Global Collapse: Probabilities, Factors, and Timetables, Part 1. Was MIT right? (A Three-Part Series)

Part One of the three-part series presents past and current timeline predictions for a global collapse process. Intelligent individuals will utilize the three reports for critical personal and business planning.

Introduction

Part One starts with the prestigious Club of Rome reports of the 1960s and 1970s. MIT and many prestigious worldwide scientists were involved in creating these two initial reports.

The history of what happened to these two reports is both telling and chilling. Our organization's particular interest lies in the fact that these reports were created with limited information about climate change.

Part two of this series on global collapse will provide an update on the Club of Rome's predictions. Part three of this series will cover what happens to the Club of Rome's most updated timeline and consequence predictions when you include calculations for current climate data.

Please note that a combination of ecological, economic, political, and climate factors can cause a global collapse process.

Part One below was written by Bruce Nappi, a long-time Job One volunteer and a former Sandia National Lab and U. California, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist.

The first and second club of Rome reports and their global collapse timelines

By the mid 60s, it was already clear to some industry leaders that humans had created serious problems. These were not so much climate problems as they were natural resource problems. In 1968, a small group of leaders from large European industrial firms was concerned due to alarming internal corporate reports. The reports warned that their production output would soon be limited due to shortages of natural resources.

In 1970, these leaders, who informally called themselves the Club of Rome because they frequently met at the Academy of the Lincei in Rome, brought together a group of economists and social scientists to examine global problems. The initial discussion concluded that such a study would not be feasible. There was, however, an unusual guest at the meetings: Dr. Jay Forester from MIT. He proposed that he could obtain a preliminary estimate of the results they were looking for by developing a computer model based on new work he was conducting. The system model would estimate the future progression of worldwide natural resources and economic trends based on a wide range of assumptions provided by economists.

With funding from the participants, primarily Volkswagen, the study was completed in two years. The outcome was profound and startling! The model projections were devastating for humanity. Furthermore, they were expected to occur soon, not far off in the future. The study results were published in the 1972 book Limits to Growth. (1-1) The book stated that unless all of human society addressed population control, resource conservation, and pollution management quickly, aggressively, and simultaneously, major collapses would occur, drastically affecting human society beginning around the middle of the 21st century.

The study team, led by Donella and Dennis Meadows at MIT, anticipated they would face many challenges to their findings. There were too many powerful, wealthy, but selfish people in the world who would attack the report to defend their wealth. To defend the report, the MIT team had to plan for attacks similar to those used to discredit the abuses of the tobacco and asbestos industries, which had claimed the report's data was incomplete and inaccurate.

The report team developed a novel and creative strategy. For some of their models, they would not use the currently estimated worldwide data, but would use greatly exaggerated quantities for available resources, which could not be dismissed. To take that approach one step further, they even assumed that some natural resources would have no limits.

For example, for some model runs, the study didn’t assume that society would run out of coal, oil or natural gas. They didn’t try to figure out if new crops could be found to feed the hungry. In those models, they assumed that technology would somehow provide solutions to produce 2 or 3 times the highest levels of carbon fuels and food that could ever be expected.

Again, they were stunned by the results! Even under those extreme assumptions, each outcome ultimately led to the collapse of society due to some limiting side effects. Regardless of the level of each variable used, due to their interactions, society as we know it would collapse sometime in the mid-to-late twenty-first century, only about 80 years from the study.

In another example, for the population-focused model, a trial analysis was made where the level of anticipated food production was very high. Based on previous analyses of pollution causes, the program calculated the amount of pollution that would be generated by producing the additional food. To counter the additional pollution, a greatly exaggerated solution was also assumed that some new technology would decrease pollution by a factor of 4. The result was still a massive population die-off due to pollution for the following reasons. The large increase in food initially led to a significant rise in population. They, in turn, produced more food and more people. Industrial production rapidly increased (which would make everyone on Wall Street happy) until a growing global pollution crisis emerged around 2010, causing the melting of the polar ice caps and altering the weather. This caused a major sea level rise, which devastated the food supply and led to widespread starvation. (This scenario is ironically playing out today.)

In another variation, they assumed technology could achieve perfect birth control by 1975. That alone would surely reduce the population growth rate. But improved farming technology would also force people to move into cities, become wealthier, and become mass consumers. They would eat more food. The entire world society would also eat more, quickly overrunning food production. In this simulation, the city's population continued to grow, and the production of consumer products also increased. Eventually, carbon pollution reached such high levels that society had to shift to renewable biofuels. By the time that happened, the food supply had been wiped out because pollution continued to cause the crops to fail. In that model, the population still collapsed around 2040.

Continually being startled by each new result, every combination of variables was tried. This included measures such as allowing land to yield double, permitting every remote resource to be mined, making birth control perfect, switching to all nuclear power to reduce air pollution, and assuming that 75% of goods were recycled, among others. And yes, the analysis even attempted to use all of these improvements simultaneously! Even in those idealized cases, by 2070, the Earth’s key natural resources had been depleted, food production had collapsed, pollution had increased, and the population had drastically declined.

In short, there was no way for human society to survive as long as it continued to grow. Notice the critically important word' growth.' Falling back to more limited goals, the best possible outcome was finally reached. It achieved a sustainable world, but only without growth.

The illustration below shows the dangerous convergence of population growth, resource depreciation, changing industrial output, pollution and food production predicted by MIT and the prestigious Club of Rome. (Please also note that the timeframes predicted in the illustration below have shortened considerably due to new research on accelerating climate change.)

To achieve this sustainable model, the following necessary and immediate interventions were needed: population growth had to be stopped by 1984 at 5 billion; industrial growth had to be stopped by 1990; jobs were largely shifted to services; pollution across all industries, including agriculture and carbon fuels, had to be cut by 75%; food production had to be subsidized extensively using expensive organic sustainable methods; capital equipment had to be designed for a minimum of 50 years depreciation. Even with all these strict limitations, the long-term depletion of natural resources was not solved, and would require further limitations.

The Club of Rome members, who held very prestigious industry positions in Europe, believed that once world governments saw these results, they would take immediate action. Upon publication of the book, the results were presented directly to the United Nations (U.N.) With significant support from U.N. leadership to involve all nations in developing commitments, world nations responded positively and strongly! Almost every nation committed to strong support to heed the warnings presented in the studies. The study participants were ecstatic! There was one significant country, however, that would not go along – the U.S..

No sooner had world action begun than other leaders of industry, government, and academia emerged as opponents of the plan. All they saw were the disruptions that would occur within their own companies and institutions if they implemented such an approach. If the population were made stable, for example, what would happen to the construction industry? No population growth means fewer new houses and fewer new roads. The focus would shift to replacement only. World manufacturing would have to be capped on many fronts.

In a strong negative response, the world fossil fuel industry and the major investment banks began a major attack on the U.N. effort by discrediting the science behind the study with fraudulent claims. Despite the strong initial response, the support of countries around the world pulled back. The result was, in two years, all but one country backed out of their commitments. The only country to stand behind its commitment was Mao Zedong’s China, which had committed to a one-child-per-family response, the main requirement of the study. They stood by that commitment for 40 years. A current push by the fossil fuel industries against CO2 limitations and growth restrictions has eroded China’s resolve. They recently slightly curtailed the program due to recent international banking pressures. Again, to their credit, the population limitation program has not been completely abandoned.

Despite continuous suppression by industry, academia, and banking, the MIT team produced an update of their analysis every ten years after the first Limits to Growth book was published. Using the most current world data, each update repeated the warnings because the most up-to-date data confirmed the model’s accuracy. The analysis was also repeatedly confirmed by independent groups. (1-2) Lacking adequate growth limitations and reductions in the use of natural resources from world countries, each estimate of future devastation was expected to be worse, and the dates of occurrence were expected to be earlier than the worst case of the prior study.

Fast forward to 2020. The collapses that were feared by the original Club of Rome study have already started. The most recent report updates suggest how they could play out. The combination of pollution and resource depletion will lead to mass food and water shortages. These, in turn, will cause mass population disruption. The death and migration of billions of people will lead to economic collapse and war around the globe. (Editor's note: Previous Club of Rome reports had few calculations for the primary and secondary consequences of climate change. Imagine what those reports would have looked like if they had included estimates for the primary and secondary consequences of climate change.)

However, let me reiterate an important point. These are no longer predictions for a future time. The collapse is now underway, just as the models suggested. The world is now facing an apocalypse, as great and as devastating as many religions have long feared. In this case, however, the collapse is due entirely to human-induced natural causes, of which climate change plays only one part.

Without scientific justification at the end of World War II to slow population growth, “end of war” politics at that time actually ushered in a baby boom. The reason human civilization was able to exceed an estimated 2B sustainability level was because the Earth still had easily accessible natural resource reserves. Over hundreds of millions of years, nature essentially created a stockpile of supplies. So, if nations had understood the problem and taken action to slow population growth after 1968, and growth had stopped in 1984 at 5 billion, and then declined again to 2 billion people around 2024, humanity could have achieved a sustainable future without disaster.

That didn’t happen. In fact, the population problem was completely ignored. As of 1984, the population was still growing fast. It now exceeds 7.7 B. This is what happens when many people, in a world system only able to support 2 billion, is called overshoot.

This means the current population has far exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity. Overshoots, in system theory, are always followed by strong collapses. So, a rapid collapse back to 2B or less is coming. As a sign that the current population is approaching its “peak”, look at how quickly the growth rate is dropping.

In 1964, it was 2.24%. It dropped to half that, being 1.1% in 2018. That’s a reduction in growth rate of 1.0% in 39 years. The current growth rate in 2022 is only 0.83% and is decreasing rapidly.

If current rates continue, the peak—i.e., zero population growth—will be reached around 2026. Note! This does not mean that growth will be “leveling off” as mainstream economists would have us believe. It will be an earth-shaking and undeniable milestone that the great population collapse has begun.

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Here is an update on the world's population growth rate: The current global population in 2022 is 7,975,105,156, representing a 0.83% increase from 2021. The global population in 2021 was 7,909,295,151, representing a 0.87% increase from 2020. Think about it! This is down from 9% in 2018!

( https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20World,a%200.87%25%20increase%20from%202020.)

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Here is the original graph from the Club of Rome/MIT study.