53% of parents say climate change affects their decision to have more kids

Rich Americans have more kids than average Americans.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12148

If idiocracy (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) ever happens (or has already happened ;-), it is primarily because of the "smart" set doing exactly this. I was shocked at how few of the students in my evolutionary biology graduate program were planning to have kids. Having two kids or less is the definition of unfit parents (unless you are propagating clonally).

Political opinions are moderately heritable in general, not sure about CC specifically.

That's happening right now though, and people are still fervently climate change deniers. When it comes to conspiracy theories or cults, no amount of evidence or rational thinking is going to change someone's mind. It's not a tool they use to perceive the world.

Of course beliefs aren't passed down genetically, but they are likely to be passed down through a parent raising a child. It happens with adopted children too. For example, if both of your parents are Republicans, you are much more likely to be a Republican than if both of your parents were Democrats.

Turns out "regular" american Christianity didn't need an excuse to push for Christofacist nationalism. It's attempting to take hold literally right now.

> A friend with similar opinions worries that the Quiverfull movement will result in Christian nationalists taking over.

I'm less worried about that, because I grew up in that subculture - my parents were early adopters, before the label had been coined - and the extreme religious belief doesn't really stick. So far as I am aware, none of the kids in my cohort have followed in our parents' footsteps. Many of us abandoned religion entirely, and those who kept with it have found more conventional expressions; none of us have gone on to raise enormous families of our own.

It makes sense, when you consider why people are drawn to join extreme religious movements in the first place; of course the kids they raise are going to have a very different experience and perspective on life, and they're likely to go looking for what they need in a different direction.

Single points of failure lead to inherently unstable systems.

Standards are way higher now for new kids than even in the 90s.

In the end - there's basically no serious scientist saying the world is going to be destroyed from global warming. There's going to be more extreme weather. Life in hot areas in third world countries is going to suck more.

But add up all the deaths and inconveniences from this, assume it gets worse, and the world is still incredibly better off than it was in the 1980s.

Humans will always adapt to the current status quo. It is why we have been such a dominant species.

The conditions of 30K years ago are interesting to consider, but also largely irrelevant to a current population adapted to the current status quo.

It will be of little comfort to reflect on the extreme environments of the past when current standards of living decline relative to what they are today.

We’ll adapt to whatever new local lows are to come, but for many people this conversation will always be about change relative to now and current expectations about what it means to live a “normal” life.

I wouldn't say it's exactly been going only one way since ancient history, but certainly for living memory.

> People are now looking into the future and the only apparent path forward involves a decline in that quality of life.

I'm not sure I could agree with that statement. Regarding global warming, sure, although we can't be certain to what degree. But many other aspects, such as treatment options, simply weren't available before - and for sure many other will appear (as will new diseases, but still...).

>the only apparent path forward involves a decline in that quality of life.

The paths they focus on, maybe.

Certainly not the only paths, or even the likely paths.

> People are now looking into the future and the only apparent path forward involves a decline in that quality of life.

There is always something to worry about Peter Lynch said in the 90s. And yes I worry about climate change. It’s a big problem. However, technology innovations as a whole go up exponentially since the industrial revolution. I don’t see clear evidence why that would stop now.

News stories aren't evidence. They are written to make you click and then subscribe. The doomer perspective is simply wrong. There is no increase in extreme weather, just reporting of it.

This document goes through all the data for the UK and shows this to be true using the government's own numbers and charts:

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/06/UK-weather-2...

e.g. "Since the naming of storms began in 2015, they have gained more attention in the media and amongst the public, with the consequent misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, wind storms have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s"

This page presents charts for number of heatwaves, forest burn area, hurricane frequency and energy and tornados in the USA over time. They all show no problems and in some cases declines in extreme weather.

https://realclimatescience.com/extreme-weather/

But reporting this sort of thing is left to non-profit bloggers because the news industry wants you to be scared, all the time, because scared people read the news a lot. This can result in insane outcomes, like the Washington Post telling you that a lack of hurricanes is "terrifying"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

Weather events: terrifying when they're there, terrifying when they aren't. There's a theme here.

I'm actually in favor of what you're saying, but would attribute that contribution to putting the onus on government (not businesses). To me businesses taking responsibility looks more like 1% for climate change and social responsiblity, which I think companies do poorly due to (seemingly) conflicts of interest.

I think we agree in principal on a good path forward, but I disagree that the study says people think the government should regulate more.

btw here's a lead for those wondering "why 100 companies?" - https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Are you sure those are two different things? Those 100 companies provide energy, food, transportation, consumer goods etc to many of those 8 billion people. By regulating them you are pushing change on their customers as well.

True but it's also true that Saudi Aramco isn't drilling just for the thrill of it.

You're arguing something different.

maerF0x0 is saying that survey respondents are saying what they think they're supposed to say, but they don't really care, which is why they think other people should be the ones to do something.

You are saying it's easier to make a small number of powerful people do things than make lots of people do things. In other words, that's the best way to force 8 billion people to do things they don't want to do. That may be so but isn't really related. In particular, if most people don't actually care because they don't think a lot of the claims are true but are afraid of being cancelled for saying so, then there's no moral basis for controlling those 8 billion people by manipulating 100 companies.

Meanwhile half the tribe is sure that the tiger is their friend, would never eat THEM, and actually you are the enemy for wanting to prevent the tiger from eating other people. Tigers have been eating people for a million years, how dare you try and pervert the natural order!

Well... yes... and climate change is going to be responsible for more and more of that as it affects food scarcity, habitable land, drives refugees (which has political ramifications with xenophobia and nationalism), and conflict over finite resources.

By 2050, if we are very lucky we will have kept temperature rise no higher than 2 degree average - though that will be uneven in its application. That world will see a shift in weather patterns which will affect water, agriculture, and habitability. Some place worse than others. That will lead to political instability income countries, wars, mass migration. Even in wealthy countries that will be less crippled than that, the migration alone is often seen as a rise of nationalism and xenophobia. Right-wing governments don't typically leans towards women's rights, tolerance, cooperation, secularism, or environmentally friendly policy. This is already happening but at a smaller scale. Even the extreme changes in weather is the US are very appearances; from hurricanes, tornados, to wildfires.

Look to the roots of the Syrian civil war and some of the contributing factors - you will see crop failure from climate change as one major factor (not the only one of course). Look at the huge numbers of immigrants crossing over the Mediterranean, and the tension that is rising mount some EU nations (see Italy, Greece, Turkey). Look to the southern US border getting worse, and who is using that for political capital? We are already seeing the spiral of many major ecosystems that have kept the Earth somewhat stable, from the Amazon, barrier-reefs, arctic regions...

This is just the start. We are in the very early days of something that has only begun.

Perhaps it isa failure of imagination, but I think people do not understand or appreciate the various things that are affected and intertwined with climate change.

My eldest is 15.

I don't think it would be possible to control the child's access to information such that you can prevent them from learning about global warming, though that does seem like the sort of thing insular religious communities try to achieve with some success.

They are being indoctrinated using computer projections of disaster. It's a total travesty. While local climate change is always with us, the reality of global change is lacking, and the projections have been pushed out year for year over the last forty years now.

Fertility is lower in developed countries and people have in general kids later. But it’s BS to claim that having friends with children is a bubble. We’d fertility to fall orders of magnitude more for that to be the case.

The Ice Ages are well confirmed scientifically, but not understood.

The dominant climate of the earth is cold. We get relatively brief warm periods, "interglacials", of which we are in one now. Ice ages are theorized to be prompted by shifts in the Earth's orbit[0].

CO2 is measured in hundredths of a percent for impact on the climate. Does it really seem reasonable that our little human technology, an infinitesimal fraction of the energy at work in the Solar System is making a huge difference?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial

>The reasonable thing to do would be to still not have children, and if the world doesn't end up horrible, know let the next generation have kids knowing that climate change won't be an issue.

What next generation?

> Let's say I'm avoiding having more children due to the risk of climate change making the world a bad place to live. If I put money into fixing climate change, why would that make me more likely to have children?

They did not claim that putting money into fixing climate change would make you more likely to have children, you missed the point made by the comment you were replying to.

The "cope" part they were referencing was that the people surveyed simply used climate change as an excuse for not having children, and it wasn't their real reason (with the real reason being one of bajillion possibilities, just probably a less "socially cool" sounding one, but that's irrelevant). The grandparent comment reasoning was that if those people actually cared that much about climate change and wanted to have children if it wasn't for climate change, are they doing anything to address that problem (with the primary method being funding climate change reversal initiatives)?

Mind you, I do not necessarily agree with that reasoning entirely, but you are attacking a strawman here.

I think it is a reasonable conclusion that if someone claims they care very much about some thing X but does nothing about that thing when possible routes out exist that any accurate model of their behaviour does not place a high coefficient on their belief about X.

In practice, in conversation, this is about smiling and nodding. If pressed, I might say "I don't believe you" but that would be socially ungraceful and, since most statements X subject to this condition are meant to be a socially graceful way to deflect, it is unlikely that I would have to do this.

So, sure, I'm not going to challenge anyone but I'm not really going to expect you to behave like an environmentalist if you say you care about climate change but then do nothing about it. And I probably won't believe anything about your reasons for why you don't want kids.