Albert Bartlett and Implications of Exponential Growth

Albert A. Bartlett, late Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado, spent the latter half of his life alerting both the community of physicists and the wider society to implications of unchecked exponential growth. Among the areas he addressed were population growth, sustainability and consumption of non-renewable resources. He placed particular emphasis on the concept of the doubling time in an exponential process, showing, for example, that the amount of a resource consumed in a doubling interval exceeds or is approximately equal to the total consumed in all of history prior to the start of that interval. We present here some examples contained in a typical Bartlett lecture or paper with the hope that, with his passing in 2013, a new generation of physicists will continue this educational effort.