Limits to Growth
I thought for a long time, that the result of the study “The Limits to Growth” by the “Club of Rome” are clearly disproved. But then I investigated a little bit and found that it doesn’t seem to be the case. This worries me a lot, as the model (World3) they use predicts a collapse of society around 2030-2050.
Serious critisism to the study seems to be:
- The model is very sensitive to initial starting values. No sensitivity analysis of the model has been done.
- The model only includes a single limited natural resource. This does not incorporate the possibility that a limited resource like oil can be substituted by another less limited resource.
However I found studies investigating the sensitivity of the model (see links below), so point one is clearly not true. What I’m missing is a similar thing like in weather forecast there they show the temperature mean and the variance. So instead o showing only the mean value in all the plots, the investigators of the world3 model sould also show the variance of the outcome .
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The input data for the model is choosen, so that it fits to the predictions of the model in the past.
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The model only shows the global means, like a global mean temperature.
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Dennis Meadows: Erhalt überkommener Industrien: german newspaper article
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Graham Turner: A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with 30 Years of Reality : Very frightening, it seems like the World3 model is basically correct!!
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World3 in Modelica: Creating System Dynamics Models in the Modelica Framework
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[http://www.heise.de/tr/Wikipedia-der-Prozesse–/artikel/141050]