There are plenty of people who are so desperate about anthropogenic global warming that they're willing to forgo having children and proclaim that the disastrous decline in fertility rates in places like Korea (see recent HN thread) are actually good and necessary because we need fewer humans on this earth.
World population is still growing. It seems ironic you are casting aspersions towards people desperately trying to fight climate change, when you are desperately worried about population decline, when it isn't declining.
It IS declining in western countries though, which is where all the “stop having children, you’re killing the earth!” propaganda is concentrated. ALL the population growth is happening in Africa and parts of Asia, that’s it. But curiously, no one is chiding poor Africans for having so many children.
Yo. Number 1 reason I'm not having kids is I don't like kids. Number 2 reason is I don't think it's ethical to intentionally bring a child into a world that's going to be torn to pieces by climate disasters & wars.
He is an "apocalyptic environmentalist" in the sense that he believes climate change is going to be such a catastrophic event that human existence will be miserable. When I was a kid, he was an evangelical Christian who believed the end times were coming any day. He had a nasty divorce, a mid-life crisis, met a woman who worked at PETA, became a radical vegan, and then, surprise surprise, once again embraced a new form of apocalypse to replace the End Times one: climate apocalypse.
He's a mathematically illiterate narcissist, a psychological subtype who is known to be the most prone to apocalyptic ideologies.
Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Climate change is real. Excess CO2 caused warming is going to create major challenges for the planet. Humanity will go on, we will innovate our way out of it, and like every Malthusian cult throughout history, you and your fellow apocalypse believers will be proven wrong until you find a new reason to ruin everyone's dinners with negativity.
The churches my dad had me in when I was a kid taught me how deranged people can be, and how good it makes them feel to be part of a heroic tribe trying to warn everyone the world is ending. I know what it looks like, I've seen it Christians, I've seen it in hippies, and I see it in yuppies now too.
> Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Can you point to me where I said the apocalypse is coming?
> Humanity will go on
I agree.
> we will innovate our way out of it
Too late for that, the impacts are here and more are coming. The question is whether we will be able to deal with the upcoming climate refugee crisis without war. It seems unlikely to me.
> ruin everyone's dinners with negativity
FWIW this isn't like, a major facet of my personality. I'm just explaining in a thread about having kids why I chose not to have kids.
People throughout history continued having children through wars, disasters, and climate changes (ice age) worse than anything that our children will experience. Climate change is a problem, but a manageable one. No need to panic.
> The majority of scientists reacted negatively to The Skeptical Environmentalist and he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book; the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited." His positions on climate change have been challenged by experts and characterised as cherry picking.
If we were actually on a positive trajectory with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I might agree with you. But we're not. Things are bad and the trends are only getting worse. Many places will become uninhabitable; the residents will emigrate elsewhere; the places being migrated to will react by electing right-wing nationalists; some resource or border conflict will result in war. It's gonna be bad. I'm not going to feed more lives into that meat grinder.
Wikipedia is heavily manipulated and not considered a reliable source on scientific issues. Do you have a substantive criticism of Bjørn Lomborg's positions?
I mean unless you're a climate scientist yourself, at some point you have to choose your experts to trust. Almost every climate scientist disagrees with this guy. I'm far more likely to trust the IPCC and their hundreds of experts than I am this single guy.
> People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
I'm definitely not predicting extinction, however massive climate-driven impacts are unavoidable, and large-scale war seems an almost inevitable consequence of those impacts. Large-scale war has definitely happened before, quite a few times.
Who is "they"?