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Zombie #246 posted:Okay but what if the kid you have is the one that leads the eco-revolution, that seems like a pretty good carbon negative impact
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Mar 19, 2015 19:23
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Zombie #246 posted:Okay but what if the kid you have is the one that leads the eco-revolution, that seems like a pretty good carbon negative impact And that child's name was John Conner.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:23
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Strudel Man posted:Humanity is the only thing that makes the environment worth anything. Personal opinion, of course. That you refer to it as "7 billion assholes" I think is rather telling. You're not wrong. We, as the most capable intelligent species on this planet have a responsibility to protect and preserve this planet not only for ourselves, but for every living creature on it. Instead, we strip it bare like we plan to discard it when we're done. Humanity is both the best and the worst thing about this planet. Forgive me if I choose to cut humanity zero slack for being total fuckups when it comes to protecting and preserving the Earth. Zombie #246 posted:Okay but what if the kid you have is the one that leads the eco-revolution, that seems like a pretty good carbon negative impact And what if the kid you have is the next Hitler? 
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Mar 19, 2015 19:27
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Av027 posted:You're not wrong. We, as the most capable intelligent species on this planet have a responsibility to protect and preserve this planet not only for ourselves, but for every living creature on it. Instead, we strip it bare like we plan to discard it when we're done. Humanity is both the best and the worst thing about this planet. Forgive me if I choose to cut humanity zero slack for being total fuckups when it comes to protecting and preserving the Earth. I mean, our first obligation is ultimately to ourselves. It's one thing to say that we must wisely manage our habitat, both for practical reasons and for the aesthetic and conceptual value that we place on its other inhabitants. It's quite another to say that we should take a knife to ourselves for their sake. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 19:37
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Strudel Man posted:We're the only species which even has the capacity to conceptualize that obligation, and ultimately we're fallible creatures of meat ourselves, loosely organized into quarreling and competing groups. I think your expectations are too high, and your judgements too harsh - particularly when it comes to suggesting that the best thing would be for great portions of our species as a collective entity to simply die off. Can people stop equivocating the advocation of population reduction with suicide? How are we "taking a knife to ourselves" by aiming to have a better future while remaining the dominant species on the planet? Nobody is suggesting hurting individuals who are alive or who will be alive, but preventing births. If the population were only 2 billion in 100 years time but it were able to sustain itself without further damage to the environment, would we have "taken a knife to ourselves"? An interesting point of note - if we assume that average global longevity is about 60 years and that the average age of people alive today is about 30, that means that, even if women entirely stopped giving birth tomorrow, there would still be something like half the world's population still alive in 60 years, which, at current resource uses, would still be beyond sustainability.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:58
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Placid Marmot posted:If the population were only 2 billion in 100 years time but it were able to sustain itself without further damage to the environment, would we have "taken a knife to ourselves"? I do agree that there's some ambiguity in the question, particularly as regards the difference between failing to grow (If we reproduce at replacement levels when we could be having five kids apiece, does that constitute 'reduction?') and actually having a declining population. But I feel fairly comfortable asserting that deliberately restricting fertility to the point of losing 70% of our population over whatever period is indeed a kind of culling. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 20:01
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Strudel Man posted:We're the only species which even has the capacity to conceptualize that obligation, and ultimately we're fallible creatures of meat ourselves, loosely organized into quarreling and competing groups. I think your expectations are too high, and your judgements too harsh - particularly when it comes to suggesting that the best thing would be for great portions of our species as a collective entity to simply die off. Killing humanity off wasn't my suggestion. I did ask why we felt that maintaining or even growing our 7 billion population was important or beneficial, but have not seen any compelling evidence to support either position. However, having a smaller population can easily be linked with lessened environmental impact. Again, I'm not advocating the gas chamber for 2/3 of the population or anything, but rather trying to sort out why people think we need more people, especially considering we're headed towards a massive culling of our population in part due to our present numbers, if things do not change. Having more children will in fact accelerate our demise if we maintain the status quo. It's a sensitive subject, to be sure, but this isn't a difficult concept to understand, even if it personally offends someone. Even if you believe that our obligation is to ourselves first, you must realize that pollution, shrinking biodiversity, deforestation, overfishing, climate change, etc - all brought on by our actions - is evidence that we aren't responsible enough to handle it. Properly looking out for #1 should primarily involve habitat preservation. What good is the latest iTurd if your family is starving? At the rate we're going, by 2100 we'll be dropping like flies and wondering why. If my judgments are harsh it is only because my expectation - to not intentionally kill ourselves off - is, incredibly, beyond us.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:05
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Evil_Greven posted:Another example is from Syria - that the civil war there started because of a multi-year drought where the government completely let people down. It seems that hunger was a huge and ignored motivation behind this conflict. The CIA and DOD are well aware of this and treat CH as a real and evolving national security threat, which is of course why the Repubs now want strip their funding for this aspect: quote:“The Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, two of the most important agencies in our national security apparatus, currently spend part of their budget studying climate change,” the Republican budget proposal reads, under its section on “Eliminating Waste.”
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Mar 19, 2015 20:05
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Av027 posted:Killing humanity off wasn't my suggestion. I did ask why we felt that maintaining or even growing our 7 billion population was important or beneficial, but have not seen any compelling evidence to support either position. However, having a smaller population can easily be linked with lessened environmental impact. Again, I'm not advocating the gas chamber for 2/3 of the population or anything, but rather trying to sort out why people think we need more people, especially considering we're headed towards a massive culling of our population in part due to our present numbers, if things do not change. Having more children will in fact accelerate our demise if we maintain the status quo. It's a sensitive subject, to be sure, but this isn't a difficult concept to understand, even if it personally offends someone. Do you have any scientific based evidence that we are "headed towards a massive culling of our population"? Remember Malthus doesn't count. I just think that instead of spending energy making sure the poor don't breed we should maybe attack the root cause of resource use per person per Quanta of standard of living.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:37
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Strudel Man posted:Considered as a species, yes, we clearly would have done so. No, we clearly would not have done so; evolutionary success is not a matter of numbers but longevity. I specified that we would remain the dominant species and, with 2 billion people, we would also have the highest biomass of any animal, except perhaps ants and cattle, though cattle would realistically have to go pretty soon in order for resources and environmental conditions to allow 2 billion people to still exist in 100 years. Your last sentence sounds like something that "white genocide" promoters spew; choosing to have fewer children is not "culling" in any respect. If I choose not to have children - which is my intention - not only is nobody being killed but, as discussed at length in this thread, the lives of others, both those already born and who will be born because others do not share my opinions, will be improved in the future. Declining birth rates are associated with improved education and reduced poverty [excluding involuntary reductions, i.e. war, famine, etc], and bring benefits to all.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:04
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I guess famine is a better population control method than contraception after all, thanks thread.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:25
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Instead of maybe thinking about having fewer children as a slightly more pro-active approach to reducing climate impact let's not do that and just wait 100 years when India will be completely unable to feed itself, most of the population of Bangladesh will become climate refugees, and agriculture in general will be in steep decline across the global south. Shave a couple of billion humans off the rolls with zero effort!
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Mar 19, 2015 21:35
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Strudel Man posted:Seems like any voluntary environmentally-motivated fertility reduction would be pretty self-limiting, anyway, since within a generation or two the great majority of the population would have been raised by people who didn't consider that to be a reasonable tradeoff. I hate to break it to you but all of the people discussing not having kids in this thread were themselves born to parents who had kids.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:40
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Placid Marmot posted:No, we clearly would not have done so; evolutionary success is not a matter of numbers but longevity. I specified that we would remain the dominant species and, with 2 billion people, we would also have the highest biomass of any animal, except perhaps ants and cattle, though cattle would realistically have to go pretty soon in order for resources and environmental conditions to allow 2 billion people to still exist in 100 years. And instead of not having kids, someone else could just live a less resource intensive life than you and do better for the species and the climate. Salt Fish posted:I hate to break it to you but all of the people discussing not having kids in this thread were themselves born to parents who had kids. Actually, history is strewn with examples of movements advocating childlessness dying off when the first wave dies.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:19
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Trabisnikof posted:And instead of not having kids, someone else could just live a less resource intensive life than you and do better for the species and the climate. And yet there are multiple nations with long term declining birth rates that extend beyond a single generation.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:24
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Salt Fish posted:And yet there are multiple nations with long term declining birth rates that extend beyond a single generation. Its almost as if the decline in birthrates aren't because people are actively choosing to not have kids to support the climate and instead are the result of complex social factors.... Also if your climate solution is to use declining birth rates to reduce impacts, I have to let you know that this is a perfect example of "too little too late." Voluntarily dropping the population to 2 Billion would take far longer than we have. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 22:36
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Saying that using a computer is bad for the environment and having kids is also bad for the environment are both true statements. Why is everyone so mad?
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Mar 19, 2015 22:38
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Let's just pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and be done with it. The most American of solutions 
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Mar 19, 2015 22:40
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Trabisnikof posted:Its almost as if the decline in birthrates aren't because people are actively choosing to not have kids to support the climate and instead are the result of complex social factors.... Complex Social Factors that reduce birth rates: *The economy * Resource availability * Overpopulation * perceptions of a child's future well being * The environment Complications caused by global warming: *Reduction of economy *Resource scarcity *Increased population pressure *lowered perceptions of the future *destruction of natural habitat Now consider why I was scoffing at the idea that a decreased birthrate as a reaction to global warming would be a temporary phenomenon restricted to a single generation. Trabisnikof posted:Also if your climate solution is to use declining birth rates to reduce impacts, I have to let you know that this is a perfect example of "too little too late." Voluntarily dropping the population to 2 Billion would take far longer than we have. Everything is too little to late. We're already in the middle of global warming. There is nothing that will prevent it. Now we can talk about the little things that we can do to reduce the eventual total harm but nobody in this thread is saying that we can avoid it.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:44
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Actually, given that the vast majority of over-consumption is from the rich, it's actually the rich who should stop reproducing. Deciding to be an activist that changes the world is not a practicable, realistic or achievable goal. If you want to contribute you can for sure become an expert in a field and contribute in some quantifiable manner. Also there are plenty of activists in many fields with PhDs who have driven change by communicating their research. How can a movement convince people without information?
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Mar 19, 2015 22:44
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Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. Also advocating population control in the first world as a solution for climate change is idiotic and facile on so many levels, I can't believe it always comes up. It's as intellectually shallow as CO2 is good for trees or global warning is false because it's cold outside. You guys should really stop discussing it because it will never happen for ethical reasons, wont work for logistical reasons and is actually detrimental for socioeconomic and sociocultural reasons. Autistic nerds love to sperg about the 'ideal' solution which might be population control or nuclear energy or a future where everyone's nutritional needs are met by a pill but that poo poo doesn't fly in the real world where solutions have to work within the context of the existing systems for better or worse. Even China couldn't keep its poo poo centrally planned for top-down deployment of these schemes, nevermind the world. cowofwar fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 22:54
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cowofwar posted:Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. You got confused somewhere and translated "choose to not have kids" into "the government should institute strict population control measures". You're arguing against literally nobody. For someone who is railing against "sperg" ideals you seem to have a pretty self righteous writing style and low social awareness yourself.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:04
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Re: Episode 3 of Years of Living Dangerously - about 49min in, Republican Congressman Michael Grimm changes his opinion to believing it actually does loving happen, and he makes an incredible observation: "Washington isn't real life. You see, you're talking the substance and the science... and my point to use is - [it's] irrelevant. Irrelevant!" If the U.S. isn't in board, we're just hosed. It's that simple. Sadly, he has issues of his own. He represented Staten Island, and seemed to do a lot of good after Sandy.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:07
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Placid Marmot posted:Declining birth rates are associated with improved education and reduced poverty [excluding involuntary reductions, i.e. war, famine, etc], and bring benefits to all. The rest is, eh. Not particularly responsive, really.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:12
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Strudel Man posted:It doesn't matter much in terms of the overall thrust of your argument, but you have causality backwards there. Improved education and reduced poverty decreases birthrates, not vice versa. The phrase "are associated with" doesn't imply a causality in either direction.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:13
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cowofwar posted:Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. Yes, but we do know that freak weather events and patterns will be more likely in the future due to climate change. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/extreme-weather-events-in-our-future-climate/
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Mar 19, 2015 23:23
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cowofwar posted:Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. Check out this stunning logic: 1) The climate is too complex for us to assert positively that a single event was "caused" by climate change. 2) Therefore this (any) single event wasn't caused by climate change.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:26
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Strudel Man posted:It doesn't matter much in terms of the overall thrust of your argument, but you have causality backwards there. Improved education and reduced poverty decreases birthrates, not vice versa. No, that is what I said. "X is associated with Y" implies that X follows from Y. Trabisnikof posted:And instead of not having kids, someone else could just live a less resource intensive life than you and do better for the species and the climate. Not many Westerners live a less resource-intensive life than I do, being a vegan who eats local food, who does not have a car, commutes by bicycle, who has not flown in over a decade, does all the hippy waste reduction etc stuff and, incidentally, whose electricity comes from nuclear. N.B. You will note that I did not claim to be the least resource-intensive Westerner or in any way perfect, in case you were clicking feverishly at the quote button to scream at me. Every extra Westerner added to the Earth (i.e. my child, if I were to have one) will add at least as big a carbon and resource footprint to the world as I do, and will coinhabit the Earth with me for probably 60 more years before I die; it is not possible for anything that I might do as an individual to offset that cost.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:35
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Placid Marmot posted:Not many Westerners live a less resource-intensive life than I do, being a vegan who eats local food, who does not have a car, commutes by bicycle, who has not flown in over a decade, does all the hippy waste reduction etc stuff and, incidentally, whose electricity comes from nuclear. N.B. You will note that I did not claim to be the least resource-intensive Westerner or in any way perfect, in case you were clicking feverishly at the quote button to scream at me. Every extra Westerner added to the Earth (i.e. my child, if I were to have one) will add at least as big a carbon and resource footprint to the world as I do, and will coinhabit the Earth with me for probably 60 more years before I die; it is not possible for anything that I might do as an individual to offset that cost. Why are you so emotionally riled up to hear that your personal choices aren't sensible policy or an effective means to counter global climate change?
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Mar 19, 2015 23:43
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cowofwar posted:Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. I was led to believe that the events, while normally occurring throughout history, will be happening with a greater or decreased frequency and/or effect. DoctorDilettante posted:A lot of this has been driven by interactions between the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and it's eastern counterpart the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Both a low ENSO index and a low NAO index contribute significantly to the winter weather in the eastern part of North America; a strong NAO in particular pushes some of the major atmospheric circulation patterns northward and shields North America from the Arctic air that's been hammering it for the last few years. In the last two or three years, both the NAO and ENSO indices have been on the low side, contributing to the colder, wetter weather than you've been seeing out in your part of the world. Combined with a solar activity minimum (which we're just starting to pull out of now), it's led to some very harsh and cold winters in eastern North America. This was pretty interesting and kind of neat to dig deeper into. I never even knew about oscillations.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:44
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Salt Fish posted:Check out this stunning logic: Look at you not knowing the difference between climate and weather.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:44
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Placid Marmot posted:No, that is what I said. I don't know why it would even be worth mentioning without that claim, really. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 23:48
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Strudel Man posted:Saying that "Declining birth rates are associated with improved education and reduced poverty [excluding involuntary reductions, i.e. war, famine, etc], and bring benefits to all" certainly sounds like a claim that declining birthrates bring benefits like improved education and reduced poverty. If you are simple and don't understand that correlation doesn't imply causation, then yes, it does. What is it about saying the true fact that choosing not to have a kid is the biggest impact you can have on your carbon emissions that drove half of the people in here insane?
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Mar 19, 2015 23:50
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Strudel Man posted:Saying that "Declining birth rates are associated with improved education and reduced poverty [excluding involuntary reductions, i.e. war, famine, etc], and bring benefits to all" certainly sounds like a claim that declining birthrates bring benefits like improved education and reduced poverty. To me it sounds like the declining birth rates come about as a result from the other things.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:51
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Arcane come back
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Mar 20, 2015 00:36
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Zombie #246 posted:Arcane come back He can't show his face since his "pause" "ended" (2014 having been the new warmest year on record), and especially since this: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/19/us-climatechange-arctic-idUSKBN0MF28A20150319
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Mar 20, 2015 01:00
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Placid Marmot posted:He can't show his face since his "pause" "ended" (2014 having been the new warmest year on record), and especially since this: Ugh, don't say he can't come back, that will force him to appear just so he can prove something wrong.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:06
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cowofwar posted:Deciding to be an activist that changes the world is not a practicable, realistic or achievable goal. cowofwar posted:If you want to contribute you can for sure become an expert in a field and contribute in some quantifiable manner. Also there are plenty of activists in many fields with PhDs who have driven change by communicating their research. How can a movement convince people without information? The cost of an undergraduate degree is around $20,000 and takes 4 years. The cost of a masters is around $40,000 and takes around 2 years. The cost of a PhD is around $72,000 and averages around 7-9 years (depending on the field). So you're saying that average people, who want to stop climate change, should spend over $100,000 and take around 14 years of their life to join a field (no mention of what field that is) to do some incremental research (no mention of how that solves the political problem of inaction), probably uprooting their lives to move to different universities across the country several times, and that this is "practical"? Not just "practical" but the "most practical" thing they can do? This is juxtaposed to the other possibility of joining a local activist organization to help out in what free time you have. Then you ask the question "how can a movement convince people without information?" as if it was lack of extremely technical research information (you know, the kind of information researchers with PhDs do) driving this nearly non-existent response to a global climate crisis. Telling people who want to stop climate change to go get PhDs first is maybe one of the dumbest things I've heard in my life.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:18
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Uranium Phoenix posted:So you're saying that average people, who want to stop climate change, There's your problem. Climate change won't be solved by "average people, who want to stop climate change."
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Mar 20, 2015 01:43
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Lemming posted:What is it about saying the true fact that choosing not to have a kid is the biggest impact you can have on your carbon emissions that drove half of the people in here insane? I'm still trying to work this one out myself. A tirade of false equivocation, lovely logic, projection and straw men. I wish people would just own up to their internal biases; it makes the conversation much easier and quicker if people just admit outright "I strongly desire children, and I want grandchildren, and great grandchildren". Oh, and just realise that anyone in that sentence starting with at least one "great" isn't not going to have a fun time of it.
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Mar 20, 2015 01:53
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