If you don’t pay attention to the bananas (and other trivial subjects), then you’ll undergo a very personal extinction event sooner rather than later. Where bananas come from, where they go to and what happens to them inbetween may be beneath your contempt, but it’s actually, literally vital. For you to have the luxury to ignore them requires some people — a lot of people — to dedicate their whole working lives to them. So don’t knock trivia, oh reader of trivial blogs. If we all dedicated our lives to understanding — or for many of us, not understanding — original research papers on population dynamics, there’d be no-one available to put food on your table. Or even a table to put food on.
As massive a brain as I have for a member of a great-brained family of creatures, I can’t read those original research papers. I have difficulty reading Nature. New Scientist used to be my level in my voracious youth, but lately I find even that a struggle. Pop-science blogging is where I’m comfortable at the moment, and at that level, there is a distressing amount of “We’re all doomed” that is every bit as misleading as your summary of Cory’s summary of… etc. So, yeah, at that level it is useful to point out one of the more pernicious memes going about, dating back to the 1970s at least, that population growth is exponential, is just plain wrong.
As far as I can tell, the revisiting of the models used by the Club of Rome didn’t seem to revise them in any way; they just replugged the latest figures into the old models and ran them again, coming out with unsurprisingly similar results. Their assumptions are still as questionable as they were back when I read The Limits to Growth in the late 70s, as are their conclusions. The best lesson that you can draw from their models is the one learned by climate scientists a while ago, to not draw conclusions based on only one model, or one set of models built with the same assumptions.
Yes, there are many possible futures. Our future may yet resemble one of the Club of Rome models. Maybe their assumptions will cancel out and approach reality that way. Or maybe they won’t. To label one view of the future as “greenwashed” because it conflicts with something you think you’ve learned from the Limits to Growth seems every bit as potentially fallacious as whatever you think you’re railing against.
