Why, some readers asked, did we call The Limits to Growth swill? Because they masquerade as a scientific work, when in fact they are its exact opposite. Science is the search for truth on the basis of hard evidence; Meadows & Co have collected onesided evidence to fit a faith (in doomsday). When they could not find such data, because there were none, they shamelessly substituted data blatantly contradicted by the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Much has been written about the absurdity of their computer model. It treats cause-effect relations of the entire world in single loops (overpopulation in Rawalpindi causes pollution in San Francisco). It ignores the fact that while some resources may be nonrenewable, none of them are irreplaceable. It ignores the negative feedbacks built into any civilization - in the model, everything grows except the countermeasures. The "stabilized" world model recommended by the authors under these absurd conditions is one where pollution is roughly the same as now, per-capita food consumption does not radically differ from today's levels where half the world goes hungry, industrial output stagnates, and resources go relentlessly down, down, down. (Why is it better to die over a slow fire than eat, drink and be merry if tomorrow we die?) The whole exercise in browbeating laymen with scientific jargon proves no more than that if you keep drinking from a finite bottle, you will eventually empty it. Most people do not need a computer for that
But these (and other) absurdities apply only to the model itself; What most critics of the Limits to growth have overlooked is that the absurd model was fed with false data. The model of the world concocted by the computerized soothsayers could still survive, so Meadows & Co liberally helped themselves to data that would kill it. off.
If you have not yet thrown the book in the garbage where it belongs, take a look at Figs. 31 and 32 on facing pages. The figure on the left gives genuine (US-AID) data on GNP versus birth rate for the countries of the world, and it totally lacks the correlation needed (a sharp rise of birth rate with GNP) to kill the world. The opposite figure does have the desired dependence
¾it plots the results of opinions (not facts) on the number of desired children against GNP ¾ and the authors claim that this figure shows "a relationship comparable to the trend in [the] figure" on the opposite page. And so it does. at first sight. But look again. The opinion chart has 17 points, the fact chart close to 100. One of the 17 opinion points lies in splendid isolation, and the authors have arbitrarily drawn a curve with the desired rise through that single point. But look again, for that is not all. To make the two figures comparable, they have, without telling the reader, changed the scale on the horizontal axis on one of them by 25%, which very conveniently pushes the GNP values of 6 countries (one of them the USA) off the page. You will now see that the illusion of the "comparable trend" has been created by a manufactured curve, whose rise is flatly contradicted by the data of no less than 24 countries and supported by none. These doctored data were then doctored some more before the resulting witch's brew was fed into the doomsday machine.One can have a good guess why the authors so brazenly manipulated their input data in this and other cases. But their motives are less important than the result: swill.
|
|
Vol. 2, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 2 Issue/No.: Vol. 2, No. 6 Date: February 01, 1975 04:18 PM Title: The Use of Force
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|