World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency(dx.doi.org)

42 points by oleks 6 years ago | 6 comments

remarkEon 6 years ago |

> Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women (Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018).

Proposals such as this are going to turn off a lot of otherwise amenable people, like myself, who would support more extreme measures to control the climate. It belies a view that there needs to be some kind of world governance structure deciding who does and does not get to have children.

mac01021 6 years ago | |

Not necessarily. There are routes to social change (which the world is largely following but not nearly fast enough) in which the average family (average woman?) undergoes a voluntary, unsolicited reduction in fertility. These are the routes they mean when they discuss policies that "make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women"

remarkEon 6 years ago | | |

See, this is either a serious proposal (reducing global fertility) or it isn’t. If fertility reduction is one of the means necessary to avert what is, allegedly, an existential crisis for civilization I don’t see how a “voluntary” program gets it done. I’m certainly not going to volunteer. Do I get socially shamed later for having kids (the fiancé and I want at least 3, hopefully more depending on career timing)? It’s also a little strange to outright claim that more education for women means lower fertility. I understand that that is usually the result, but it seems to run against a lot of the equity rhetoric I run into wherein the goal is actually to preserve a woman’s right to have a family while maintaining a career.

ncmncm 6 years ago |

Global climate disruption denialists will turn out to have caused, collectively, more human suffering and just general harm than Mao's, Stalin's, Hitler's, and Pol Pot's regimes combined. Maybe, more than the sum of all despots in history, all the way back to the first towns.