cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64475908

In Limits to Growth, a '70s era tome lauded by both environmentalists and doomsday conspiracy theorists, MIT scientists made a number of predictions about population growth, food production, etc, using the data available at the time – and were immediately lambasted by the media and politicians as being fear-mongering, since they hinted that collapse would likely come in the 2nd half of the 21st century. Recently, investment guy Joachim Klement revisited the predictions, adding data from this century. The results were… not great, with some indicating that we’re living in the peak of human development like literally right this minute.

  • hotelbravo722@slrpnk.net
    8·
    4 days ago

    Sad thing is that when it was first published it was meant to be both a warning and a guide on how to limit resource consumption back to sustainable levels so as to not experience catastrophic collapse. However none of those warning where taken seriously and the researchers where made to look like crackpots in popular media. Which sucks because all they where trying to do was make sense of the problem and work collaboratively on solutions to safely and methodically transition society so things wouldn’t be so disruptive. We saw how well that went.

  • Dogyote@slrpnk.net
    5·
    4 days ago

    What was the human population predicted to be? Everyone seems surprised that the birthrate is falling across the world for what appear to be economic/philosophical reasons. Was a decline at this time predicted by the models? If not, how would that affect every other prediction?

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      They predicted peak population about now at 7.7billion or so. They did include falling birth rates into their models as even back then rich countries had below replacement rate fertility rates. As of right now we are not a peak population though.