Oh sweet pea, don't forbid yourselves from having children because of climate change. :( Your family can still live a conscious life, and you get to rise the most awesome climate change fighters the world has ever seen!
Children are free to follow suit with whatever life pursuits they desire.
The vast majority of people won't be consciously fighhting the climate and consume vast amounts of resources.
I feel that the excuses for having children when we know the collapse of most ecosystems is essentially inevitable at this point just hide the lack of ethics on the matter.
Who gets to decide who can have children and who can't? That's a decision that can't be made ethically.
If the suggestion is that no one can reproduce, then I'd also call the extinction of the human race unethical.
When I hear things like that, it sounds to me like giving up and preparing for the end.
And at the same time I take that with what seems like numerous different acts of messaging directed towards guilting people into not having families...and I can’t help but wonder if that message is benign or malicious.
It just rings like all of the people claiming “end times” for hundreds of years.
But more specifically, is everybody on earth getting the same message? If not...why?
For those of us who don't have a particularly strong desire to have children this is very much a dealbreaker.
> It just rings like all of the people claiming “end times” for hundreds of years.
The only way that would be the case is if you ignore the evidence that makes the current situation untentable in a way that no other prior instance of history has been.
With a single scientific advance that would allow rapid carbon capture from the atmosphere, we could be having a totally different conversation.
... and reverse the laws of thermodynamics, too!
Recapturing atmospheric CO2 means working to transform from a high-entropy state to a lower-entropy state. That's not going to happen for free.
So you need to have:
1) A fast efficient carbon-capture mechanism.
2) A way to generate lots and lots of power that doesn't itself produce CO2.
You're not describing a "single scientific advance" as much as you're describing dozens or hundreds of major feats of engineering. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but I would not bet the planet on it.
As far as I can tell it’s more about having a working option and then paying for it.
But even if we aren’t betting the planet on it...this is akin to a poker game where all of your money is already in the middle. Folding the hand just means you lose.
There is literally nothing to gain by giving up. Nothing.
The world has ended 0 times so far. The world has a 100% record of not ending.
Makes more sense to prepare for the continuation of the world, since then I'd have to actually do something.
> You’re just removing people who will grow up to better protect the planet
It's too late for that. This is a crisis for people who are adults today to address, or it will be too late. The IPCC says we have to cut global emissions by 50% by 2030. We can't wait for your little Jr to grow up and maybe turn out to be an environmentalist.
When you visualize the human race on planet earth in 10 years, what are you imagining?
This isn't a snarky question btw, I'm genuinely curious.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/02/climate-...
- Human population in decline
- Industrial output per capita in decline
- Food production per capita in decline
- Resources in decline
- Pollution will ultimately peak
We have not meaningfully deviated from the collapse predicted in 'The Limits of Growth': https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point, we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries.
Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.
If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.
...
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.
Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″
He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees.
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
PS: The 30-years period has just elapsed, how did the “most conservative scientific estimate” of 1 to 7 degrees rise fared?
Seems accurate to me. We've already passed +1C and approaching +1.5C today: https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is...
You didn't even specify whether you're talking about Centigrade or Fahrenheit degrees, but +1C is ~1.8F. 1.5 C would be about 2.7F.
Edit: But you might have a point on the C/F question. I don’t know what Dr. Brown meant. The quoted 9 degrees difference relative to the Ice Age may suggest it’s not Celsius, but even in that case we would barely be at the lower end of the “conservative” range of 0.6-3.9 C rise.
You know that moment when you can see the inevitable, but you can no longer do anything about it? That's roughly where I see humanity in 10 years. Maybe it will take 15 or 20, but it seems highly likely that we will be passing the point of "oh shit" quite soon. There are too many reports, of too many extremes, too close together. Far too many "sooner than expected", and "more than expected". All the consequences won't be home to roost, but they'll look inevitable... Maybe first phases of normal climate isn't any more needing a new normal or "no such thing as normal", or first signs of farming failures. Comparable to say 1937 appeasing Hitler, it all seems vaguely OK, maybe he's not really that bad, but it's very, very clear where it's going and soon. Some parts of the world will be fully living the nightmare.
If that's the case, we'll also have passed all the easy and affordable routes out that were available when people started talking about it 30 or 40 years ago. Several tipping points may have clearly tipped. All that will be left is emergency drastic action to try and mitigate. Fix or avoid it? Too late. Reverse it? Good luck with those tipping points.
I have children, I dearly want to be badly wrong. This decade's events makes me think I, and the IPCC may be at the optimistic end of things.