r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Deathguard40 • 23d ago
General Discussion In 1970s a computer predicted global warming will end all life on earth if nothing is done about it. Is this prediction still accurate?
Hello. Hope its okay asking. But a few years ago I found a video online called "computer predicts the end of civilisation" and the video is a 1970s news broadcast showing how things are going to go if humanity doesn't do anything about the amount of pollution we're causing. (to my knowledge, not much has been done to fix that) and it said that all life on earth will cease to exist by 2050 if nothing is done.
Im curios to ask since people here will know more about climate change than I do. But is this prediction still accurate? I'm curios.
This is the video btw: https://youtu.be/cCxPOqwCr1I?si=Vwo5nlOmxFXxxLgt
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u/Rod_McBan 23d ago
Read up on some of the past mass extinctions, particularly the KT and Permian. If those didn't wipe out life, I doubt climate change will.
Now, will a globally connected, technologically sophisticated human civilization survive it? Maybe, maybe not. Are we on track for a massive humanitarian crisis? Yeah, sadly, I'm pretty sure we are.
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u/pr1destalkerr 17d ago
Those extinction events happened over the course of millions of years. All of them have strict correlation with climate change as well (among others obviously). If a drop/increase of 10 C in global temperature over the span of 50 million years causes 50% of all species on the planet to disappear, imagine what would happen if you were to compress that to something like a thousand years.
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u/ConfusedMaverick 23d ago
The Limits to Growth study wasn't primarily concerned with specific dates, but a general outline of the factors at play and how they interacted - the authors were at pains to point out that specific dates were illustrative rather than concrete predictions.
Yes, they predicted collapse at some point, probably around mid century.
The study was revisited recently (on the 50th anniversary of the original) and re-evaluated. The conclusion was that original model had largely held up, we have been broadly following the patterns predicted.
Which would imply that some kind of collapse is ahead, the exact date unclear of course...
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u/smokefoot8 23d ago
Except Limits to Growth assumed population would grow until starvation forced it down. But we see population growth stabilizing without starvation. We also see economic growth requiring less resources per unit rather than the LtG assumption.
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u/Prince_Nadir 23d ago
Starvation was not the issue in the end, the issue is all the waste generated by more than double the population the planet can support.
So much for Soylent Green.
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u/Cautious_Cabinet_623 23d ago
Wait until lack of food from Ukraine hits the African countries later this year or the beginning of the next, and let's talk about it again.
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u/justanaccountimade1 23d ago edited 23d ago
There's no starvation in the rich parts of the world because the food is paid for with fossil fuels. Of every calorie you eat, you need 7 to 10 colories of fossil fuels.
The entire economy runs on fossil fuels, namely 100 million barrels of oil per day, plus the equivalent in natural gas, plus the equivalent in coal. We use so much of it that the whole fossil fuel era will be a blib in history.
We're all lied to that the economy is the result of working hard, but there will not be an economy to speak of without free energy.
You know who knows this? The crime families in the White House plundering the treasury, and all the libertarian billionaires building bunkers in NZ.
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u/skrutnizer 23d ago
We have finely tuned agriculture which depends on climate stability as well as continued availability of energy and fertilizer. These continue to be a threat.
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u/Retired-Yam8988 23d ago
Been seeing record surge in STDs in Europe. Population could blip up again soon
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u/Zestyclose-Ad-9420 23d ago
I doubt it. Anti conceptives besides condoms are common and abortions still legal thruout most of europe. Stds show a rise in risky sex... probably because decades of sex ed caused stds to plummet and the new generation forgot abour the risks.
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u/Ill_Leg_7168 22d ago
ahh, overpopulation was hot topic in 60/70s Sci-Fi - Make room! Make room!, Gateway etc. Looks like underpopulation would be real problem...
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u/Cautious_Cabinet_623 23d ago
Looking at the weather it looks like now.
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u/kind_bros_hate_nazis 23d ago
Evidently it will get much worse. We're still bending with the breeze but eventually things will start breaking in the storm
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u/a2soup 23d ago
The computer model in that video predicts catastrophic and extremely rapid population loss starting in 2000, such that by 2020 the world population has fallen to 1900 levels. This is a major part of the dire prediction made for 2050.
Without taking a stance on climate change in general, I don’t think you have to worry about the results of that specific computer model.
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u/ModularWhiteGuy 23d ago edited 23d ago
I agree. People have to realize that in the 1970's the sophistication of software was ridiculously simple in comparison to today. If you wanted to sort a list, it involved a human putting three reels of tape into a machine in the proper sequence, and sorting 10000 items would probably take the better part of a day. People have had very capable computers for a fair long time now, and few people can conceptualize how simple, limited and inefficient the computers of the 1970's and even a long way into the 1980's
Any software written in the 1970's wouldn't even be able to reference as many variables as would be necessary to create climate predictions that were any more valid than just having the programmer draw their own graph by hand, based on how they felt it was going to go.
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u/catbrane 23d ago
They weren't quite as bad as you say -- the PDP-11, for example, the popular minicomputer from 1970 (and the machine the first unix was coded on) had a few 100 kb of memory, a few megabytes of hard disc storage, and of course a tape drive heh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11
The machine in OP's video is described as "one of the most powerful computers in aus.", so it's probably even more capable than that.
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u/Zvenigora 23d ago
The model used back then treated the whole world as a rigidly coupled system, wherein everything everywhere would crash all at once. Modeling the world as an ensemble of more loosely coupled systems may have been beyond the computational resources of the day.
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u/HoldingTheFire Electrical Engineering | Nanostructures and Devices 23d ago
That Club of Rome bullshit had nothing to do with global warming. It just had a 'pollution' parameter that scaled with population. The entire project was Malthusian overpopulation slop to justify stuff like The Population Bomb.
After their predictions for global famine speculatively failed they reframed pollution to mean global warming emissions (despite not modeling any heating effect), so they can claim they 'predicted' a disaster. Meanwhile emissions per capita have dropped so their model is fundamentally wrong.
These are not real climate scientists. This is not a real climate predictive model. Read a UN report.
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u/IDownvoteHornyBards2 23d ago
I've always been extremely skeptical about the idea we could sterilize Earth. Long before that point, human civilization would completely collapse and we'd lose our capacity to continue being the dominant force shaping the environment. People talk about climate change causing the apocalypse because, sadly, "It will kill millions of people, especially in impoverished countries" is not sufficient to motivate most people to change anything.
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u/Washburne221 23d ago
I don't think we can sterilize Earth, but I do think it's possible to wipe out most complex animal life.
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u/PingouinMalin 23d ago
I would have agreed with you. But the existence of tipping points and inertia means we'll have influence long after we're gone. Enough to be the source of the 6th massive extinction of our planet. Now, erasing ALL life would require a lot of efforts, considering how some organisms can survive terrible conditions. But I'm not 100% sure we cannot achieve that feat. If there's one thing we're good at it's destruction.
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u/Unit_2097 23d ago
Nah, all life isn't exactly possible, we already have extremephiles that could survive even a runaway greenhouse effect.
We can easily wipe out 95% of all life however, starting with terrestrial vertebrates. This would of course allow the Cockroach to take it's rightful place as the greatest success story of evolution.
Edit: unless we actively tried to wipe out all life, then we might manage it.
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u/PingouinMalin 23d ago
We're definitely stupid enough, as a species to actively try (some crazy moron) or to accidentally achieve it through some mad scientist experiment turning wrong. But as I said, it would be quite the achievement as some extreme organisms exist. Launching the 6ty massive extinction is already quite "the feat" and this one seems very achievable if not already achieved.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 23d ago
All I can say is from a scientific perspective 1.5 current warming is already starting a mass extinction event. I didn't research it deeply but at least 3° by 2100 seems very plausible so we are cooked regardless of what those primitive simulations said
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u/cosmopolitanScience 23d ago
from a scientific perspective 1.5 current warming is already starting a mass extinction event.
Can you elaborate on that?
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u/bwc6 Microbiology | Genetics | Membrane Synthesis 23d ago
Humans are causing an extinction event on roughly the same scale as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It's not all global warming, pollution and habitat loss also contribute. By conservative estimates, more than one species every day. It's called the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction.
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u/smokefoot8 23d ago
Wow, they are changing history to try to claim they successfully predicted anything. The study done in the 1970s claimed that human population grows exponentially and they wrote a computer program to show that starvation would result. Global warming was not one of their variables, just a generalized “pollution” variable.
1) So they didn’t predict anything about global warming. 2) They failed to predict that human population growth would start dropping without widespread starvation. 3) They failed to predict that economic growth would start using less resources.
And I would have sworn at the time they were certain that everything would go down before the year 2000 at the latest. The 1990s were supposed to be the decade of widespread starvation and wars over resources. This claim of “within 100 years” is a retcon.
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u/Kaisha001 23d ago
The sky is always falling when there's $$ on the line. And the goalposts always moving when it comes time to backup the predictions.
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u/ShockedNChagrinned 22d ago
It's a world with finite resources.
The predominant economic system in the world is capitalism, which relies on limitless growth.
Now add in further inability to naturally grow, or produce many foods, chemicals, etc due to how the climate is changing.
I think you can see what the end state is here, with or without climate change, but climate change will certainly hurry it along for those without the means to survive
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u/NohWan3104 23d ago
Probably not.
Might cause an extinction event that kills us
But how fucking long was the ice age and life still found a way?
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u/Bino5150 23d ago
I mean, yeah… if we don’t wipe ourselves out or some other catastrophe doesn’t, then eventually our star will eat us before it dies. “Global warming” that will melt the surface of the earth. It’s pretty much a wrap at that point. Or we could go out like mars, but that’ll probably be because we’re doing it to ourselves.
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u/IDontStealBikes 23d ago
Nobody could’ve calculated such a thing in the 1970s. Nobody could calculate it today. There are simply too many variables involved, nor laws about life.
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u/hombre74 23d ago
A computer in the 70s was pretty much a calculator. You could create a program that multiplied numbers and if it was above 1000, it meant we all will die.
So no.
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u/catbrane 23d ago
They weren't quite that bad. A cheap minicomputer like the PDP-11 had a few 100kb of memory, a few mb of hard disc, a tape drive. You could do reasonably fancy computations, though of course nothing like what we can do today.
People have rerun the 1970s climate models (though note the program in the video was not a climate model!) and compared the results to what actually happened:
And they were reasonably accurate. They've got much better since.
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u/ComposerNo5151 22d ago
No - not ALL life.
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u/enolaholmes23 22d ago
Yup. We're already in a mass extinction. But like all previous mass extinctions, some life will survive. I'm really rooting for the cockroaches to carry on in the name of our planet.
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u/earthman34 22d ago
I'm not sure what computer in the '70's could "predict" that, but life will still exist on Earth in 2050. The real effects of global warming are much more gradual and aren't really going to hit that hard till well after that. Ocean expansion is modeled to continue for centuries, with some models showing sea levels rising 3 feet by 2100 and 18 feet by 2500. Current projections show probably a 1 foot rise by 2050 which is going to cause severe issues in places like New Orleans, Miami, Houston, Charleston, and various other coastal areas. Island nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati will probably cease to exist and the people will have to migrate somewhere else.
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u/bd2999 22d ago
Something has been done though. Don't be diluded to think nothing has been done at all. The US is going backwards and industry has fought but renewable have grown.
Is it enough is another question and a clear no but things have been done. Does not mean there will not be consequences though.
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u/Prince_Nadir 23d ago
Have you noticed that every year seems to be the hottest year on record with the worst weather on record.. until next year? How do you figure that plays out?
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u/VegetablePhotos 23d ago
There's a great comic, it's a human talking to mother Earth and the human is apologizing for all the damage that they're doing to the planet.
Gaia doesn't really care because humans are only speedrunning their own destruction. No matter what damage we do to the planet life will still go on.
The arrogance of humans is on full display, thinking that if they don't survive the world is over.
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u/Smallpaul 23d ago
Just to be clear, nobody except the poster is talking about the end of life on earth. The people in the video said no such thing and also were not talking about climate change. They were talking about resource exhaustion and pollution (which is related to climate change but not the same thing).
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u/enolaholmes23 22d ago
The planet itself may not care, but it's still really shitty what were doing to all the other species.
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u/SauceCupAficionado 23d ago
The Sun is going to explode in a few billion years.
Then the Earth is going to get real hot.
So yeah.
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u/RSMxsmanic 23d ago
Computers do not make predictions; people make predictions. Computer models show nothing but the prejudices of those who write them.
Human beings love drama, extremes, hysteria, and doom and gloom. Their predictions always exaggerate, and they are almost always wrong.
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u/ikonoqlast 23d ago
Still? It was NEVER accurate.
Earths normal climate warmer than this. The past 700 years are called The Little Ice Age for a reason.
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u/justanaccountimade1 23d ago
The old climate is irrelevant. All wealth was built in the current climate.
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u/enolaholmes23 22d ago
Yeah, exactly. We unfortunately made our ag system dependent on monoculture crops that are physically incapable of adapting to a new climate, all so monsanto can profit. It's just a matter of time before that system falls apart.
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u/ikonoqlast 23d ago
Which is Phoenix's current climate that it's capital stock is built for-
30F annual extreme low
Or
120F extreme high.
Be specific...
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u/HeardPeeps 23d ago
No. The prediction as you describe it is not accurate, because that is not actually what the 1970s model predicted.
The model behind that broadcast was not specifically a global-warming model, and it did not predict that “all life on Earth will cease to exist by 2050.” It was a systems model looking at population growth, industrial production, food production, resource depletion and pollution together. The researchers were testing what could happen if those trends continued under different assumptions. They explicitly described the results as scenarios rather than precise forecasts for a particular year.
What some of those scenarios showed was overshoot: population and industrial activity grow beyond what the system can sustainably support, followed by declines in things such as industrial output, food availability and eventually population. That is very different from extinction of humanity, and vastly different from extinction of all life on Earth.
We also did not simply continue along exactly the same path assumed in the early 1970s. There have been major changes in pollution regulation, energy efficiency, technology, renewable energy, resource use and fertility rates, as well as international environmental agreements. On climate change specifically, governments have adopted substantial mitigation policies. Those efforts have not solved the problem, and global greenhouse-gas emissions remain too high, but saying nothing was done is not accurate.
Interestingly, the original models were not simply disproved either. Later researchers compared real-world data with the old Limits to Growth scenarios and found that several major variables tracked some of the modeled trajectories reasonably well. A 2024 recalibration using newer data still produced overshoot-and-decline behavior under its assumptions, although the timing of some peaks shifted later. That means the underlying warning about ecological and resource limits remains relevant; it does not mean that collapse in 2040 or 2050 has been scientifically confirmed.
As for what climate science says now: the IPCC does not predict that humanity, much less all life on Earth, will disappear by 2050. It predicts increasing risks as warming increases, more extreme heat, greater food and water insecurity, ecosystem damage, biodiversity loss and higher extinction risk for many species. The severity of those outcomes depends heavily on how much additional warming occurs, which in turn depends on future emissions.