Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children

[The_jackalope]

1. Bingo! nt

[dhill926]

2. done...gladly...

[LuvLoogie]

3. That's a random, unfocused, pointing of the finger.

Good luck trying to stop people from having kids. If you want to play a long game, you're going to have to come up with something more proactive. Reproduction is kind of the point of life on Earth.

Our choices have to reconcile how we treat the life on Earth. "Responsible" people having less kids just means the irresponsible ones say, "Woo-hoo! More for us!"

[Buckeye_Democrat]

5. Oh, I agree.

I'm quite cynical about Earth's future given the many examples of people not cooperating for the betterment of all on broad scales.

Edit: I doubt that measures to dissuade people from having children, such as larger tax refunds for people without them, would go anywhere. I suspect it would be hugely unpopular, especially among the "family values" types.

[The_jackalope]

9. That's the "Idiocracy" syndrome.

"Responsible" people having less kids just means the irresponsible ones say, "Woo-hoo! More for us!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

I chose to remain childfree on the off chance that it would give Mom Nature a bit more elbow room to recover once we and our biospheric victims are gone.

Given my knowledge about what is coming, having children would have been a dreadful agony rather than a "joy".

[LuvLoogie]

11. You assume that having children is a narcissistic act.

You put it in terms of your agony versus your joy. Loving your children means you endure agony and experience joy, and you never know what you're going to get when.

It comes and it goes.

I experience agony when my daughter walks to the Starbucks. But she's a great kid. And this world is a better place because she is on this planet.

I respect your choice, but our humanity isn't the problem. It's our cruelty. We have to do better, and we have to teach our children how to do better. One lifetime is not enough to combat the greed. One less child will not lessen the greed.

[The_jackalope]

12. In a sense it is largely a narcissistic act.

It's an effort to deny our own deaths by creating something that lives on after us, whether made of stone or flesh. Ernest Becker explored that territory in his book "The Denial of Death".

in order to feel as good as possible about our self-interested decisions (including whether or not to have children), we dress them up after the fact with socially acceptable motivations. You had children to make the world a better place. I did not for the same reason...

The greed you note has been an embedded part of European culture since the 5.9 kiloyear climatic event around the Mediterranean and eastward in 4,000 BCE. the resulting adaptations to that event are what has enabled those peoples to spread their malignant culture around the world, wiping out more balanced indigenous cultures wherever they were encountered.

Enjoy your daughter. It makes no difference to the final outcome one way or another, and it makes you happy. Being happy now has great value too. There are days when I wonder how I would be different today if I'd had kids 50 years ago.

[LuvLoogie]

13. I didn't have my daughter to make the world a better place. When we found out she was coming,

making the world a better place included taking care of her and raising her to be a decent person. Children aren't clones of ourselves and our motivations. They are their own entities. As a parent, you learn that very early on. And women can often tell you about a child's' uniqueness while they are still in the womb.

Again, I respect your choice. But children have enough to deal with without hanging the death of the planet on their having been born.

That may be hyperbole, but don't lay that rap on them.

[The_jackalope]

18. I try not to lay it on children. They had no choice in the matter.

Parents on the other hand? Well, down that road lies a fight. And since there's damn little that can be done to change the state of affairs now, with 7.7 billion little miracles already here, there's little point in fighting over it.

I know what a joy kids can be. I have nieces and nephews, and feel it regularly. But I am also convinced that there are far too many of us for the health of the biosphere.

[Boomer]

4. And this is why we're royally screwed

Most people want children, and consequences be damned. It's hard-wired into our species, and integrally threaded throughout our culture and our economy. We are eating our way through the global ecosystem, digging our way through all non-renewable resources, and yet we won't stop increasing the population.

The inevitable crash of over-shoot is going to be truly spectacular.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

7. Yep.

It's not like I WANT to believe it, but that's how I perceive the situation too.

[rownesheck]

6. Yes!

Lookin at you, mormons, catholics, and quivverfull people!

[Kilgore]

8. Nope, not doing it

Between two kids, we have ten grandkids.
The joy they bring is beyond measure!

[Boomer]

15. And I rest my case.

Within the context of our daily lives, children are seen as a blessing, a gift. As one poster stated farther up in this same thread "the world is a better place" with their child in it. The kind of sacrifice that is needed to avert catastrophic climate change simply isn't a part of our emotional/psychological profile as a species.

I haven't had children (and I'm beyond the age where it's even a possibility), but I made that choice for purely personal reasons. I can't claim that it was an ethical action. If I had wanted children, I most likely would be making the same kind of rationalizations for why their existence is a good thing rather than a nail in our coffin.

Everyone alive today is part of the problem, every single new birth is compounding the problem, but births in 1st world countries are probably the greatest burden on the planet. At the very least, I wish people would be honest about the choices they've made, but that is probably asking too much as well. We all want to be the hero of our story, not the villain, so we rewrite reality to prop up our decisions and justify our actions. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone, only with smaller choices such as driving a car and eating meat.

[Kilgore]

16. It comes down to how you view the world

I choose not to be a pessimist. I am also trained in science and engineering, plus have a love of history.

My view is not a dire end of the world as we know it, but instead, humanity will figure out a way to deal with the coming changes in a manner that has not even been conceived of yet. History shows we have experienced climate change before and survived. The big difference is now we have a much bigger arsenal of tools at our disposal.

The best thing I can do is to make sure my grandkids are equipped to squarely meet this challenge. Thats why they get exposed to lots of opportunities to learn about their physical world. I'm a proud grandpa knowing the two oldest are heading to college, one a physics major, the other as an electrical engineer.

Who knows what yet undiscovered treasures they will find.

[The_jackalope]

17. "History shows we have experienced climate change before and survived."

This degree and extent of climate change? Really? When?

https://www.livescience.com/66027-climate-change-different.html

The global climate is changing faster now than it has at any point in the past 2,000 years.

That's the conclusion of a trio of papers published July 24 in the journals Nature and Nature Geoscience that examined the global climate over the past two millennia. The researchers showed that none of the past fluctuations — that is, not the Little Ice Age, the warm period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly or any other famous shift — had the global reach that modern climate change is having. Past fluctuations tended to be localized, affecting primarily one region at a time. Modern climate change, by contrast, is messing with the entire world.

"Temperatures did not rise and fall everywhere in step [in the past]," editors wrote in an accompanying opinion piece in Nature Geoscience. "Specifically, early cool or warm intervals that lasted for centuries peaked at different times in different regions."

That's a radical departure from modern climate change, Scott St. George, a climate researcher at the University of Minnesota who wasn't involved in the research, wrote in a news and views article for Nature. [10 Climate Myths Busted]

"Although the Little Ice Age was the coldest epoch of the past millennium, the timing of the lowest temperatures varied from place to place," St. George wrote. "Two-fifths of the planet were subjected to the coldest weather during the mid-nineteenth century, but the deepest chill occurred several centuries earlier in other regions. And even at the height of the Medieval Climate Anomaly, only 40% of Earth"s surface reached peak temperatures at the same time. Using the same metrics, global warming today is unparalleled: for 98% of the planet's surface, the warmest period of the Common Era occurred in the late twentieth century."

Personally, I view this sort of magical thinking on climate change with shock, dismay and horror. But I guess since so many billions of people share it, it must be a good thing...

[Kilgore]

19. So if I accept this line of thinking...

The conclusion is we are screwed with no hope.

Cant join you there.

[The_jackalope]

20. Too bad.

Enjoy the surprise party.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. Remember your training in science and engineering

Don't reject the data just because they give you an answer that you don't like.

The point is that your "history shows we have experienced climate change before and survived" is highly misleading. In history, we've never had climate change like this. In archaeology, we find that humans did live through the end of a glacial period, which was rapid climate change. But back then, the world population was perhaps between 1 and 10 million - say one thousandth of what it is today. Everyone was nomadic, and there was room to move. Because of our huge population, we can't do that now.

And that's why rejecting the call to have fewer kids because of your personal joy is shortsighted. If those grandchildren, and everyone else, were to continue the rate of increase you and your children have enjoyed - effectively from 4 grandparents to 10 grandchildren in 2 generations - then by the end of this century, world population would be about 4 times what it is now - 30 billion people. Is that the future you plan for your grandchildren?

[The_jackalope]

10. The fewer we have now

...the fewer will have to die in the future to get the biosphere back to the 50 million or so humans it can actually support in perpetuity.

"Sustainability" is a harsh goal if your criteria are biophysical instead of political (on edit: or romantic...)

[littlemissmartypants]

14. One more reason why women deserve reproductive health care with access to birth control. nt

[kat3rinamarquez]

21. I don't think so

For us to stop climate change is to strictly discipline ourselves. Discipline in throwing our garbages, as well as stop cutting trees illegally and burning plastics these, are the activities that cause us to suffer climate change if we can stop these bad habits we can stop climate change. Having fewer children is not the answer to stop climate change. Even if you do have fewer kids but still you are doing the same routine to Mother nature, climate change will still be there.

[Beringia]

22. Wow, looks like there will have to be a collapse before people voluntarily change

or government imposes Draconian measures.

And this is the environmental group, yikes.

[Calculating]

23. Not having children is easily the single greatest sacrifice you can make for the environment

It completely dwarfs all of the 'feel good' measures like buying a Prius, putting in LED lights, or using reusable bags at the store.