The Oil Drum

I can say that it had a similar impression upon me as a new engineering (ChE) student. We were required to read it as part of the Introduction to Engineering Course that we all took. Seems we read Jay Forrester's work before LTG came out.

The lesson objective was that in dealing with complex exponentials counter-intuitive outcomes and counter-intuitive steps to "prevent" disaster were likely to be required and definitely considered.

I have read M R Simmons summary "Revisiting the Club of Rome", also his book TITD.

Is the CERA Lynch/C.J Campbell saga not disimilar to this? Campbell is often accused of incorrectly predicting oil depletion dates. I,m not sure he actually did. He may have made reference to dates, but not necessarily predictions. From where I'm standing, the Simmons/Campbell camp may have the last "laugh" on this one. (It won't be funny)

Hi Ugo,

Thank you for the thoughtful post and starting this discussion. I have also had the experience, after a seminar, of hearing, "Your work is like Limits to Growth and the Club of Rome. They got it wrong."

In that context, it is interesting to look at nonrenewable resource use in the two scenarios from Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update, shown below.

Figure 4-11 Scenario 1: A Reference Point

Figure 4-12: More Abundant Nonrenewable Resources

"Resources" in the graph means nonrenewable resources, and the top of the resources scale is given in Appendix 1 as 2x10^12. The units are not specified, but if we identify fossil fuels with nonrenewable resources, Ttoe is a reasonable fit. If this interpretation is wrong, someone please correct me. In Scenario 1, the ultimate would then be 1Ttoe, and the cumulative production would reach half of this by 2016. In Scenario 2, the ultimate would be 2Ttoe, and we would reach the half-way point by 2040. This range of years for the half-way point would probably be considered reasonable by many Oil Drum regulars.

There are 8 other Scenarios in the book, and they all use the higher ultimate. The nonrenewable resource use in most is similar to Scenario 2, but there are a wide range of responses for the other quantities.

Dave

I graduated from high school the year LTG came out. I was fascinated by the idea and had some programming experience so took on the project of translating the code in Jay Forrester, "World Dynamics" into Fortran and duplicating his results. I would have arguments with my dad in those days about the validity of the whole thing. I would argue that if you did not like some aspect of the model, then suggest something more likely - and we can test out that supposition. My father would argue that there are human factors - our response to conditions, that can't be included in models. We are at the crossroads now. Is humanity able to collectively see our current conundrum and change direction in time, or are we subject to the coefficients in the LTG models?
Since that time the study of complex systems has become an independent discipline of its own. We now know more about the evolution of chaotic systems, about islands of stability, and bifurcation in state space to new uncharted regimes. At the time, the LTG study just said that when the lines on the graphs became too vertical, the models broke down. From the perspectives of complexity theory, this is still the way it is - we just expect that after a period of unpredictable thrashing, the system will come to another quasi-stable equilibrium - that may or may not include a population of human beings.