I also concur that overpopulation is a major problem. There seems to be a trajectory of too many humans for this planet to sustain, unless we dramatically change the way we consume our own resources.
I'm going to get slammed for this, but I hope in the future governments apply some form of a consumption tax to families that are greater than their own replacement value. Also, education all day long about the risks of large families, and making sure people have easy and affordable access to birth control methods.
I would also be in favor of legalized euthanasia with more liberal thresholds, and with a proper process structure in place to ensure all corners are covered with finances, family, work, etc. Individuals should be able to more freely allow themselves to perish. I am ready for the onslaught of critique
A lot of the world's issues are due to overpopulation in 3rd and 2nd world countries. I was astounded to learn that India recently took over from China as the world's most populous nation. If you've ever watched any videos from India/Pakistan, you can see the tremendous amount of fuel, emissions, and pollution that come from their day to day driving, street businesses, and industry. The migrant crisis in the west is heavily due to unstable and poorer countries with too many people with too few opportunities. That's a whole other thing in terms of how it came be fixed.
A lot of the world's issues are due to overpopulation in 3rd and 2nd world countries. I was astounded to learn that India recently took over from China as the world's most populous nation. If you've ever watched any videos from India/Pakistan, you can see the tremendous amount of fuel, emissions, and population that come from their day to day driving, street businesses, and industry. The migrant crisis in the west is heavily due to unstable and poorer countries with too many people with too few opportunities. That's a whole other thing in terms of how it came be fixed.
India's birth rate is below replacement.
Getting people out of poverty corresponds to the dropping birth rates we see around the world. The population thing seems as if it will take care of itself.
One massive benefit of a growing population has been more nodes of innovation. More people in a position to think about important problems rather than scrounge for food leads to more advances.
Now that we are facing a flattening/decreasing population, we need to figure out how to get more people in a position to contribute to innovation.
Birth rates are plummeting almost everywhere in the world. The planet’s population is now expected to peak at 9 billion in 2050 - much lower and sooner than predicted even a decade ago. A rapidly aging population is shaping up to be a a bigger global problem in this century than overpopulation.
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Yep, we will need to dramatically incentivize children to avoid this once immigration ceases to be an option.
China will be interesting to watch as their one child policy along with sex selection means they will hit this problem well before other nations and given their size are likely unable to fix it with immigration like we can.
Unless the cost of living to have a multi-child family becomes significantly cheaper in Canada in the coming months and years, those incentives are going to have to be pretty damn convincing. COL, higher education and the increasing rejection of religion are large factors in the declining birth rates in western countries.
Yep, we will need to dramatically incentivize children to avoid this once immigration ceases to be an option.
China will be interesting to watch as their one child policy along with sex selection means they will hit this problem well before other nations and given their size are likely unable to fix it with immigration like we can.
Japan is ahead of China on the aging curve, as are S Korea and Taiwan. But they reached mass prosperity before demographics became a big problem. Much of Chinas is still quite poor, and they barely have a pension system. So demographic decline will be even more painful for them.
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Unless the cost of living to have a multi-child family becomes significantly cheaper in Canada in the coming months and years, those incentives are going to have to be pretty damn convincing. COL, higher education and the increasing rejection of religion are large factors in the declining birth rates in western countries.
The reason for declining birthrates is pretty universal with almost zero exception. Wealth
Unless the cost of living to have a multi-child family becomes significantly cheaper in Canada in the coming months and years, those incentives are going to have to be pretty damn convincing. COL, higher education and the increasing rejection of religion are large factors in the declining birth rates in western countries.
Dollars also might not do it at all as like you point out it’s a reduction of religion and improvement in family planning that drives low birth rates as evidenced by lower incomes in developed countries having more kids than higher incomes. It’s a lifestyle choice, an unwillingness to sacrifice personal goals for having children. People like to say they can’t afford another child but what they really mean is they don’t want to take the lifestyle hit to have an another child or a first child.
So if automation hasn’t eliminated scarcity you will need like 20% additional tax penalties on the child less to pay for their own retirement / health needs.
Newly uncovered documents reveal that the Oil Industry knew about the hazards of fossil fuel burn induced warming from CO2 emissions all the way back to 1954, well before the Exxon climate report of 1977. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-change-denial
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To that end, the Alberta oil sands have recently been found to pump out up to 60 times more harmful pollutants than industry reports. The paper was published in science.org, which is a juggernaut of a scientific research paper. Not a good look.
There's a real possibility that we've underestimated how much trouble we're in. We're playing russian roulette with our future.
NSFW!
language
Good luck meeting your maslow's hierarchy of needs in the scenario she describes.
I saw this posted this morning. Its a good context expansion of Sabine's video that gives better clarity on why those Hot Models are treated with a larger grain of salt.
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I saw this posted this morning. Its a good context expansion of Sabine's video that gives better clarity on why those Hot Models are treated with a larger grain of salt.
I don't know what purpose is served by focusing on the just fringe potential outcomes. It behooves the incumbent energy producers to feed people nihilism.
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I don't know what purpose is served by focusing on the just fringe potential outcomes. It behooves the incumbent energy producers to feed people nihilism.
There's a couple of reasons why your comment here really misses the mark.
First, you keep confusing genuine concern with nihilism. Despite me repeating over and over again that I reject doomerism and helplessness/hopelessness, you keep accusing me of it. Not really sure why.
Second, "fringe potential outcomes" is a misnomer. The reality is that there is a not-insignificant chance that we've underestimated the danger that climate change presents to us, and allowing the average global temperature to go much higher than 2 degrees C rise is a risk we can't afford to take. The political and social consequences of such rise could be just as devastating to various groups of people (and our species as a whole) as the direct climate effects themselves... possibly even more devastating. We're talking about unprecedented levels of migration and social upheaval, in a world where several nations are nuclear-armed. Never underestimate how hostile people can get when they feel like there are "invaders" that they believe are "destroying their way of life".
Think about this, if someone handed you a briefcase and said there's a 99% chance it is filled with money, but a 1% chance it contains a bomb that will go off as soon as you open it, would you guard against the so called "fringe potential outcome", or would you ignore it outright?
Even if very bad scenarios are deemed statistically not very likely to happen, we still need to do what we can to try and avoid them. Because after all, this planet is our one and only home; there are no mulligans here, no do-overs, no second chances. We have one and only one chance to get this right. There's no backup planet we can flee to if things go horribly wrong here.
My position is simply this: there needs to be more urgency - and a greater push toward developing better technology and getting to net zero - than we're currently seeing. We're not moving fast enough. Our priorities are not where they need to be.
There's a couple of reasons why your comment here really misses the mark.
First, you keep confusing genuine concern with nihilism. Despite me repeating over and over again that I reject doomerism and helplessness/hopelessness, you keep accusing me of it. Not really sure why.
Second, "fringe potential outcomes" is a misnomer. The reality is that there is a not-insignificant chance that we've underestimated the danger that climate change presents to us, and allowing the average global temperature to go much higher than 2 degrees C rise is a risk we can't afford to take. The political and social consequences of such rise could be just as devastating to various groups of people (and our species as a whole) as the direct climate effects themselves... possibly even more devastating. We're talking about unprecedented levels of migration and social upheaval, in a world where several nations are nuclear-armed. Never underestimate how hostile people can get when they feel like there are "invaders" that they believe are "destroying their way of life".
Think about this, if someone handed you a briefcase and said there's a 99% chance it is filled with money, but a 1% chance it contains a bomb that will go off as soon as you open it, would you guard against the so called "fringe potential outcome", or would you ignore it outright?
Even if very bad scenarios are deemed statistically not very likely to happen, we still need to do what we can to try and avoid them. Because after all, this planet is our one and only home; there are no mulligans here, no do-overs, no second chances. We have one and only one chance to get this right. There's no backup planet we can flee to if things go horribly wrong here.
My position is simply this: there needs to be more urgency - and a greater push toward developing better technology and getting to net zero - than we're currently seeing. We're not moving fast enough. Our priorities are not where they need to be.
I'm sorry if I've been unclear. I'm not accusing you of anything. You seem genuinely concerned about the same things I am and agree on the gravity of the situation. The small differentiation between our perspectives of one of pragmatism, not substance
One of the most prominent climate tipping elements is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which can potentially collapse because of the input of fresh water in the North Atlantic. Although AMOC collapses have been induced in complex global climate models by strong freshwater forcing, the processes of an AMOC tipping event have so far not been investigated. Here, we show results of the first tipping event in the Community Earth System Model, including the large climate impacts of the collapse. Using these results, we develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal of AMOC tipping: the minimum of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic. Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping. The early warning signal is a useful alternative to classical statistical ones, which, when applied to our simulated tipping event, turn out to be sensitive to the analyzed time interval before tipping.
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Although no AMOC tipping has been found in historical observations, there is much evidence from proxy records that abrupt AMOC changes have occurred in the geological past during the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events.
Last edited by TherapyforGlencross; 02-10-2024 at 12:29 PM.
In October, the Anthropocene Working Group proposed that an Anthropocene epoch started in the mid-20th century, when nuclear weapons tests left radioactive fallout across the planet. They submitted this proposal to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which establishes a standard timescale for the past 2.6 million years and is part of the International Union of Geological Sciences.
Twelve SQS members rejected the proposal, while four voted in favor and two abstained, according to the New York Times. This decision came as a surprise to many scientists, per New Scientist’s Chen Ly.
It’s unfortunate that most mainstream outlets are describing this as a rejection of the Anthropocene as an epoch. Rather, it’s an argument of when the Anthropocene started. Regardless, thought this pertained to climate change and human impacts on the Earth. 1950 was the proposed boundary date, with a slew of varved sequences, soot/ash particles (SCPs) as defining markers.
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That’s an interesting proposal to use nuclear to separate but I’d go agriculture or the transfer of stored energy to work through combustion as the delineations where humans were driving geologic change.
I’d suspect that ice core data or perhaps sediment would show the start of combustion, agriculture might be more difficult to detect but it might show in the fossil record
Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, and stays in the atmosphere for more than 1000 years.
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