New report on climate change released today

[bilby]

Population doesn't cause climate change

Then who is causing it? Are you blaming global warming on the cattle? If so, the widespread cultivation of cattle is still a by product of human civilization. All of global warming is caused by carbon ultimately traced back to human civilization.

Population reductions can't help much, even if you killed off nine out of ten people right this instant.

Then that is exactly how many people the earth can not sustain on current technology.

What can and does help is getting energy from non-fossil sources. In fact, in the long run, that's the only viable solution for any practically achievable population level.

The population is something we can control today. Your pie in the sky technology may not ever happen. Or it will happen too late.

The human population simply has to match what the earth can provide today with the technology of today. Otherwise the planet is in trouble and all life (even plants) are in peril.

You couldn't be more wrong. We CANNOT control the population today, other than through genocide - and I for one will fight to my last breath against genocide. Birthrates are at an historic low, but population will continue to rise for about another three decades, simply because the current population is very young, as the result of the earlier high growth-rate. But we have already demonstrated the ability to implement a complete replacement of fossil fuel for electricity generation in a developed nation in less than two decades.

If every human were sterilized today, population would not fall much for about 30 years. Energy use would likely continue to rise for at least that long - children grow up into energy users, and they massively outnumber the old people who die and stop using energy.

The technology of forty years ago is perfectly capable of providing for all the humans we are ever going to have. We are just stupidly choosing to use the technology of 150 years ago instead, and it's fucking everything up.

Worrying about population stopped being sane about thirty years ago. Until then, it was a reasonable concern, given the then state of knowledge and the then trends in birth rates. Worrying about nuclear power was never sane - but it was conflated with the (perfectly rational) worry about nuclear weapons, and people are very bad indeed at changing their political positions on the basis of new evidence, so anti-nuclear activists and population control activists are still commonplace, despite their positions being based on untruths.

If nuclear power is pie in the sky, how did the French manage to make it work some forty years ago? Do you think that people were better at engineering and materials science forty years ago?

Population is irrelevant to the solution, regardless of its contribution to the problem. All that matters is how much coal, oil and gas gets burned over and above what natural sinks can remove from the atmosphere. Seven billion people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year add the EXACT same amount of CO₂ to the atmosphere as seven hundred million people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year, or as 70 billion people burning seven billion tonnes of coal a year.

The solution is to burn less coal. Having fewer people might (or might not) tend to make that happen (depending on what the remaining people choose to do); But it's clearly not the primary driver of the problem, and saying that it is is a hugely dangerous and pointless distraction. No matter how few people there are, they will all want to be wealthy, and will all want to consume lots of energy. Getting rid of the people who currently are not wealthy enough to use much energy doesn't help - the big consumers will just keep consuming more. Get rid of a big consumer, and a lower consumer will likely take his place.

 

[ruby sparks]

I for one will fight to my last breath against genocide.

Warning: this product may contain traces of nuts.

Population is irrelevant to the solution, regardless of its contribution to the problem. .

For anyone who has not read that article, the writer advocates for population control.

Retitling links to articles so that they say the opposite of what the writer says! You could hardly make this sort of stupidity up.

There is of course an argument for nuclear power, and technology in general. It's just not the Loopy Lou argument bilby is making.

 

[RVonse]

I for one will fight to my last breath against genocide.

Warning: this product may contain traces of nuts.

Population is irrelevant to the solution, regardless of its contribution to the problem. .

For anyone who has not read that article, the writer advocates for population control.

Retitling links to articles so that they say the opposite of what the writer says! You could hardly make this sort of stupidity up.

There is of course an argument for nuclear power, and technology in general. It's just not the Loopy Lou argument bilby is making.

+1 Agree with both you and the article ( not the false title though)

 

[angelo]

Throughout human history there's always been the doomsayers. The New Testament as well as the old is full of them.
Today we have a bunch of them in outfits like the UN's IPPC who's every prediction of forthcoming doom have failed to materialise. Polar bears were supposed to be extinct by now not in the record numbers there are now.
Most Pacific islands were supposed to be under water by now not actually rising.
There were supposed to be millions of " Global Warm........oops, sorry, Climate change" refugees.
Here in Australia the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd Labor government spent billions on desalination plants because a certain dickhead [ Flannery ] appointed by that incompetent government advised that because of global warming, rainfall would cease, and the Eastern Seaboard would have no fresh water. Nature's revenge was swift. All the dams actually overflowed and all the desalination plants are still placed in mothballs.
The Climategate scandals are still fresh in many people's memory, assuring that most people don't swallow all the hogwash.
By the way, I don't deny climate change. It happens, is happening and has always happened over the 4.5 billion years of the earth's existence and will do so for the rest of it's existence regardless of what it's inhabitants do or don't do.
Humans as well as all life adapts to conditions. Warming won't mean the extinction of any life on earth, but we're the Earth to tip the other way and head into another ice age all bets are off.
Remember that the greatest development of mankind happened in warming period, not in ice ages.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It isn't the number of people; it's the waste they produce...

It's obviously both.

We are the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion (5 billion metric tons); second only to China (9 billion metric tons). China has a population of 1.38 billion; we have a total of 325 million.

Our share of global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion is greater than the next three polluters combined (Russia, India and Japan), or a total of 1.75 billion to our 325 million.

China and the US alone account for almost half of the total global share (43%).

So, no, it is not "obviously both." If just China and the US ceased all carbon dioxide emissions this year, we'd be over twenty years ahead of the curve and leaders in global influence/technology.

 

[ruby sparks]

It isn't the number of people; it's the waste they produce...

It's obviously both.

We are the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion (5 billion metric tons); second only to China (9 billion metric tons). China has a population of 1.38 billion; we have a total of 325 million.

Our share of global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion is greater than the next three polluters combined (Russia, India and Japan), or a total of 1.75 billion to our 325 million.

China and the US alone account for almost half of the total global share (43%).

So, no, it is not "obviously both." If just China and the US ceased all carbon dioxide emissions this year, we'd be over twenty years ahead of the curve and leaders in global influence/technology.

Right. Because that either shows it's not both human population and activity that's the problem, or it shows something else. I wonder which?

Does the word 'obviously' have too many letters for you? I can try to use words with fewer letters if that helps.

 

[ruby sparks]

Throughout human history there's always been the doomsayers. The New Testament as well as the old is full of them.
Today we have a bunch of them in outfits like the UN's IPPC who's every prediction of forthcoming doom have failed to materialise. Polar bears were supposed to be extinct by now not in the record numbers there are now.
Most Pacific islands were supposed to be under water by now not actually rising.
There were supposed to be millions of " Global Warm........oops, sorry, Climate change" refugees.
Here in Australia the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd Labor government spent billions on desalination plants because a certain dickhead [ Flannery ] appointed by that incompetent government advised that because of global warming, rainfall would cease, and the Eastern Seaboard would have no fresh water. Nature's revenge was swift. All the dams actually overflowed and all the desalination plants are still placed in mothballs.
The Climategate scandals are still fresh in many people's memory, assuring that most people don't swallow all the hogwash.
By the way, I don't deny climate change. It happens, is happening and has always happened over the 4.5 billion years of the earth's existence and will do so for the rest of it's existence regardless of what it's inhabitants do or don't do.
Humans as well as all life adapts to conditions. Warming won't mean the extinction of any life on earth, but we're the Earth to tip the other way and head into another ice age all bets are off.
Remember that the greatest development of mankind happened in warming period, not in ice ages.

You've given me a great idea. I'm going to go see if I can find a forum with fewer twits like you and a worrying number of others. A rational forum maybe. Gotta be one, somewhere, surely. No, on second thoughts I'll stay here. I might not get to laugh as much somewhere else.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

We are the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion (5 billion metric tons); second only to China (9 billion metric tons). China has a population of 1.38 billion; we have a total of 325 million.

Our share of global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion is greater than the next three polluters combined (Russia, India and Japan), or a total of 1.75 billion to our 325 million.

China and the US alone account for almost half of the total global share (43%).

So, no, it is not "obviously both." If just China and the US ceased all carbon dioxide emissions this year, we'd be over twenty years ahead of the curve and leaders in global influence/technology.

Right. Because that either shows it's not both human population and activity or it shows something else. I wonder which?

Stop being so obtuse for irrelevant interwebz winz. It clearly shows that ONE country--more so than any other--(the US) is the most flagrant abuser and that its particular populace is causing disproportionately more damage than any other country's population. The reason for that is because we've been programmed to be wasteful consumers.

It is the mentality that has clearly caused the biggest problem, not assertions of overpopulation. Iow, we don't have to stop having babies, we simply have to tell the babies that we do have to stop wasting energy and/or to stop using "dirty" energy. It's a matter of education, discipline and proper technology, not birth control.

 

[ruby sparks]

It is the mentality that has clearly caused the biggest problem, not assertions of overpopulation. Iow, we don't have to stop having babies, we simply have to tell the babies that we do have to stop wasting energy and/or to stop using "dirty" energy. It's a matter of education, discipline and proper technology, not birth control.

Koy. It's both. Or if you want to chuck in mentality and other stuff, then it's all of them.

Unless it's World False Dichotomy Day and no one told me.

You can't say that it's activity not population (by hypothesising a lower activity) any more than you can say it's population not activity (by hypothesising a lower population). In reality, the two are strongly intertwined factors and can't be divorced.

One country's activity per capita greatly exceeding another country's activity per capita doesn't change that, even though it is a relevant fact.

 

[PyramidHead]

We need to rationally plan our production output on an international scale in a careful, sustainable way. We need to de-prioritize growth and accumulation while shifting to long-term stability as a guiding principle. We need to first target the low-hanging fruit of the 100 or so corporations that emit over 2/3 of the carbon, who will need to drastically alter their goals and practices.

These are obvious, reasonable courses of action that, if taken by the Household^TM or the Business^TM that conservatives love to say embody the right way to run society, would be simple survival planning. Yet, on any scale larger than that, none of these things will happen. Why?

Because:
1. Rationally planning production among businesses is forbidden, even though rationally planning production within businesses is commonplace and expected
2. Massive, seductive incentives exist to ignore long-term stability beyond the horizon of profitability; the first company that adopts this strategy will go bankrupt while the others absorb their sales
3. The largest corporations are the ones whose lobbyists set the policies that dictate how society is run, and would never tolerate any threats to their bottom line

I mean, I'm not gonna say it because the last time I did it offended people, but it's pretty obvious what needs to go if we're serious about averting this problem. It's something that hasn't been with us for too long, compared to our lifespan as a species, even as we like to think it's somehow a reflection of our innate competitive selfishness as humans. It's something that created a gigantic explosion of wealth and technology that has enabled surplus production beyond the subsistence needs of the planet's entire population. It's something that rewards rapid innovation and adapts to disruptions in the status quo, but has no mechanism to stall its forward momentum other than periodic crises that leave deep societal scars. It can only be tempered via policies that guide it toward goals that are compatible with perpetual acceleration and expansion, and only on local scales. It relies for its existence on a thriving public research sector and a heavy government hand to clean up its messes and subsidize its excesses. It keeps everybody working all the time to create more than any of us need, while simultaneously leaving most of the world without what they need. It start's with a big letter "c"...

 

[untermensche]

The New Testament as well as the old is full of them.

Those scientists in the New Testament used strange methods.

Those that deny the predictive value of modern science deny the modern world.

 

[ruby sparks]

I mean, I'm not gonna say it because the last time I did it offended people, but it's pretty obvious what needs to go if we're serious about averting this problem. It's something that hasn't been with us for too long, compared to our lifespan as a species, even as we like to think it's somehow a reflection of our innate competitive selfishness as humans. It's something that created a gigantic explosion of wealth and technology that has enabled surplus production beyond the subsistence needs of the planet's entire population. It's something that rewards rapid innovation and adapts to disruptions in the status quo, but has no mechanism to stall its forward momentum other than periodic crises that leave deep societal scars. It can only be tempered via policies that guide it toward goals that are compatible with perpetual acceleration and expansion, and only on local scales. It relies for its existence on a thriving public research sector and a heavy government hand to clean up its messes and subsidize its excesses. It keeps everybody working all the time to create more than any of us need, while simultaneously leaving most of the world without what they need. It start's with a big letter "c"...

Communism!

No seriously, point taken, but if we did as you suggest, would I still get a phone on which I can watch box sets of tv series while walking down the street? You hadn't though of that drawback, had you?

 

[PyramidHead]

I mean, I'm not gonna say it because the last time I did it offended people, but it's pretty obvious what needs to go if we're serious about averting this problem. It's something that hasn't been with us for too long, compared to our lifespan as a species, even as we like to think it's somehow a reflection of our innate competitive selfishness as humans. It's something that created a gigantic explosion of wealth and technology that has enabled surplus production beyond the subsistence needs of the planet's entire population. It's something that rewards rapid innovation and adapts to disruptions in the status quo, but has no mechanism to stall its forward momentum other than periodic crises that leave deep societal scars. It can only be tempered via policies that guide it toward goals that are compatible with perpetual acceleration and expansion, and only on local scales. It relies for its existence on a thriving public research sector and a heavy government hand to clean up its messes and subsidize its excesses. It keeps everybody working all the time to create more than any of us need, while simultaneously leaving most of the world without what they need. It start's with a big letter "c"...

Communism!

No seriously, point taken, but if we did as you suggest, would I still get a phone on which I can watch box sets of tv series while walking down the street? You hadn't though of that drawback, had you?

More importantly, what will become of this enticing cargo ship route? From the sphincter of Jacob Wohl:

 

[ruby sparks]

More importantly, what will become of this enticing cargo ship route? From the sphincter of Jacob Wohl....snip....

Well, that is something else I wanted to raise. Sometimes, I have to wait a ridiculous amount of time, up to 2 days in some cases, for stuff like a new phone to arrive from Japan.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Koy. It's both.

Ruby, it's not. RVonse (or whichever moron made the point) was trying to redirect attention away from the fact that the problem isn't an "evil US"; it's that we have too many humans on the planet.

Too many humans is not the problem. We could quadruple the number of people on this planet and STILL not have any waste issues if the mentality were properly aligned. Having a zero carbon footprint is not only something already within every human beings' capacity right now, we can implement negative measures right now to reverse the problem.

So, once again, the problem is NOT the number of people; it's what a comparatively smaller percentage of those people are doing--their mentality--that is the problem.

 

[ruby sparks]

Koy. It's both.

Ruby, it's not. RVonse (or whichever moron made the point) was trying to redirect attention away from the fact that the problem isn't an "evil US"; it's that we have too many humans on the planet.

Too many humans is not the problem. We could quadruple the number of people on this planet and STILL not have any waste issues if the mentality were properly aligned. Having a zero carbon footprint is not only something already within every human beings' capacity right now, we can implement negative measures right now to reverse the problem.

So, once again, the problem is NOT the number of people; it's what a comparatively smaller percentage of those people are doing--their mentality--that is the problem.

Well it isn't one or the other, and countering someone who says it's one and not the other by saying it's the other and not the one is getting it wrong too.

Although I did not notice anyone trying to do what you suggest, to be honest.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Koy. It's both.

Ruby, it's not. RVonse (or whichever moron made the point) was trying to redirect attention away from the fact that the problem isn't an "evil US"; it's that we have too many humans on the planet.

Too many humans is not the problem. We could quadruple the number of people on this planet and STILL not have any waste issues if the mentality were properly aligned. Having a zero carbon footprint is not only something already within every human beings' capacity right now, we can implement negative measures right now to reverse the problem.

So, once again, the problem is NOT the number of people; it's what a comparatively smaller percentage of those people are doing--their mentality--that is the problem.

Well it isn't one or the other, and countering someone who says it's one and not the other by saying it's the other and not the one is getting it wrong too.

Although I did not notice anyone trying to do what you suggest, to be honest.

Odd, since you responded to the post where I responded to RVonse:

But first and foremost is LESS people in the first place.

TOTAL fucking horseshit. It isn't the number of people; it's the waste they produce as a direct one-to-one correlation of conservative-run corporations and their systemic reliance on profit over sustainability. As Trump's election proves, Republicans (and a small percentage of Dem white males without college degrees) are fucking morons that will do anything they are told to do. But they first have to be told to do it. Forced to do it in fact (and yes that will in fact mean at gun point eventually if they don't do it in response to their programmers telling them what to believe and do and how to behave like good little nazis).

The central problem is in fact that Trump and the US is "the evil" in that those in majority power are NOT forcing corporations to do as they are told by the scientists. Billions of dollars are instead being funneled into telling people to pay no attention to the scientists; that SCIENCE itself is wrong and bad and flawed and lies.

If Trump told his nazis to stop buying gas--hell, to fuck their mothers--they would. Without hesitation. "LESS people" isn't the issue; Dunning-Kruger is the issue.

So, actually, strike that. You're right, less people is the issue. And every fucking one of them spouts bullshit like you do, so less of people like you trying at every step to undermine a unified population against science-deniers and we all win, just people like you in spite of yourselves.

And I was responding to RVonse's initial post here:

But first and foremost is LESS people in the first place. That does not mean kill everyone off the planet but it does mean some serious global population control.

And a close second to the aforementioned is learning how to put people other places than this planet. The Elon Musk style of doing things.

But blaming Trump and the US as the evil bad villians according to the OP is a complete and utter waste of time! Trump isnt going to fix a global problem nor should he be expected to. Expecially when 99.99% of this problem is TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE on this planet.

So, as you can see, RVonse was, in fact, claiming that 99.99% of "this problem" is overpopulation. That is wrong.

 

[ruby sparks]

So, as you can see, RVonse was, in fact, claiming that 99.99% of "this problem" is overpopulation. That is wrong.

Ok. I may have missed that. Yes, I think it would be very incorrect to say that 99.99% of the problem is population.

 

[repoman]

To be fair, that was in response to my musing about the plausibility of getting CO2 back to below 300 ppm (in the face of tundra and arctic ocean shelf outgassing) EVEN WITH 99.99% of current humans disappearing in the blink of an eye. It was a hypothetical...

Basically, it is a base from which to work out how much more difficult it will be to reverse the current ~406 pmm CO2 which will have to include the current humans.

If it can't be done with nearly no humans, it can't be done with the population we have now.

Obviously BUA methods are doing nothing.

 

[Alcoholic Actuary]

You should calm down fella.

It must be frustrating to not have any scientific evidence to support your position!

I’m not the one making outrageous proclamations of impending climate disaster or attributing natural events on “climate change” based on, well not much.

What you are obviously doing starts with T. Rhymes with rolling.

aa