Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
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- ISBN13: 9781931498586
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In 1972, three scientists from MIT made a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and made stirring conversation about global ‘go past,’ or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.
Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognizable for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current go past, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plot to lower our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.
Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a arresting 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. Go past cannot be sustained lacking collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to judge that humanity can still back some of its hurt to Planet if it takes appropriate measures to lower inefficiency and waste.
Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development.
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This book was required reading for me in my Political Science class over 20 years ago when I was in college. By this point in human history, humanity was supposed to be doomed. I agree with a previous reviewer who pointed out that the authors simply fail to take into account human ingenuity and the resilience of the planet and its inhabitants.
But hey, if you want to relentlessly worry and fret, this book is probably for you.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
30 years ago these same people predicted hurt and havoc by today. They got teachers and professors to buy the book in bulk, building the authors wildly successful. But the conclusions proved hilariously incorrect.
Now they want another generation of students to be forced to buy this joke of a book to make the authors even wealthier as they predict–yet again!–planetary doom.
This is a disgrace and should give intermission to all persons well-meaning people who tend to judge ‘climate change’ alarmists. They lied 30 years ago. Why judge them now?
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I admit to not ahveing read the latest edition of this work. But I have read the previous two and unless there have been changes of substance, which additional reviews here suggest has not happened, I will not be wasting my money on the new edition. The reason is that the authors’ work entirely fails to take into account the way in which human ingenuity, stimulated in part by fee changes which scarcity should surely bring about, has made, and can be expected to continue to make, adaptations in how resources are used and extracted. Indeed things that were never thought to be resources can be made into resources; deposits that were uneconomic to exploit can become economic if prices rise. The issues were all set out very clearly by economists when the first fantastic scare broke out in the mid 1970s (when we were told we were going to run out of crucail resources by the year 2000). I suggest googling two vital papers by Yale’s William Nordhaus in Brooking Papers for a comprehensive critique of the two previous editions. This is not to say that resources are infinite, they clearly are not. But nor is the life of this planet, which is doomed to end when our sun reaches later stages of its life cycle. The huge question is when we run out of renewable resouces and how soon we can replace thenm by renewable ones. The sort of analysis in the work of the Limits to Growth team ignores so much of the possible adaptations that a well funtioning economic system can be expected to make that it is of no help in answering the huge question.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I hoped the CD would contain more material but it didn’t give me more than reading the book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book is fantastic intelelctual achievement, but is methodologically flawed: if you assemble some differential equations and some data that generate coefficients used in these equations, then differential equations will generate SOME solution. But, appealing question is how solution changes if coefficients change slightly? This analysis is known as “sensitivity analysis”, and as exampels show, majority of dynamical systems show tremendous sensitivity towards coefficients and initial conditions.
It is OK that 30 years ago authors didn’t perform such analysis. But now, there are many proper algebraic tools and software tools for performing such analysis, and 30 years was enough time to do this.
“Naked” solution of differential equations lacking sensitivity analysis have the same reliability and extrapolative power as predictions generated by crystal ball.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5