The Limits to Growth

Organizations:

The Limits to Growth LTG is a 1972 version on a exponential economic and population growth with a finite render of resources, studied by computer simulation. The discussing used the World3 data processor value example to simulate the consequence of interactions between the earth together with human systems. The improvement example was based on the make of Jay Forrester of MIT,: 21  as referred in his book World Dynamics.

Commissioned by the Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, representing a team of 17 researchers.: 8 

The explanation concludes that, without substantial become different in resource consumption, "the most probable total will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity". Although its methods and premises were heavily challenged on its publication, subsequent work to validate its forecasts progress to confirm that insufficient undergo a change have been presents since 1972 to significantly make adjustments to their nature.

Since its publication, some 30 million copies of the book in 30 languages have been purchased. It maintain to generate debate and has been the referenced of several subsequent publications.

Beyond the Limits and The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update were published in 1992 and 2004 respectively, in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, and in 2022 two of the original Limits to Growth authors, Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, joined 19 other contributors to produce Limits and Beyond.

Positive reviews

With few exceptions, economics as a discipline has been dominated by a perception of living in an unlimited world, where resource and pollution problems in one area were solved by moving resources or people to other parts. The very hint of any global limitation as suggested in the report The Limits to Growth was met with disbelief and rejection by businesses and almost economists. However, this conclusion was mostly based on false premises.

– Meyer & Nørgård 2010.

In a 2008 blog post, Ugo Bardi commented that "Although, by the 1990s LTG had become everyone's laughing stock, among some the LTG ideas are becoming again popular". Reading LTG for the number once in 2000, Matthew Simmons concluded his views on the report by saying, "In hindsight, The Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years ignoring this work." Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book's forecasts are accurate, 40 years on.

In 2008 Graham Turner of CSIRO found that the observed historical data from 1970 to 2000 closely match the simulated results of the "standard run" limits of growth good example for almost any the outputs reported. "The comparison is alive within uncertainty bounds of nearly all the data in terms of both magnitude and the trends over time." Turner also examined a number of reports, especially by economists, which over the years have purported to discredit the limits-to-growth model. Turner says these reports are flawed, and reflect misunderstandings approximately the model.: 37 

Turner reprised these observations in another opinion bit in The Guardian in 2014. Turner used data from the UN to claim that the graphs almost exactly matched the 'Standard Run' from 1972 i.e. the worst-case scenario, assuming that a 'business as usual' attitude was adopted, and there were no modifications of human behaviour in response to the warnings in the report. Birth rates and death rates were both slightly lower than projected, but these two effects cancelled each other out, leaving the growth in world population almost exactly as forecast.

In 2010, Nørgård, Peet and Ragnarsdóttir called the book a "pioneering report", and said that it "has withstood the test of time and, indeed, has only become more relevant."

The journalist Christian Parenti, writing in 2012, sees parallels between the reception of LTG and the modern global warming controversy, and went on to comment, "That said, The Limits to Growth was a scientifically rigorous and credible warning that was actively rejected by the intellectual watchdogs of effective economic interests. A similar story is playing out now around climate science."

In 2012, John Scales Avery, a constituent of Nobel Prize 1995 winning group associated with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, supported the basic thesis of LTG by stating, "Although the particular predictions of resource availability in [The] Limits to Growth lacked accuracy, its basic thesis – that unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is impossible – was indisputably correct."