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Comment by marshmallow_12 | Hacker News Reader

Probably the worst possible damage a person can do to the enviroment is to have children. Everything else is basically just a drop (of pollution) in the ocean. I have my own opinions here, which i won't say, but i'm just addressing the elephant in the news.

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Yes but, to be clear, we are only fixing the climate emergency _for_ our children, and their children.

Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.

This is why it has been so hard to get people to make real changes, spend real money reducing our footprint. A lot of people just don't care because they will be dead and gone when the real trouble starts.

> Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.

Climate change is already effecting millions of people worldwide in drastic, life-changing ways, and those effects will only increase over current lifetimes even under the most aggressive plausible decarbonization scenarios.

> Probably the worst possible damage a person can do to the enviroment is to have children

Sure, let's nuke the whole world and get rid of the human species to save the environment! What a wonderful take.

Omnicidal and suicidal thoughts are multiplying as people lose hope in the future and their future specifically.

Furthermore, is there any sensible, hopeful, safe, stable, productive, and generally happy society that has mass shootings and addictions/crimes of despair nearly everyday?

The current apocalyptic scenarios are the same as in the past. If anything, we do have more science and technology to deal with them and to predict them.

And the grim prediction is rather than climate change, the real problem is population growth.

> the real problem is population growth

Population growth is not a massive problem: we already know that human population will hit a max of 10 billion people and from there start aging progressively and reduce over time.

We don't know, we suspect that in the most optimistic scenarios. Without knowing the underlying mechanism. Without knowing the consequences of cultural change and industrialisation of the third world countries.

This is the finest kind of denialism, and it is really going to bite us hard in about a hundred years at most.

I agree. The problems are resource consumption and pollution per capita. There are many soft and hard effects trends that are reducing population. Oceanic food production that would also sequester carbon would allow for a greater population carrying capacity. The main issue is getting people to reproduce. xD

Mass shooting are isolated events - Statistics clearly show that most gun deaths are either self-inflicted or the result of gang wars - and "mass shooting" reporting is incredibly biased since they decided to artificially cut the definition at "more than 3" iirc and the data will look quite different depending on the thresholds you choose. But that's a very different topic.

Isolated events are like the weather, a general trend is the climate. There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world.

There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.

> There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world

Comparing with other countries is ridiculous at best when not nonsensical. No country enables citizens to purchase weapons like in the US and no other country has hundreds of millions of weapons in circulation. Trying to make it look like a single variable problem is a joke.

I wouldn't be such a prophet of doom; there is still plenty of happiness in humanity, and i'm not certain its declining as badly as you are making out.

A "take" is knee jerk replying to a valid statement, albeit not sourced in this case, with what is an outrageous exaggeration.

Reducing the number of humans is not the same thing as extinction. Your argumentation is lacking.

If we end up with an upside down population pyramid, we'll have bigger problems than a slowly changing climate.

There are some countries with an upside down population pyramid and it isn't the end of the world. Certainly less apocalyptic than most climate change scenarios.

Well, it doesn't scale for the future tax vs. elder social benefits. You can't just sweep the consequences of extreme population demographic shifts under a rug. Look at China with its disastrous One-child policy where there are millions of unhappy, dissatisfied men who can't marry. That's a recipe for social unrest and suicide attacks.

Look at Japan, there things got more stable with the aging of the population. China isn't really an example for most of the world because CCP experiments screwed up more than just their age pyramid.

Also, taxes and pensions are very small problems compared to uninhabitable coastal regions, mass migrations and food shortages that climate change predictions show us.

Taxes and pensions are pressing, immediate problems within the next 50 years. What you're talking about is a much bigger problem trend, but it will take longer to occur, say 80-120 years.

Age pyramid? That's not the biggest issue in China's demographics: it's the sex ratio. Talking vague FUD about China isn't helpful and doesn't contribute to this discussion.

Mass migrations and food shortages are happening now, but not as bad as they will be. This is due to both climate and US Monroe doctrine meddling (crime caused by the War on Drugs and installation of right-wing leaders with death squads).

> Look at China with its disastrous One-child policy where there are millions of unhappy, dissatisfied men who can't marry

I'm pretty sure that's because of Missing women of China[1], not necessarily the one child policy.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China and the other linked articles.

agreed, but that's the inevitable conclusion of any inquiry into solving climate change. Should we therefore do nothing? Probably not. But again, i won't elaborate.

Increasing population levels in highly emitting countries whose populations have naturally leveled off or are decreasing is very bad too (not to mention all the other horrific problems with this neocolonial type of immigration).

I happen to like kids and want someone to bury me in the right plot that was already set-aside (in basically the middle of nowhere). We also need some people sensible enough to fix the damage done to the Earth by the reckless and selfish generations of FF burners, meat eaters, jet-setting frequent-fliers, long-distance/single-occupant car commuters, and concrete pourers who came before.

We do not need humans to "fix" anything on earth, the ecosystem will find a new balance on its own. Absent a few chaotic effects that might happen, without human disturbance, this balance will be reached faster than with humans meddling.

:-/ You're basically recommending giving-up. There is waay too much energy in the water cycle that is locked in for hundreds of years, and may lead to global ecological collapse: desert earth. Humans already "meddled" negatively, humans can also "meddle" positively to make the Earth habitable and stem the Holocene extinction. Just throwing your hands up in the air in the names of external locus-of-control is insane when humans can clean-up and restore the ecology of what we damaged. Coral reef preservation, for example. Cleaning up microplastics from oceans is another.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disease-ravages-coral-reef...

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