2018 was a terrible year for Swiss glaciers

I share a house with two who claim to be. They do shut up about it when I suggest that they go first however.

No need to propose a human cull. Simply make large families something socially unacceptable and promote via campaigns and the tax system. It could easily change as extensively and rapidly as single earner family with stay at home mothers have.

It has to be part of any rational solution.

Otherwise, I agree with you. Barring killing people who live now, any attempt now at reducing population will start having meaningful impact decades from now (kids use less energy than adults). We need solutions that deliver impact on much shorter timeframes.

But my point here can be extended to non-nuclear wars, population-elimination strategies (genocide) and extreme population control (sterilization, one-child-max-or-else). They're all adversarial, and this is something that comes easy to humans. Whereas implementing policies to help deal with climate require coordination at scale, which is something we particularly suck at.

I agree only if the data about the countries are observed independently. That is, if somebody says "the country X is so and so because overpopulation." But once we speak about the world:

Once one accepts that there's only one planet and the humans on it, it's much more obvious: the critics are always ready to say that the humans as the whole starve less as we reached this number of billions. But the analysis of how it was possible gives a simple answer: we have pushed the previous limits by simply using more resources and more energy. Both of which are much more limited than a lot of humans are willing to know: the heavier elements (and even as light as helium) are produced in the stars, so once we don't have enough available on the earth's crust, we'll have big problems. The arable land is also limited, we're already mostly using everything usable, and pushing the limits there affects everything else. Finally, we managed to use half of easily reachable oil, only to discover a new way to exact it, giving us approximately a few times more than before. But by burning the hydrocarbons we're making very big problems for everything on the planet, including us.

Look at these graphs, soon you will not be able, thanks to the administration which doesn't like such details to be even read about:

http://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/glo_2014.html

especially "Global Per Capita Carbon Emission Estimates." Note that in the same time period the number of capita of the world steadily increases.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-Population-1800-20...

At 2000 we were at 6 billion. Now we're at 7.7 billion.

We do continuously use at least the same energy per every human on the planet, not less (in fact we used mostly always more and more). And given that a lot of people in the "second and third world" produce the stuff for the people in the first, the "first world" just enjoys the benefits of the cheap labor and new consumers being steadily born in new quantities and the use of more energy for everything, but all at the cost of... the whole future.

So yes, in such a context overpopulation of the planet is one of the topics that are so inconvenient that most are not even ready to think about it.