There is another solution: less people.
High levels of industrial production without counting the cost of carbon emissions is the problem.
Counties with high birth rates (mostly in Africa) aren't the ones causing that.
It's really the 2 person family in the West, with 3 cars, a MacManshion and 4 overseas holidays a year.
Europe and even US have negative emission growth recently, even though our populations are slowly growing, our emissions efficiency is outclassing our increased consumption for a net small retreats in emissions. 1st world alone, and at their current and projected rate we'll continue to increase CO2 concentration and warm but second derivative of temperature will go strongly negative, and we will never hit a crisis.
There are no scary AGW that show this 1st world emissions plateau, instead they show continued exponential growth coming from increased wealth and high population growth (e.g. projected 6 billion people in Africa by the end of the century) in the developing world.
This doesn't me to "blame" anyone, simply to point out that if we "froze" the consumption levels and population at today's levels there is no scary AGW. Only with inexorable population and economic growth do we get +2C scenarios.
Firstly, 6B in Africa is the most pessimistic assumption possible[1].
Secondly, this is completely wrong: 1st world alone, and at their current and projected rate we'll continue to increase CO2 concentration and warm but second derivative of temperature will go strongly negative, and we will never hit a crisis.
To quote Wikipedia: In a scenario where global emissions start to decrease by 2010 and then declined at a sustained rate of 3% per year, the likely global average temperature increase was predicted to be 1.7 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050, rising to around 2 °C by 2100.[2]
To make it clear: with a global reduction in emissions (not just first world) we are still in the "crisis" area of a 2 °C increase in temperatures by 2100.
Those estimates were made in 2008, and I believe we are already past the possibility of dropping emissions enough to meet those targets.
[1] https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/ (Need to choose Africa)
We've already warmed close to +1C. While this huge +1C warming crisis was going on, we raised agricultural output by 10x. We've gone from thousands of people dying in hurricanes to dozens.
There is a warming amount ("climate sensitivity") that will rock our civilization, but it's not 2C - that amount would be background noise in the progress on the 21st century.
2C is generally considered to be the line above which things are critical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Cha...
They are simply on their way to become like us: high population density, high individual environmental damage.
IMO it's important to keep the person who's going to read your words in mind if you want them to understand you rather than using your favorite high-dollar words to try to sound smart. Making word soup like that obfuscates your message, as evidenced by the off-message conversation we're having right now.
I've more or less given up trying to draw such people into useful conversation, because there isn't enough common ground for direct discourse between me and someone who finds it other than abhorrent to seriously contemplate mass human slaughter as a geoengineering technique. Happily for my state of mind if nothing else, that perspective seems rare enough overall to make largely unnecessary an engagement for the benefit of the audience - put simply, this isn't really a subject on which most people need a worked example.
So, in such a case, I sometimes feel at some liberty to indulge myself, especially here on Hacker News, where the typical user's personal lexicon is considerably broader than you tend to find a lot of other places. Of course I understand that it's not a game to everyone the way it is to me. But I also understand that I'm not the only one who feels that way about it. And I don't really know that there's a lot of grounds to assume, for example, that I'm just "using high-dollar words to try to sound smart". I mean, I already know I'm not all that smart, and I hope I'm not terribly insecure about it; I make myself useful in other ways, and in general I'm just glad to be able to keep up on HN to the relatively limited extent I succeed in so doing.
Some folks just like playing with words, that's all. I've always been one of them. Sometimes, when there's no real need to hammer home a point most people already grasp implicitly and the rest aren't at home to, I screw around a little. You're the first person who has evinced any upset at all about that since before I was in high school. Maybe you're right, and I shouldn't indulge myself this way at all, rather than just doing so very rarely. But I don't really know that I care to stop. I guess I'll just have to hope that people getting bent out of shape over it remains as rare as it has been throughout my life heretofore.
I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.
Perhaps you think I'm being unkind to you here, or unjust, or unreasonable somehow. Perhaps you don't really understand how people make a connection between saying "there are too many people" and this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, it has escaped your notice that a lot of people said things like that in the century just past, and that the result was atrocity on a scale possibly never equaled, certainly never exceeded, in all human history before that time.
And here you are, not even a hundred years later, trotting out the same blood-soaked idea that started it all - and with the sheer unthinking temerity, the gall, to expect a friendly reception. Do you know nothing of history? Or do you just not care?
Fair enough. Then people should pay more in taxes than they receive in health and pension benefits. Right now, American retirees on average get more in benefits than they paid in taxes. The only way that works is if we have continual population and productivity growth, meaning we need to incentivize kids or we need to stop retiring and getting sick so much.
A better solution is probably a raised standard of living and more education.
edit: By raised standard of living I'm not talking about AC and other energy-intensive luxuries. I mean not having to have 7 kids because many of them will probably die.
Someone, or something, will ultimately be making decisions.
Why not a government, or government analog?
What about that bothers you? What alternatives do you suggest? Different mechanisms? Different institutions?
Raising standards of livings has always required raising material resource consumption.
In the end I think the individuals themselves will be the ones making the decision to have fewer kids. I don't have a source for this, but I seem to remember that immigrants to more developed nations have fewer children after assimilating than people in their native, less developed countries.
These seem to reflect strong underlying tendencies of complex evolving systems. In particular that higher levels of organisation and complexity very powerfully tied to greater rates of energy and resource use, overall if not individually.
If humans manage to defeat this tendency it would be a singular exception.