I wouldn’t say that a joking annoyance at incorrect information being bandied about constitutes “issues”… you did catch the not 1 but 2 bright yellow smiley faces i used to indicate playful humor right? in case it wasn’t clear, i was joking.
the short lifespan misinformation is so often stated despite being absolutely 100% incorrect, that you see it everywhere, and people will even jump to defend it (ahem) without having any facts whatsoever or even bothering to look into it. the average person just doesn’t understand averages alas.
Myths about overpopulation in no way presuppose that overpopulation as a concept is contrafactual. The problem is not so much a matter of ascertaining what the maximum sustainable human population on the planet can be. But rather that humans tend to lack the coordination to decide how many are needed. This might be merely another kind of misdistribution of resources.
Who here, or anywhere else for that matter, said that’s the problem? Why are you announcing that that’s not the problem when as far as I can tell, no one here has said it is the problem? Why do you think talking about overpopulation has something to do with determining some maximum sustainable number of people? How precise would such a number have to be for you? And what do you think should happen if we went over it? What if we went say, 100 over it? Or may be, just one? And what should we do with those sudden over-the-magic-number babies? Do you think they should be killed? Converted to food for those who came before them? Should the others be told that’s what they’re eating? Would that even be ethical? And if we’re going to come up with some Magic Number, what about animals? Domestic ones, especially, use a lot of resources – shouldn’t Magic Numbers be arrived at for them too? How would those numbers be allotted? If a farmer’s horse had triplets, would it be proper to kill two of them if his allotted number only allows for one? Or should other farmers who have yet to reach their number be sought out? What if those farmers don’t want those particular baby horses?
Sorry, I don’t have time to dedicate to answering your barrage of questions now.
Anyway, I will clarify that I was not suggesting that people need any sort of Magic Number to be agreed upon, I said that people appear to lack sufficient coordination to know spontaneously how many people are needed.
The problem is not “how many are needed”, it’s how you make it so.
Pretty much without exception, the solutions proposed in the realm of climate change tend to involve politicians increasingly picking of my pocket, or politicians increasingly telling me what to do. The fact that the USA has been on a steady trend of reduced CO2 emissions for the last several years without either of these strategies being much increased (rants about Obama to the contrary) seems to be widely ignored.
And trying to cap population at a given level:
(1) turns this process up to eleven, with politicians deciding who will cease to exist, or who will never be allowed to exist (although I have a suspicion that the families of high level politicians and their donors will suffer no restriction). You practically need to have that mostly mythical creation, the Benevolent Dictator/Philosopher King, which history shows us rarely survives as such beyond one generation.
(2) ignores the reality that richer societies around the world tend toward replacement or below replacement population growth, and that one thing which correlates superbly with the movement of societies from “poor” to “rich” is the availability of abundant, affordable electricity.
Want populations to stop growing? Give them kilowatt-hours. Lots of them.
That’s because that trend is largely from a continuing recession. This falls right under what Malki! was making fun of in the comic you posted, imaging a weak economy somehow means dedication to the environment. But that’s not something anyone wants to keep steady; instead people are hoping the US can get its act together and turn things around.
Part of this is also a shift from coal to natural gas, and just about any step away from coal works out to a net positive although things like fracking do have their own externalities. But otherwise I can’t see that it reflects any change toward minimizing the externalities of what we do, once people can afford to do them again. And of course, it’s still very much at the scale of adding more pollution a bit less quickly.
I imagine so, because the problem is continued pollution, and those are phrased to cover pretty much any possible response to it. Requiring companies not to pour mercury into waterways is telling us what to do. A free market solution is charging companies for their externalities, like the emissions trading that helped with CFCs, but if a cent of the costs of pollution finds its way to you that will be picking your pocket.
Maybe the president could reward companies who reduce emissions, or make a gently worded request for people to at least consider not idling their trucks for hours at an end…but no, even those are still telling us what to do, so unacceptable. I’m pretty sure the only thing it allows is no change, which here means continued pollution.
Note this is the odd framing this discussion keeps being subject to: do nothing means add pollution at the present rate. We may see increasing damage from droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, farms and homes and lives being ruined, but none of that counts as what we are changing. A change is only when you try to counteract that, like making gasoline prices come a bit closer to its true cost. Somehow the precautionary principle has been perverted to mean we should keep crapping in our pool and not risk cleaning it.
Funny, the president, who makes much of his climate change awareness, has been telling us for the last five years that the economy is in recovery mode. “We’re still in recession” has been labeled as a right-wing meme.
One important externality is that there is nothing which lifts people out of poverty, improves the position of women, reduces birth rates, provides access to decent water and sewage disposal, nearly as well as does abundant electricity.
Only if “doing nothing” is defined as “not enacting legislation”.
If those who advocate deep cuts in carbon emissions would be candid about the effects it would have on the lifestyle and budget of Joe and Jane Sixpack, it would at least no longer be possible to charge them with disingenuousness.
It’s pretending that we can all do this easily, that everyone will prosper (except the C-suite at Gazprom, BP, Aramco et al…) which is what really roils my bowels the most.
The majority of the trash comes from a minority of the population. We are not overpopulated. Not by any stretch or measure. All of humanity could fit in Texas, with the same population density as New York City.
Putting aside for the moment that population control will solve the problem (the same way that blowing up all the cars will end traffic jams), but is utterly unnecessary:
People are okay with politicians saying you can’t murder. Why is not okay for them to tell you you can’t effectively contribute to the suffering and deaths of millions the world over? Because you only help to pull the trigger? Sorry, not buying that justification or the indignation. We’re not in it to save the planet. This rock is pretty much going to stay here regardless of what we do. We’re talking about our lives, our population centers, and our species. Putting an end to global warming is an intensely selfish endeavor. I realize that Global Warming concerns seem to be intimately connected to the softie, tie-died shirt crowd, but you have to be hard-nosed about its reality.
That’s one example of what I’m saying: imagining the government continuing to allow the emission of more pollution means somehow maintaining the situation we have now. It’s not the only example.
That’s an important one – believe it or not, nobody here is against electricity – but not actually the most important. For instance, you might be able to take it for granted, but an even more important thing for having access to decent water and food is actually having a supply of water.
The drought in California has been pushing enough people there toward poverty, and because it is an important source of food may well hurt people elsewhere. A much worse case was the multi-year drought in Syria, ruining countless farmers who became urban unemployed, and was a key part of taking what had been one of the more stable countries in the area into a disastrous civil war.
This is just one example of the many costs of climate change from our pollution, from the way we currently get our electricity. I fully understand trying to change it will have costs for some people, though these are often greatly exaggerated compared to what people who have actually looked into them estimate. What infuriates me is ignoring that our present course has its own much larger costs, pretending that it somehow doesn’t include all the damage that is happening because of it and only expected to increase in the future.
We are not creating prosperity right now. We are creating a mix of benefits and very serious problems, and making that seem like prosperity by trying to externalize the latter, so people see the relation to gas prices and ignore what happens to food and homes. It is very predictably starting to come back to us.
I take offense to your suggesting that it wasn’t thought that generated my
statement
Now I think for a moment I realize you couldn’t possibly know me well
enough to not make such a statement.
Granted I may be naive on some things but my thought about a giant ball of
10,000 degree hot iron at the center of our planet was certainly worth
looking at regarding its effect on surface temperatures.
The answer I got was permafrost was the barrier.
What about oceans which cover 2/3 of the planets surface?
I guess your idea is to grasp for any alternative to the well-supported explanation – if not iron or ice, then maybe water? But saying the core is hot iron and the oceans cover most of the planet’s surface was as true a thousand years ago as it is today. It doesn’t exactly require much thought to see that if it’s not something that is changing, it doesn’t make sense as an explanation for changes.
