Predictions: Driven By Fear or Wishful Thinking?

How many times have we heard this story?

From a June 29, 1989, Associated Press dispatch:
UNITED NATIONS (AP)—A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

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When I was in college a book called The Limits to Growth (1972) was published by an international think tank called The Club of Rome. The group used computer models to predict that continued economic growth would lead to a catastrophic depletion of key natural resources. It claimed that the world would run out of gold, silver, copper, zinc, natural gas, and petroleum within decades. These predictions proved to be spectacularly wrong.

The Club of Rome's central error was a failure to understand the nature of resources. It treated resources as fixed, static piles of materials that humanity was simply draining. This ignores the most important factor: human ingenuity, which is the ultimate resource that turns useless raw materials into valuable assets.

Here’s what actually happened, and why their predictions failed so completely:

Resources are created, not just found. A resource is a substance we have the knowledge and technology to use for our benefit. Oil was just black goo until humans developed the technology to refine and use it. Human innovation constantly finds new ways to locate, extract, and utilize raw materials more efficiently.

Consumption drives innovation. As we use more of a resource, its price may rise, which incentivizes smart people to find more of it, develop better extraction technologies, or create substitutes. This is why, contrary to the Club of Rome’s models, our "proved reserves"—the amount of a resource considered viable to produce with current technology and market conditions—have consistently increased for oil, gas, and most minerals, even as we consume more. This is why we have heard the mantra "in ten years we will run out of oil" for the past 60 years.

A classic case of catastrophizing. The Club of Rome's predictions are a prime example of catastrophizing, a word I learned from my brother the psychologist. With regard to the future, our unchecked imaginations wildly overstate negative side-effects while completely ignoring the benefits of industrial progress and the human capacity for problem-solving. This same flawed thinking pattern is used today to predict climate catastrophe, ignoring our proven ability to master climate dangers through technology powered by cost-effective energy.

So why does the media persist in its fear-mongering? Is it genuine fear, wishful thinking or ratings?

Related:

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