"Limits to Growth" is 40 years old this year
I've just seen that the "Limits to Growth" is 40 years old in 2012. That seems worthy of discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_growth
The New Scientist has a feature article about it this week, preview here
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328462.100-boom-and-doom-revisiting-prophecies-of-collapse.html
In short. The World3 simulation seems to be a fairly good analogy to the real world. The inherent lags mean that pretty much every set of assumptions leads to boom, crash and extreme uncertainty post the crash. If the resource depletion doesn't get you, the pollution will. There are a few scenarios where growth can be deliberately limited to create a stabilised scenario but they're hard to achieve and would require a global political consensus that didn't happen and doesn't look like happening.
The catch is that it's not clear exactly when the shit hits the fan. Some time between now and 2100 is a pretty broad range and the 2nd half of that probably doesn't affect most of the people alive today.
Interestingly where the model is different from 40 years ago is
- Birth rate and death rate well below expected. but population growth ends up the same.
- food calories per capita above the graph22 Musley Ln