Back in 1972, the Club of Rome-commissioned “The Limits of Growth,” a report that argued the world’s economic system could not continue its current rate of growth because of resource constraints and environmental matters. The report presented various outcomes for what could happen when the growth of industrial civilization collided with finite resources. Without big changes of direction, the authors argued, civilization might collapse. The report caught immediate, blistering criticism—some of which was accurate and some decidedly myopic. While the club’s analysis wasn’t focused on climate change, one buried chart showed that an astonishingly steep and rapid rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was already underway and would continue soaring even more steeply in coming years. When the report was published, atmospheric CO2 was running at 328 parts per million and the prediction was that it would hit 380 ppm by the year 2000. It actually took until 2005. The chart made no mention of rising temperatures as a consequence. (You can see a more readable copy of the chart at this link—scroll to page 72). Not all climate activists are completely in tune with every note of teenaged eco-warrior Greta Thunberg’s “blah, blah, blah” assessment of climate summits in general and specifically the COP26 get-together happening this week and next in Glasgow. Nonetheless, among activists, the overall sentiment is one of low expectations for what will come out of this latest summit. Not when it comes to words—as Thunberg laments. Plenty of those, plenty describing our climate predicament, plenty about the failure so far to turn those words into serious, immediate action to cut off the accumulated spew of human-generated greenhouse gases that are heating the planet toward average temperatures not seen since Homo sapiens emerged 300 millennia ago. Read more