The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth:

"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."