[ Aquarium -- fanpop.com ]
What happens to a well-stocked fish tank, that no one bothers to keep on sprinkling the "fish food"?
Eventually you end up with one very FAT fish. And eventually even that over-bloated fish dies.
The Limits to Growth -- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book about the computer modeling of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.[1] Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation[2] and commissioned by the Club of Rome it was first presented at the St. Gallen Symposium. [...]
The purpose of The Limits to Growth was not to make specific predictions, but to explore how exponential growth interacts with finite resources. Because the size of resources is not known, only the general behavior can be explored. [...]
Exponential reserve index
One key idea within The Limits to Growth is the notion that if the rate of resource use is increasing, the amount of reserves cannot be calculated by simply taking the current known reserves and dividing by the current yearly usage, as is typically done to obtain a static index. For example, in 1972, the amount of chromium reserves was 775 million metric tons, of which 1.85 million metric tons were mined annually (see exponential growth). The static index is 775 / 1.85 = 418 years, but the rate of chromium consumption was growing at 2.6% annually (Limits to Growth, pp 54–71). If instead of assuming a constant rate of usage, the assumption of a constant rate of growth of 2.6% annually is made, the resource will instead last
ln( 1 + 0.026 * 418 )
_______________ = (approx) 95 years
0.026
(note that the book rounded off numbers).
In general, the formula for calculating the amount of time left for a resource with constant consumption growth is: [10]
ln( r * s )
____________ = y
r
where:
y = years left;
r = 0.026, the continuous compounding growth rate (2.6%).
s = R/C or static reserve.
R = reserve;
C = (annual) consumption.
LIMITS TO GROWTH
from science-pope.com
[...]
In 1972 a group of systems dynamics professors wrote a book called The Limits to Growth. The book explored future scenarios through a computer model dubbed World3, which crunched real world data (resource consumption, fertility rates, etc.) in an attempt to predict the path of human civilization. When finished, what World3 spit out was not very encouraging: it predicted complete system collapse roughly halfway through this century (see chart above). Think of this collapse as the Mad Max scenario: due to dramatic declines in food and resources, the human population plummets as it suffers from starvation, pollution and war.
The culprit? Economic growth and human consumption. Every year our economy grows, our population grows, and our standard of living increases. We consume more and more resources at a faster and faster rate, outstripping the earth’s ability to sustain us. We’re talking all kinds of resources here…fossil fuels, precious metals, but also fish in the sea, water for drinking, and arable land. Right now we’re in a period of overshoot…think of Wiley E. Coyote when he runs off a cliff. For a few comical moments he blinks and curiously scratches his head…right before realizing his predicament and crashing down to terra firma.
Don’t look now, but we’re running in midair.
[...]
What happens to a well-stocked planet, that runs out of resources, before it runs out of resource retailers?
Eventually you end up with one very RICH Resource-extractor class. And eventually even that over-indulged "fish" flounders.
“If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.”
--
Frank Herbert, The Dune Storybook
Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?
by Matthew R. Simmons, Club of Rome, clubofrome.org
Matthew R. Simmons (1943-2010) was the founder of Simmons & Company International, a private investment bank that specializes in energy research, trading, and capital structuring. Simmons was a former advisor to President George W. Bush and a member of the National Petroleum Council. In his later years he was trying to raise awareness on Peak Oil.
[...]
“The most amazing aspect of the book is how accurate many of the basic trend extrapolation worries which ultimately give raise to the limits this book expresses still are, some 30 years later. In fact, for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated. To the contrary, the chilling warnings of how powerful exponential growth rate can be are right on track.”
Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All? (
Part One)
by Matthew Simmons, resilience.org; originally published by GreatChange.org -- Sep 30, 2000
[...]
In the early 1970's, a book was published entitled, The Limits To Growth, a report of the Club of Rome's project on the predicament of mankind. Its conclusions were stunning. It was ultimately published in 30 languages and sold over 30 million copies. According to a sophisticated MIT computer model, the world would ultimately run out of many key resources. These limits would become the "ultimate" predicament to mankind.
[...]
The group all shared a common concern that mankind faced a future predicament of grave complexity, caused by a series of interrelated problems that traditional institutions and policy would not be able to cope with the issues, let alone come to grips with their full context. A core thesis of their work was that long term exponential growth was easy to overlook. Human nature leads people to innocently presume growth rates are linear. The book then postulated that if a continuation of the exponential growth of the seventies began in the world's population, its industrial output, agricultural and natural resource consumption and the pollution produced by all of the above, would result in severe constraints on all known global resources by 2050 to 2070.
[...]
The book painstakingly acknowledged that the model's work was still "preliminary." Much more detailed analysis was needed to hone in on the issues this model raised. The decision to publish the results, as rough as they were, was driven by a desire to quickly get the issues into the public domain. This would hopefully command critical attention to the work and spark debate in all societies about the changes needed to avoid the catastrophic elements that the model indicated would occur by 2070, absent any changes.
[...]
Limits to Growth:
The 30-Year Update Paperback
amazon.com
by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
[...]
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.
In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.
[...]
A Synopsis:
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows; The Donella Meadows Institute, donellameadows.org
[...]
The signs are everywhere around us:
* Sea level has risen 10–20 cm since 1900. Most non-polar glaciers are retreating, and the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice is decreasing in summer.
* In 1998 more than 45 percent of the globe’s people had to live on incomes averaging $2 a day or less. Meanwhile, the richest one- fifth of the world’s population has 85 percent of the global GNP. And the gap between rich and poor is widening.
* In 2002, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimated that 75 percent of the world’s oceanic fisheries were fished at or beyond capacity. The North Atlantic cod fishery, fished sustainably for hundreds of years, has collapsed, and the species may have been pushed to biological extinction.
* The first global assessment of soil loss, based on studies of hundreds of experts, found that 38 percent, or nearly 1.4 billion acres, of currently used agricultural land has been degraded.
* Fifty-four nations experienced declines in per capita GDP for more than a decade during the period 1990–2001.
These are symptoms of a world in overshoot, where we are drawing on the world’s resources faster than they can be restored, and we are releasing wastes and pollutants faster than the Earth can absorb them or render them harmless. They are leading us toward global environmental and economic collapse -- but there may still be time to address these problems and soften their impact.
[...]
[ Exponential Growth and The Rule of 70 -- ecofuture.org ]
THE DRIVING FORCE: EXPONENTIAL GROWTH
For more than a century, the world has been experiencing exponential growth in a number of areas, including population and industrial production. Positive feedback loops can reinforce and sustain exponential growth. In 1650, the world’s population had a doubling time of 240 years. By 1900, the doubling time was 100 years. When The Limits to Growth was published in 1972, there were under 4 billion people in the world. Today, there are more than 6 billion, and in 2000 we added the equivalent of nine New York cities.
Another area of exponential growth has been the world economy. From 1930 to 2000, the money value of world industrial output grew by a factor of 14 -- an average doubling time of 19 years. If population had been constant over that period, the material standard of living would have grown by a factor of 14 as well. Because of population growth, however, the average per capita output increased by only a factor of five.
What happens to a well-stocked planet, that values "limitless wealth," more than the guiding principle of
sustainability?
Well, we are about to find out. And IF eventually that bloated fisher class, ever comes to its ultimately very-limited "fish tank" senses ... there just may end up being enough "fish food" for everyone.
"By 2050, Three Earths will be needed to meet human demands."
-- DESERTEC -- Red Paper, an overview of Desertec Concept