A Model Is Just A Model

Global warming (and the future melting of the polar ice caps) is a "prediction" based on a complex model. It is not an absolute inevitability. "Since there is no way to prove that a model has not omitted some important factor, there is room for reasonable people to disagree about the relevance of the model conclusions to the real system, and to what extent the interpretation phase should be tempered by direct intuitive judgments..." (From Operations Research: Principles and Practice). In "The Population Bomb", a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, (1968), it warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Well, the world population has about doubled since that prediction (from about 3.5 billion to over 7 billion) and civilization has not collapsed. Looks like their model was wrong. Turns out that imposing a limit of one or two children on American families or initiating a more extreme plan (like forced abortions) was never necessary. Societies adapt... and future technological improvements change the "factors" in the model.