@ R. Dow Good grief. The observed trends conform every closely to the predictions in the years for which there is data. What makes you think extending the observed trend lines without any data to base them on is valid? The predictions are not linear for very good reason. So why should you expect the reality to be linear? It never has been except for short segments like the one to which you refer. Learn how to interpret data before making silly, extremely naive remarks like this. A big whole in the knowledge of science, empirical data collection, and interpretation is behind this comment. No remotely competent scientist, mathematician, or even engineer would make a comment like this. Maybe, just maybe, a lousy cookbook engineer without a creative bone in his/her body or any understanding of basic underlying principle could conceivably be guilty of such a comment.

What is the Y axis on this graph? How can non-renewable resources, industrial output, pollution, services and food, be measured and plotted in the same units?

All of these predictions are based on models. First of all, the most important things in a model are those it doesn't contain. Second, future cannot be predicted because the future is always under construction. Last but not least, analyses of this sort should take into account one of the salient characteristics of our times - complexity (which can be measured and which can only grow to certain thresholds). The limits to growth (of any system) are dictated by the so-called critical complexity (think of it as the highest value of cholesterol that gets you to a pre-cardiac infarction state). Once you get close to critical complexity your system becomes very fragile and has the capacity to suddenly deliver unexpected behavior (this is called spontaneous mode-switching or phase-changes). According to our analyses, based on data from the World Bank, the World, as a system, will reach critical complexity around 2045-2050 (if the current rate of complexity increase continues,..... an assumption which remains to be monitored).

Dear editors, Pure Bunk! I am just now getting through the April issue, and was amazed to see the article by a senior editor Mark Strauss, about the negative predictions for the future (based on the book The Limits of Growth ). Most readers weren't as fortunate as I've been, and didn't study economics in university ( in the 1990's as part of a Business Administration degree).Therefore, they have no way of knowing that the once-accepted Malthusian theory predicting the world would run out of food due to man's inability to meet population-growth needs, has been proven entirely wrong! Furthermore, around 1990 an economist from MD. University placed a $1000 bet against a biologist from another American university. He stated that contrary to many biologists' views, based on economics theories and the past, all major commodities (including wheat,) would go down considerably during the following ten years. Needless to say the economist won the bet! Most commodities indeed went down by large percentages, some by smaller amounts, yet they were all cheaper. (I saw that show right here in Israel, twice, on one of the cable channels.) I also checked the article on your Web-site and immediately saw the three false assumptions the writers had made. They didn't take into account A) price mechanisms, B) advancements in technology, C) they treated the world as a whole. These crucial points are enough to invalidate the whole "prediction." In addition, nowhere in your report do you mention what fields the professors who wrote the report have their degrees in. Was any of them an economist? That seems highly unlikely considering the above omissions. One really wonders why a senior editor such as Mark Strauss didn't do his homework? The article will no-doubt worry many readers, to say the least. To sum it up: not everything presented at the Smithsonian Institution is sacred. Sincerely yours, Joseph B. Israel

The economic collapse is normally, I think, the most problems of the world is, how if women will be collapsed of environmental problems (human made) of economy growth. God Bless You from Indonesia. Bakti Social Borunauli Foundation of Indonesia.

I have been researching the global-resources problem for roughly the past ten years. My latest "essay" on it is titled DEPLETION OF NATURAL RESOURCES WILL CAUSE THE DECLINE OF MANKIND. It is online at www.decline-mysite.net Until today I was not aware of the 1972 MIT study. Although their efforts were forty years earlier,I am pleased with how similar our conclusions are. For instance: please note how comparable my curves (about two thirds through the essay) are with those developed by MIT, yet they and I had no contact with each other. The world has seen a great many ecological, weather, resource depletion, and economic developments since 1970 (all of them bad news) therefore those of us concerned with it can see the decline of humanity even more clearly than that early team was able to. Striving to make it broadly inclusive and easy to read, this essay was written for a more general audience than their work was. Francis Reynolds

Even a cursory examination of the graph shows that if you extend the "Observed Trend" lines they are nowhere near the "Trend Predicted" lines. So how does that support the "Limits of Growth" projections?

"The environmental movement has always been about seizing power by making up one phony emergency after another." Yeah that's really worked for them, hasn't it? Since the grand-wizards of the environmental (surely pseudosciences at best) sciences seized power with all those fake emergencies and brainwashed the planet with polar bear cub images everything's gone to hell. It's a miracle that the fossil-fuel industry has survived. The comment is especially ironic considering that the emergencies mentioned are intimately tied, still present and that investigating their relationships to one-another was part of the reason for the research in the first place. In any event, the experiment is running but it's little comfort to those who are persuaded by the quality science behind this research, that those who aren't will have to share in whatever the consequences of inaction will be. What IS a comfort, however, is that having got a bloody nose with CIV 1, some lessons will be carried into CIV 2.0, who won't, in any event, have the sort of resources to throw about waantonly like their forebears.

Jorgen Randers discusses the misinterpretation of economic growth which has led several contributors to deny that Limits to Growth spoke of the possibility of continued growth. Limits to Growth only dealt with limitations deriving from physical factors. The authors did state that it might be possible to have an increase in value (economic growth) that does not entail an increase in resource consumption or waste production. They are correct in stating this as economic growth is not fundamentally linked to either resource consumption or waste production. The fact that economic growth has, historically, always been associated with resource consumption and waste production does not change this fact.

The environmental movement has always been about seizing power by making up one phony emergency after another. The population crisis was one, then the energy crisis, and now global warming/climate change. Julian Simon's "The Ultimate Resource" proves that population growth is actually beneficial. Why would they lie like that?

Short of a nano material PV / thermoelectrical / ultracapas­itating Black swan, What we can do now with "off the shelf" technology­, what I proposed at the Commission for Environmen­tal Cooperatio­n. The most cited soil scientist in the world, Dr. Rattan Lal at OSU, was impressed by this talk given to the EPA chiefs of North America, commending me on conceptual­izing & articulati­ng the concept. Bellow the opening text. A full Report on my talk at CEC, and complete text & links are here: http://tec­h.groups.y­ahoo.com/g­roup/bioch­ar-policy/­message/32­33 The Establishm­ent of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainabi­lity The Paleoclima­te Record shows agricultur­al-geo-eng­ineering is responsibl­e for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. The unintended consequenc­e; flowering of our civilizati­on. Our science has now realized these consequenc­es, developing a more encompassi­ng wisdom. Wise land management­, afforestat­ion and the thermal conversion of biomass can build back our soil carbon. Pyrolysis, Gasificati­on and Hydro-Ther­mal Carbonizat­ion are known biofuel technologi­es, What is new are the concomitan­t benefits of biochars for Soil Carbon Sequestrat­ion; building soil biodiversi­ty & nitrogen efficiency­, as a feed supplement cutting the carbon foot print of livestock & in situ remediatio­n of toxic agents, Modern systems are closed-loo­p with no significan­t emissions. The general LCA is: every 1 ton of biomass yields 1/3 ton Biochar equal to 1 ton CO2e, plus biofuels equal to 1MWh exported electricit­y, so each energy cycle is 1/3 carbon negative Beyond Rectifying the Carbon Cycle, the same healing function for the Nitrogen and Phosphorou­s Cycles Since we have filled the air, filling the seas to full, soil is the only beneficial place left. Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.

A lot of sophistry and willful denial in the posts above. Basically, a lot of countries are ramped up for massive overpopulation set to vastly exceed carrying capacity. If they all want to have 10 children who, in turn, all want 10 children then the result is obvious. And on that day the fight for resources turns ugly. 2030 dudes. The number is in.

People interested in this discussion might be interested in reading my book (in French) « Thermodynamique de l’évolution ». The evolution of mankind is a dissipative process. As such it is subject to self-organised criticality. The collapse of a society is a consequence of this process. Societies self-organise to dissipate energy. The more energy they dissipate, the more their environment evolve, the more they have to reoganise themselves. It leads to what biologists call « the red queen effect ». One has to run as fast as possible to stay in place. At some point species become extinct and/or societies collapse. This is what we are now experiencing.

Some silly comments up above. The human brain is useless without food, and food requires energy to be produced. In fact, nothing whatever happens without energy, and that includes the 'hydrogen economy' (unfortunately, hydrogen is a vector, not a source). And the C of R didn't set out to be catastrophic, indeed they doubted their initial findings. Then - like Bartlett with Hubbert http://www.hubbertpeak.com/bartlett/hubbert.htm They ran it with 'double resources' (two planets, in other words)and found almost no change to the outcome.

Y'all are forgetting that oil need not be the source of energy. But right now it's the most effective. Even nuclear might be limited - we're at peak uranium too, although thorium reactors might be a better bet. Ah, but having uranium power plants gives us better opportunity to make nuclear bombs. Probably why they went with that. Anyway, perhaps someone will figure out some kind of geothermal thing, or perhaps they will find a way to tap into the electromagnetic force of the earth. Solar and wind just don't cut the mustard for the sheer amount of demand we have, but they're good for emergency backup power, like lights and maybe a radio and a box fan. Getting off the planet to colonize other places, or at least mine them, might be a concept. It would have to be worth the effort though.

Absolute bunk. Nothing is sustainable, because the planet will fry in about 4.5 billion years. It doesn't take a college degree to know that. Apparently, it takes a college degree to be ignorant enough to think that the earths "known" resources run on some sort of timeline, independent of Economics. As prices go up, we "discover" more resources. That's why timelines cannot be predicted accurately, but hey, it makes for a good doomsday read, year after year of incorrect "scientific prophecy."

If we attempt to understand Transfinancial Economics we make actually get somewhere... http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

Like others, I would like to see the most recent data, at least up until 2010. There are many measures that indicate that we are using the Earth's resources at an unsustainable level. However, there are also great opportunities waiting to be developed. For example, people in most poor countries face higher costs than we do in industrialised countries for essentials like drinking water, electricity, transport and construction, when you specify the same quality. This is because engineers are unable to achieve the same results as they can in the industrialised world, and this problem has nothing to do with corruption. Engineering has achieved huge improvements in the economy with which we use materials, energy and human effort some parts of the world. If we could do this across the whole world, the trends might look very different.

Keep debating people--you're debating their paradigms inside their matrix; so there will be no outcome other than the one planned by the puppet masters---and I've got news for you, none of you are the masters.

"the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint" -- Limits to Growth said no such thing, and if it did it would be called "No Limits to Growth." I've read both the original, and the updated versions, which both stated quite clearly that unless human population AND industrial (economic) activity is curtailed, we will experience overshoot followed by a collapse. We've been in overshoot now for around 30 years, and both population and industrial activity continue to grow.

I think we'll soon be a bit hungry: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phosphorus-a-looming-crisis

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." -Randal Monroe This is why we have to get off this rock. Until we have the tech to not be expansionist, we must expand.

I'm afraid its a little too much doom and gloom. We have hardly begun to address the enormous potential for hydrogen fuel in the long term. The oil majors and food majors continue to decide our future with weak Governments that pander to the rich. I suspect that the early signs of the rise of the 'beast' will have an impact yet to be seen. Simplification of tax affairs leading to a more equitable division of the spoils will help. Farming still has enormous potential for growth and certainly without GM. Restructuring that area could do wonders. Big farmers and food majors need controlling to allow all farmers to have a decent chance, back to politics and the 'beast' they are on the rise. More socialist government with equitable views on capitalism will win the day.

"However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint." No - the study said the exact opposite. infinite econmoic growth is not possible in a finite world. unless people no longer need to consume anything at all, then unlimited growth is not possible. "Yale’s Henry Wallich opposed active intervention, declaring that limiting economic growth too soon would be 'consigning billions to permanent poverty'" It's all a matter of how you see time - do you want billions in relative poverty now or do you want many more billions in abject poverty (with far fewer resources to support them) in twenty years?

Guess who the masses will be going after first now that the game plan has been exposed? This Has been PLANNED. the culling will start with THEM.

Nobody here understands how the world works. Nobody here can name our fundamental resource. It's not oil, or gas, or any tangible for that matter. It is our brain and its knowledge and ingenuity. It knows no theoretical bounds and cumulative knowledge is expanding massively and exponentially. It has not and never has been the Earth's constraints that kept us back, it always was only a lack of knowledge that defined a meager quality of living. When people used coal as their main energy source in the 19th century, the lack of knowledge how to extract, refine and use oil was holding us back, not Earth's constraints. Same now, fossil fuels are an infinitesimal fraction of all energy potentially available to us on Earth, and our cumulatively increasing knowledge will unlock ever greater portions of it in the near and far future. For all talk on the lack of understanding of exponential growth, you lot all lack the understanding of the one thing that will grown indefinitely at an exponential rate, human knowledge. Finally, the predictive power looks nill to me, it is only an extrapolation of linear trends up to now. What will be the benchmark of these proposterous prediction will be when they say historically ridiculous words "This time it is different" and they envision tipping points of all sorts. They will prove to be ridiculously incorrect, mark my words. Btw, why only check it up to 2000, the data should be widely available up to 2010 easily.

It baffles me how some people still try to argue or outright deny the obvious: that infinite growth cannot be achieved with finite energy. Fossil fuels are the blood of our civilization and, unless we replace them in time, their increasing prices and unavailability will degenerate into a spiral of shortages, financial crises and war. This is a consequence of capitalism: if profit is the number one priority, it is only natural that all activities will derive into maximizing profit, at any (non-economic) cost, using whatever methods or resources are cheaper. And thus, we kill the goose that laid golden eggs. The end is near, so to speak. And this page doesn't respect paragraphs.

I have read the article and all its comments made in this page.I think that the real matter in terms of economics is that this science is poor in changes but the reality is a sea of new situations. So science is far away not only of the real explanation of what is happening in the short term but in the explanation of the long term. So we have to put in dout any prediction. And only the mechanical predictions as population are to take into consideration. It is time to redefine everything in economics to understand the present and the future, to predict the short and the long very long term.

Ignoring the potential for non-linearities after the tipping point for growth is passed may be mistake. Whilst the system may have a stable upwards growth dynamic the decline may be much steeper especially with regards population, the forcing driver here. It may strain every sinew and require massive organisational & motivational endurance pushing a piano upstairs but the same piano may fall down the stairs in quite another and speedier way.

Well, if you want to have a plot which has any meaning whatsoever, then I'd strongly recommend to put a label on the Y-axis and write in which units is the scale - then one can have a meaningful discussion on whether the Club of Rome predictions were right or wrong. From what I see in the plot I can just say that the predictions of "Food per capita", "Service per capita", "Non-renewable resources" and the "Industrial output per capita" made by the Club of Rome were terrible, were systematically biased towards 'catastrophic scenarios' and are hardly corresponding to the current observations.

Everything that is produced has an energy factor or energy equivalency. The energy it takes to produce more energy in the form of fossil fuels - coal, gas, and oil is year by year rising as the easy/cheap to mine or drill sources are depleted. This is true for other non energy rich agricultural and mineral resources as well. Technological advances have often found ways to produce more per unit of energy consumed, like longer lasting, better mpg cars or energy sipping appliances or higher yield crops. Unfortuneately the Western empire began to reach the end of the possiblilities of conservering energy use in food and material production and have turned, a couple of decades ago, to exploiting people(Asians, indigenous and neighboring peoples) so as to continue to grow in wealth. Now however, as energy costs continue to climb, elite Asians and other elites around the globe are demanding ever more wealth for themselves and the upper income classes in the US/Europe are turning toward impoverishing their own fellow citizens, cutting their jobs (austerity) so as to bolster profits so they can pay the usury of the bankers. The capitalist private property system based on selfishness and greed is like a giant Monopoly Game that is drawing to a close with the most greedy, proud and selfish holding all the wealth and property while destroying the government through indebtedness. They then demand access to the remaining public property, as well as the little left to the other players by cutting social services. Increasingly the winning players are driving the losers into bankruptcy, forcing them to drop out of the game by denying them living wages, nutritious food, safe neighborhoods and health care, a recipe that ensures their continued economic enslavement and an early death. What's to be done to prevent collapse?

Here's an idea. Let the richest one percent have children and pay the rest of us to get sterilized. This would eliminate child poverty, place money in the hands of those who have little and put the world on a sustainable course. After all, what the point of having a child if he's going to lack the opportunities that the one percent enjoy and face the toil and trouble of a hardscrabble existence? I was a student at M.I.T. when the Club of Rome report was issued. It scared me into the cloister. And that was before I had ever heard of climate change. My wife and I decided not to reproduce and I'm happy we did. To reproduce in the face of these scenarios is to consign one's offspring to a very frightening fate. And to what purpose?

I'm very surprised the article doesn’t mention the Smithsonian sponsored meeting on The Limits to Growth, held Mar 1 2012 at the American Indian Museum in DC, on the 40th Anniversary of the first meeting on it at the Smithsonian. That's surely an innocent "disconnect", that the journal of the society didn’t seem to know what the society was doing. That’s also becoming a kind of mental disconnect having ever more disruptive effects in our world too, though. Different conversations about the same thing become ever more separated by consuming different parts of the deluge of information we're creating, and getting lost in the diversity of unrelated world views being built from it. I was at that meeting on Mar 1. It’s very well worth listening to, and the whole thing is online. I was also asked to write a report on it, that the publisher later rejected because of the troubling questions it raised... That of course was the main purpose… and its rejection a major theme of this whole subject over the centuries actually. The best resource science has been suppressed over and over. When real scientists look at complex problems, they don't try to explain everything. What they do is look for patterns that are simple enough to be confidently answered. -Meeting: http://si.edu/consortia/limitstogrowth2012 -JLH Report: http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2012/03/24/approaching-30-days-from-the-40th-anniversary/

It is obvious that serious adjustments to so-called "civil rights" and personal "liberty" are necessary. The government must act because the people will not.

I find this fascinating, and important. However, it fails to highlight that there are ways of sustaining crops, people, and renewable resources without (non renewable ones). To suggest that everything is dependent upon the level of non renewable resources leaves no room to adapt the system to do without it. Yes, obviously we Live in a giant system that is dependent on it, and will not change anytime soon, But when it is forced to do without them, why is it that people and societies will 'definately not be able to sustain' by new or renewed methods of energy, etc? Also, to those stating infinity as a variable that keeps this chart from reflecting accurate information, If you follow infinity too far, you cannot know anything, and this debate becomes useless.

Ahh, cheese it!

Anyone who need a refresher course in limits to "growth," politely known as "sustainable growth" should take a seat in the classroom of Professor Albert Bartlett : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

The Limits to Growth was amazingly prophetic. If only humanity had heeded the warning. The warning was dramatically repeated in the 2009 book, The Great Waves of Change by Marshall Vian Summers. It is must-read material for adapting to and mitigating the dire environmental, economic and social future that lies before us.

No comments? I guess most were deleted due to comment violations...people will never settle down and compromise a mutual solution to this problem. It is not in our nature. We in this country cant get two free parties to compromise for the good of the people. We cant expect nations of the world to compromise. When resources like water runs out...war!

As long as the notions of human dominance of nature, and of ownership of natural resources persist, we are likely to continue this trend of limitless growth, and dismiss or ignore the concerns raised in this study. For an examination of some common assumptions that lead to environmentally destructive behaviour, I recommend 'Ishmael' by Daniel Quinn

Do we need to stop our unbridled use of finite resources? Yes and we will.

Unless an unforeseen disaster strikes, count me as healthily skeptical about the "collapse" of world society. I believe that in the next 15 to 25 years, major improvements in the quality of life will allow humans to live better than they ever have. These improvements will of course come from science. Food will be produced in factories or even in the home with machines that are now being brought to reality. I have the same confidence in science for energy, communications, medicine, etc.

In 2030, I'll be, hard to believe for me, 71 years old. I'm going to keep a copy of this article just to see that it was overly pessimistic. I believe that mankind is improving and will prevail in the end. We cannot solve all of our problems, but we can solve many that we understand. Don't give up on the human race, no matter how silly and despairing things may look!

The world has too many people. Too many people are using too much resources. The expenditure of too much resources is changing the environment.

We can either decrease the world's population or decrease our wasteful behaviors.

To decrease the population, we can try to educate the masses. Populations in Japan, and Nordic Europe has peaked, whereas developing world has no sign of abated growth. As things go, the undeveloped world with no means to educate hemselves will take over the world.

To decrease our behavior... well that's not going to happen.

So what is the anwser? Looks like they're going to the route of warfare. How long will that last?

The graph shown here is very misleading, because only one of the "predicted" lines on it is really independent, the "non-renewable resources remaining" line. All of the other predictions depend on that one, so the only really meaningful comparison that can be made is of that predicted line vs. its "observed" counterpart. And as you can see from the graph, the "observed" line is significantly above the "predicted" one, and its slope is less steep. Therefore, your phrase "the predictions nearly matched the facts" does not seem to me to be an apt description.

in fact, the downward slope of the "observed" line for "non-renewable resources remaining" is almost constant, by contrast with the gradually increasing downward slope of the "historical trend" line. This indicates to me that there is a significant *change* from the historical trend--in other words, we are doing *better* at managing non-renewable resources. This data is entirely consistent with the prediction that the downward slope of this line will continue to decrease, ultimately going to *flat* at some time in the next century or so. So "we are not on a sustainable trajectory" does not seem like an apt description either.

This is not to say that we should not be conserving, or looking for alternate sources of energy. Of course we should. But the data shown here indicates, to me, that those efforts on our part are doing what they are supposed to do, and we should continue them in a spirit of hopefulness, not panic.

As usual, humanity has never had a collective vision for the future. Too many scientists & institutions cannot be ignored with their basic research & findings re our effect on this land-limited Earth. How about the weird ' Great Pacific Trash Patch ', now covering an ocean surface the size of the U.S.? (& one beginning in the south Atlantic.) Disagree with global warming ? How about the sheer size of population growth ? More people just increases the size of societal problems, discontent & fear on an even larger scale. For the U.S. the future is not a population of 500 million. The responsibilty of freedom requires us to slow the population growth over the next, say 50 years. It's possible to reduce it eventually to, say, 120 million - which means an astounding increase in quality of life. Along with less confrontation - and working for, not against, Nature. And, I'd rather avoid having summer days that eventually may average 90-100 degreesF . . . .

The worst problem is that civilizations end up being controlled by the people who are the "best" at dishonesty. We have a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system, namely a globalized, privatized, fiat money-as-debt system. It is impossible to reconcile that system with the conservation of energy, since there is no conservation of money, but rather, endless, exponentially growing frauds in the form of debts. That is, our "money" gets made out of nothing, and returns to nothing, because THAT IS FRAUD. Political economy is inside human ecology. There is a necessary relationship between the money systems and the murder systems. The debt controls depend on the death controls. The only real solutions must be different death controls, one way or another, BY DEFINITION! The worst problem is that triumph in war was based on the most successful deceptions, but that drove the entire civilization to become too psychotic, since the violence can never make the lies become true. More than anything else, we need better negotiations of the death controls. Since that looks practically impossible, the default is collapse to chaos and genocides. We need a profound scientific intellectual revolution, to think about everything almost totally backwards to the ways we usually do. We need a truth standard in our money systems, but that requires the almost infinite paradox of more honest murder systems.

Anyone who does research formulations understands that variables affect predicted outcomes. Regardless of what math model you use "variables" such as discussed in Kaos theory, will always be un-predictable despite our best efforts to rein them in. If you study sociology and the differences in populations and the high variability rate within them it becomes obvious that while at one end certain population groups are practicing responsible ecological and economic planning, at the other end of the spectrum other population groups marching to a different drummer and are undoing all that is being accomplished at the opposite end. If you consider that third world population groups are larger and more diverse with different wants and needs it becomes glaringly obvious that variables can easily approach danger levels that skews all predicted models. As one poster correctly observed, "This data is 12 years out of date. It doesn't take into account the War on Terror, Economic collapse of the US and EU, Global Warming, etc. Would love to see this data presented in an actually relevant way!" I would reply that the data is relivant, but it cannot be completely accurate if you do not factor in variables. "Infinate" is a variable and if you understand that consideration, you beguin to grasp that there are infinate variables that can move data flows up or down, compress areas or time points of criticality or move them further out. It is these unknowns that are the devil in the details. Every discipline of science often fail to consider this. Even in engineering if you were to introduce variables into the process of building your outcomes would be different for each project or building. You could look at variables philosophically as nature's way of keeping us on our toes or off ballance depending on your perspective, but regardless unless we address them and give them the due consideration they deserve they will keep us guessing on outcomes.

The population decline is far too flat, after the points of decline of food, and industrial/services outputs. The population decline (dieoff because of shortages, famines and wars) could start as early as 2020. The end of the present peak oil era may trigger the decline. Compare a similar graph with comments at: http://www.ecoglobe.ch/scenarios/e/index.htm ["Services" are part of industrial output, the only difference being that people do to own what they buy, e.g. a leased car. Most services are very resource-intensive.]

It is interesting to note that the graphs are still on track, although those 30 years were marked by very big events, not what just happened in the past decade. So the internet was almost not used at all in business in the 70s, also the communism fell and the USSR was broken up in the 90s. These events had enormous impact.

March 17th, 1992 And as a good Father, I will then take you in my arms. I will console you and press you to my heart. You are my Work, you are the vast field to be sown, you are the seed of Love. This is the only thing that can still grow in an ungrateful soil. The world has degenerated through the virus of evil that has overgrown everything else. Verily I say unto you, the chaos will become worse and worse, because man became unfaithful to his God. Pray, pray for the sown seed to germinate! My friend, transcend your “me” in order to become “thou” within each of your brothers. Match your powerlessness with my Almight so that it can be equal in its great mystery of Love. The people urgently need to be converted. I told you before, my glory comes from the smallest and my most loved creatures. You must present the great wisdom longingly looking for the return of the stray sheep to the world rising against my commandments. The present world does not understand the language I speak with you. It derides this language which is why, in these sad moments, some discretion is needed. I will destroy their golden calf, yet I am still hesitating for the deed necessary for their reform, because I still love them. They have cost Me too much. I do not want to see them suffer, but if it is necessary, everything will come to pass. Jesus said this to Margeurite in 1992 Chévremont Belgium Kind regards Wellens Willy

RE: Eugene, As an engineer and a geophysicist, I don't think you really understand how scholarly disciplines work. "Climatology" as you claim, is essentially an agglomeration of earth sciences & liberal arts courses. True earth scientists work within what you would call "rigid" disciplines, simply because these are the proven, realistic methods which scientists utilize. I have no opinion regarding this paper, I just wanted to point out that most actual scientists consider "climatology" a joke course because of it's basis in opinion and hearsay. If you sauce anything up enough it will be appealing to the palette. Remember that.

Quite a few years ago I remember reading a statistic that said more people now live on Planet Earth than the combined historic population of the Earth prior to the 20th Century. I've never done the math, but it sounds like a reasonable statistic even if one goes no further than reflecting on the population growth of the United States since its inception. China already limits family population and yet it has the largest in the world. India's population is growing and the country is bulging with residents. Ditto for many other countries. All, including the U.S. are constantly striving for a higher standard of living. That standard frequently encompasses status symbols that are costly in terms of resources to produce them. Yet, they are often discarded as soon as a newer or glitzier model comes along. Such products include cars, computers, cellular telephones and PDAs and a myriad of other products. Often the items are expensive to recycle and/or hazardous to the environment. Anyone who considers the various stories and statistics that appear in the news media on a regular basis can't help but realize the accuracy of the report. Only fools and politicians will continue to ignore the inevitable. Like ostriches burying their heads in sand, they will deny it up to the point when disaster becomes inevitable. Then they will rant about other people failing to act to prevent calamity. By acting in concert on an international level, the major countries may be able to forestall or head off the cataclysm-but only if we chose wiser world leaders for the decades prior to the 2030 deadline. Larry Moniz Multiple Award Winning Journalist and Author

For an updated perspective, the quoted authorities, story authors and interested parties should consult the update of the original "Limits" by the original authors: see "Limits to Growth The 30-Year Update" 2004, by Meadows, Randers and Meadows, Chelsea Green Publishing.

The global economy will collapse before 2030 due to the rising price of oil. Oil is finite, yet we rely on it for most transportation. As it starts to get scarce because of ever increasing demand from China, India and Africa, the price will explode upward in a bidding war. That will collapse demand for nearly every other good and service that employ billions. The economic system will collapse. There will still be plenty of oil produced, just not enough money to pay for it. A barrel might cost $400. The problem is that oil represents about 35% of ALL energy used. There is nothing that can be scaled up fast enough to replace it, by the time the general population finally realizes what is happening, and demands that the politicians do something. The crash will hit between 2016 and 2023.

This is a fascinating, if not unnerving article. As an American expat living in the Philippines, I see a country that is on the frontlines of this problem, ballooning population, poverty, environmental problems, etc. I try to teach my students at the university I work at to take great care to prepare for the future, because the most significant challenges the Philippines, Asia, and the world will face in the next century will all be revolving around population growth and the scramble to secure resources to provide for it. Truly, we live in grim times. I just hope we are able to pull ourselves back from the point of no return.

I remember they predicted an ice age caused by global cooling too... Still Henny Penny running in circles yelling the sky is falling!!! There are a few lines missing from that graph, one is diseases that were to wipe out the human race as well...

Re: methane gas bubbles in the Arctic ocean--- rising temps are starting a cascade of negative events that reinforce each other, gaining momentum and speeding up heating of the earth exponentially. When we first start to see the melting, 90% of the heat (calories) needed to melt the ice has already been absorbed. When there's less ice to deflect the sun's rays like a mirror or a white surface, there is more passive heating of the earth. The inertia of keeping the earth from heating up is being overcome by concomitant effects that speed up the heating and the melting. Liberation of methane gas in the Arctic Ocean is an example of one of those events that add to the heating of the earth. That's why we should have quit while we were ahead. We're like patients needing an oxygen tube to breathe but continuing to smoke 2-3 packs a day. The irrational idea: "hasn't killed me yet". No, not yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Endless growth is our #1 enemy. We need an economy that makes us prosperous in a period of stability or decline, like Japan and Russia and Romania have already experienced. This is not happening right now, because the system that was set up in the Wild West days based on exponential growth still wants growth. Growth-based economics is now working against us. It is working to make us less prosperous because it punishes responsible reproduction and technological innovation, and depletes resources. It rewards greed and incompetence and waste. Just look around you at the people around you and you'll see the effects of this system. Arguing that we should implement communism or stop having children is ludicrous. Such strict reactionary measures are not needed and would only lead to more revolutions (as they should). We have plenty of room for children. We need at least 2 children per family just to sustain population at present levels. That's not the issue. We need to allow the cat to catch mice, to quote Deng Xiaoping. Having said that though, I think our existence will be more and more precarious if we don't do something to end "growth" as the religion of economics (because that's what it is). How about "individual prosperity" instead? If everyone on the planet was relatively healthy and educated, and prosperous in old age, they would not need children for support. The "growth" mentality would cease. The only thing that can get us there is education and technology. Our model should be Japan. Growth is not limitless.

I'm struck by the eerie similarity between the graph above and Ozymandias' calculations that led him to develop a psychic squid. I'm also struck by the irony that while other nations are essentially committing crimes against the environment (not to sound overly "green" - but we all want later generations to be able to depend on resources without exacerbating scarcity), they're doing it in an age where, due to our own "crimes," we're increasingly aware of the impact of the industrial/economic development "catchup" previously undeveloped nations are attempting to join the first world. And yes, that's one sentence my English teachers would not be proud of me for creating. Sorry guys!

If anyone enjoys conspiracy reading, look more into the Club of Rome. Some will tell you that there is an agenda behind anything they say. One theory is that they needed to devise a way to unite the whole world behind a single cause in order to establish a one-world government, hence the "save the planet" motif of the last several decades. Not endorsing that theory--just putting it out there if you're into that kind of thing.

I quote: "the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios" You want me to base decisions on a simulation done in 1970 on the computers of the day ... Have you ever used a computer built in 1970 ? I have. I would be more impressed if someone updated these 'models' and replicated or refined the results. It doesn't sound like these experts managed to stay in business. That in turn says something about their forecasting.

This is such a shoddy piece of journalism. When did the Smithsonian throw out fact checking and scientific validity as factors in their writing. What is the scale on the X axis? Are these significant deviations or not? Where are the last 12 years of data? SHAME

We need this updated to include the last decade (2001-2010). So much has transpired since 2000.

please update the graph to say maybe 2010 with accurate data. otherwise, climate change and overpopulation deniers will not buy it

This data is 12 years out of date. It doesn't take into account the War on Terror, Economic collapse of the US and EU, Global Warming, etc. Would love to see this data presented in an actually relevant way!

I read "Limits" in 75 and talked my daughter out of having kids. I"m glad I did.

I am so happy to see you beginning to discuss humanity's ecological footprint, rather than being so tied tomits carbon footprint. Now we're getting to reality.

I am greatly relieved to see so much optimism. Flat denial in my old eyes. Americans live in a utopian fantasy that all will be solved, resolved and taken care of by "someone" so "don't worry, be happy".

Unfortunately, for those willing to take some time, there is more than ample evidence the fantasy is not correct. Course this means learning to cope with some nasty realities. Most of all it means turning off the great fantasy machine, television, and using the intellect you have to read the research done by real people. By that people qualified in the field. You know a climatologist not a geologist or biologist. A researcher in food production not a fertilizer rep. In other words, information that challenges your thought processes.

I wouldn't stake too much hope on a couple of the curves having either slopes 10% less malevolent or one time jogs of a couple of percent in a benevolent direction, which all could conceivably be related to the 1970s oil shock which staggered the world's postwar economy for the first time, and which it could be argued (even without these curves) the world has never really recovered from. The most that can be expected is that it will take until 2050 rather than 2030 for the collapse. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the collapse had a different time course, whether more abrupt or less abrupt, just on the general principle that the behavior singular events are by nature hard to predict from curves. But their actual occurrence is rather more predictable. Just because I cannot predict the actual profile of the deceleration a car will experience upon hitting a wall doesn't mean I can't by look at a graph of its velocity, position, acceleration, or whatever and predict with some certainty that it will hit that wall.

My reading of the graphs indicate minor, temporary decoupling, mostly due to technological advancement....war, famine and global warming will decouple on the low side in the near future. Huge methane bubbles are now appearing in the Arctic Ocean. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as is CO2. Our inability to wean ourselves from fossil fuels will be the straw that gets us. Luckily, after every ending, there is a beginning. Hopefully, there will be enough of us left with the ability to read, and we will be able to create a sustainable society from the ground up, which is the only way we will reasonably get there anyway.

perspective is what each comment is about. I don't see anything good coming from the very small deviations from the lines. what is there left to harvest is inaccessible and uses questionable methods like fracking or non sustainable crops and methods that are incompatible with our body functions. We can't sustain the population with uncontrolled ,unregulated ,unethical greed . By any other name it is still genocide .

I completely agree with VX above: 1) there is decoupling from predictions 2) the decoupling is almost all to the good 3) the comparison ignores the last 11 years, which suggests that decoupling may now be much more marked, and the original predictions look completely incorrect.

I too found the original limits to growth compelling. I was upset to hear from a trusted academic source that at least one of the original contributors to the study is very possimistic about the future. When I asked why, the ansswer was overpopulation.

Calculating the CO2 output of a growing population is extremely complex. I'd like to know what the best estimates are and how inaccurate they might be.

So what we see is that actual data began decoupling from predictions. There is more food, more services, more resources remaining than predicted; at the same time industrial output and pollution is less than expected. As for population, it is close to the prediction but I suggest they predicted a different demographic model with higher birth and death rates, increasing until collapse according to Ehrlich and other doomsters; and actually both measures are falling everywhere. The most obvious decoupling happens in remaining resources, and probably this is due to the same effect which allowed Julian Simon to win his wager with Ehrlich: as resource prices increasing, we are more and more motivated to invent and implement technologies that replace those rare resources with more abundant ones. By the way, today is 2012, and this graph shows maximum 2000. Why didn't they show us what happened in 2001-10? Probably decoupling became too obvious to show that doomsters are losing ground and boomsters take their time:)

I did an undergraduate study on the report of the Club of Bariloche, a think thank opposing the Club of Rome in the seventies. Maybe you could ask the guys there what they think about "The Limits of Growth" 40 years later?

I am very puzzled (& bummed) that the graph above shows actual world population exceeding the 1972 projected population growth rate. I thought that growth rates were plunging in many, though not all, second- & third-world nations? Moreover, I would have assumed that the 1972 study/book would have opted for the absolutely MOST pessimistic case of population growth rate. Is this real, or is there a problem with accuracy-in-graphs here? Also, I note that the most importantly inaccurate projected curve is the one for 'Non-renewable resources remaining', & this could represent potential grounds for optimism, if only the population curve will cease its inexorable ascent.

It is true that there are limits to everything, but not so long ago they were predicting mass starvation; then, the green revolution came along and that was put off for a few years. There are places like Somalia that are struggling with food, but I suspect that would start getting solved if the political system there became more stable. Ecologically we seem to be living outside the natural carbon cycle, so we need to learn how to make fuel, rather than mine it from within the earth, which will allow the CO2 levels to drop naturally. I'm still pretty optimistic that we can avoid the problems that so many have been predicting.

Now that we have experienced the economic collapse or collapse of economic models of growth, what happens to the idea to alleviate the lives of billions of people living in poverty? That might be an interesting question to mull over.

I read "Limits" when it was first published. It made complete sense to me then as its conclusions seemed obvious. Unless there is an essential shift in the way humans see theselves, and consequently each other, we are on a self destructive trajectory. That shift must be with individual conciuosness, for everything we see in humanity's world is the result of manifested thought and emotion.
Socrates admonished his students "know thyself". Plato envisioned a society based on awareness of the divine Self. That is to say that human beings must realize harmony within themselves before any external harmony can be hoped for in their world. Society, religon, science, art, etc are after all only products of the human mind.