So, attempting to be objective and realistic are harmful to the cause?
If you're indicating causation without any sensible proof, citation, or well-reasoned hypothesis, and just give a "scary" slideshow with "yeah, that might be climate change... or it might not, idk", then that will help people who are trying to show that "climate-change reporting is a bunch of BS" support their narrative.
A lot of people will then, when they see a few such examples, assume that all climate-change reporting is like that.
If you're determined to imagine that even stuff like literal temperature changes aren't sensible proof of climate change, that hypotheses linking the weather in Norway to the weather in the rest of the world or temperature changes to changes in flora and fauna need to be thoroughly explained to be plausible, and don't trust that quoted academics have actually done the research unless the journalists hyperlink their original papers, then yeah, maybe the acknowledgement that climate isn't the only factor affecting flora and fauna in Norway (no shit!) is the clincher that it's all a big con.
But then, if you're determined to imagine that entire fields of scientific research and thousands of actual published scientific papers must all be irredeemably flawed because a pop science article which doesn't pretend to be anything other than a list of things observed in Norway takes a less rigorous approach, I'm not sure improving the article is going to change matters. It's not like news articles opposing the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change or global warming in general are renowned for reading like academic studies...
I'm not sure what the fix is, because a scientist is generally speaking with the level of confidence that matches their knowledge and understanding. Do we ask them to be more confident even if it goes past what their knowledge and understanding can justify?
And thanks to the Gell-Mann Effect, even if you invest time and resources into convincing the population the expert is right in one case, they still default back to believe the confident and charismatic speaker who doesn't know what they are talking about (or even worse, is being purposefully misleading).
Yes, this can harm the cause. Providing honest true facts while not providing data supporting causation can cause people to become skeptical of climate change if some of true facts change because they were caused by something other than climate change.
That's honestly the biggest issue with a lot of these radical climate activists too.
They use intentionally misleading arguments to exaggerate timelines and pretend we're already screwed. The media certainly doesn't help as more climate alarmism generates more clicks.
And of course, if you say that they're exaggerating then you immediately get branded a "climate change denier".
Now you have a generation of 20 year olds who think it's immoral to have children because of climate change and other dumb shit like that.
Radical (adjective) [1]: believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme social or political change
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/radic...
This slight disagreement is an issue of disparate definition. I believe the GP was simply being less than gracious in the interpretation of a comment, despite it making perfect sense how they came to their own understanding.
Other reasons people don't have children:
- Socioeconomic disparities make it difficult to raise a family due to cost of living
- Uncertainty over the future with massive droughts (we have observed them), and ever increasing food scarcity imply that down the road, future generations will have a lot of issues to deal with, so why bring more people to needlessly suffer?
All in all, parent commenter assumes that young people are stupid, and fails to see that young people are generally concerned about their behaviour and the consequences. Commenter also fails to see that young people don't want to bring more humans to this planet because they don't want more people to suffer.
Bringing children to life is generally a very selfish act with dire consequences to anyone involved.
No, it's not. I understand people having concerns about the future and especially regarding the expense of raising a child. But, to brand people "selfish" for having kids that they're able to provide good care for is silly.
Many children have been born to families that had the wealth to provide for the children, but ultimately hurt them in the process or caused needless suffering.
Rather, the number of children per family tends to go down as income increases - compare Congo (6.2 children per woman in 2020, $577.20 GDP per capita) with Norway (1.5 children per woman in 2020, $89,154.39 GDP per capita).
Lack of education, contraceptives and social nets means that women in congo will have more children on average. If you get them all that and a stable pension after (so they won't need kids to keep them alive when old) the numbers of kids will fall.
On the other hand, in the "rich" western countries, no matter how high the income number is (compared to congo), that doesn't mean that a young couple can actually afford a home large enough to have a kid or two (or more), childcare and all the other kid-related costs.
Why in the west? The west is already doing their (our) part by not having enough children to replace the current people here.
The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed. Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?
Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.
The cost in emissions to raise a child in the west is far higher than in other countries.
> The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed.
Countries like India and China have far lower emissions per capita than western countries, and especially if we account for carbon emissions and imports.
> Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?
There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.
> Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.
No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.
But the west is already way on the way to reducing population, even too much.
> There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
if you scroll down to the second table, sort by most recent value, you'll see many many large countries with numbers way above 2 (replacement value), and pretty much none of them will be developed western ones.
Again, why should the west not have children, while the rest can have 5? Shouldn't we focus our efforts on those 5 per couple, instead of 1.5 or watever the average for eg EU is?
> No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.
But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute? But moving poor people to richer countries pollutes too, since they earn more there and pollute more in turn.
I did not express that only we should do it. I simply said that having fewer children, especially in western world, is a very obvious way to reduce carbon footprint.
> But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute?
That's not what I said. I said that it is pretty selfish, both towards other people, _and_ towards the children themselves but people seem to have glossed over the latter.
Just because I find it selfish doesn't mean that we should be doing what I propose. If it was up to me, we'd be heading for a voluntary human extinction, but for better or worse, we are not. I simply pointed out that claiming that young people are stupid and fall into traps is not the reason they don't have children.