Puffins are in trouble

And yet, Europe and Japan have plenty of childless people.

Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.

So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.

edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.

One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.

The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.

FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.

If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.

I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.