Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 449

that it takes a leap of orders of magnitude in climate-model complexity and data
processing to realise relatively modest improvements in detailed output and reductions
in uncertainty.
8.1.2 TheClubofRome'sLimitstoGrowth(1972)
In 1968, 30 individuals - scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists
and civil servants - gathered in the Accademian dei Lincei in Rome. It was the first
meeting of the Club of Rome and they were there to discuss the present and future
predicament of humans.
Jay Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had devised
a computer model of the global human population and its resource consumption,
which incorporated not just population levels, but industrial output, food availability,
pollution and finite resource levels. Again, by today's standards it was a very simple
model. Then in 1972, the same year as the Stockholm Conference, an MIT team led
by Dennis Meadows produced a report based on runs of the Forrester World Model
for the Club of Rome. This was The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972).
The Limits to Growth report made headline news in many countries and in turn this
spawned numerous documentaries and topics. Yet it also came under severe criticism
from a number of academics and was misunderstood by many. In essence it reflected
the idea of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus that arithmetic (exponential) growth
in population and resource consumption tends to outstrip additive (linear) growth in
the ability to harvest resources (Malthus, 1798), so that eventually checks come
into play that reduce population. These checks include famine, pestilence, disease
and war, but also include 'moral restraint'. The Limits to Growth report argued that
human population growth and per-capita resource consumption cannot continue to
increase indefinitely, so that if we were to avoid some sort of collapse then 'entirely
new approaches are required to redirect society towards goals of equilibrium rather
than growth'.
The Limits to Growth's many critics point to the fact that the decades since the
report have not shown the collapse in resource use and society that were predicted.
This is certainly true. To take just one example from the report, copper was predicted
to run out in 36-48 years' time and gold in just 11-29 years from when the report
was written, in 1972. This meant that by today gold should have run out while copper
would be on the point of being exhausted. This has not happened, so clearly, the
critics say, The Limits to Growth analysis must be wrong.
However, such criticisms completely miss the point. The Limits to Growth report
pointed to a mismatch between resource consumption and supply that would come
about unless circumstances changed, hence the need for new approaches. Indeed, in
part what we got were new approaches. To continue with the examples of copper
and gold, the situation regarding the development and use of these resources has
improved. Change has taken place. Within a decade of the publication of The Limits
to Growth , copper mining and ore-refining techniques had improved so much that the
spent tailing mounds from past copper mining were themselves being mined routinely
for copper. Similarly, technological improvements had been made that enhanced the
extraction of gold and also the uses to which gold had been put changed; indeed, its