More Than 15,000 Scientists From 184 Countries Issue 'Warning To Humanity' (www.cbc.ca)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: More than 15,000 scientists around the world have issued a global warning: there needs to be change in order to save Earth. It comes 25 years after the first notice in 1992 when a mere 1,500 scientists issued a similar warning. This new cautioning -- which gained popularity on Twitter with #ScientistsWarningToHumanity -- garnered more than 15,000 signatures. William Ripple of Oregon State University's College of Forestry, who started the campaign, said that he came across the 1992 warning last February, and noticed that this year happened to mark the 25th anniversary. Together with his graduate student, Christopher Wolf, he decided to revisit the concerns raised then, and collect global data for different variables to show trends over the past 25 years. Ripple found: A decline in freshwater availability; Unsustainable marine fisheries; Ocean dead zones; Forest losses; Dwindling biodiversity; Climate change; Population growth. There was one positive outcome, however: a rapid decline in ozone depletion. One of the potential solutions is to stabilize the population. If we reduce family size, consumption patterns don't rise as much. And that can be done by empowering girls and women, providing sexual education and education on family planning.

Comments

So... what can the average prole do?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.

It reminds me of the town I live in, where water rationing was killing property values, because the older oak trees were dying. However, it was found that the golf court down the road was using 75% or more of the water, so all the losses in dead trees and cracked foundations due to ground shrinkage did nothing. Similar with the rice paddies.

The people who can do something won't... and promptly blame it on the people who can't do anything about AGW.

Missing the obvious other solution

[WillAffleckUW]

If you actually look at some of the statistics published at COP25, you'll see that US and EU emissions are down but GDP is up.

The most rapid growth in emissions is in India, which still has less emissions per person than China does. The rapid increase in pollution, greenhouse emissions, and climate impacts is mostly due to China and India, but even if we reduce it now, some of the gasses take 100 years to clear out of the atmosphere, although other shorter lived gasses are more impactful but have shorter lifespans.

The most obvious other solution is not population growth, which isn't driving either of those top two contributors to the environment, but is literally faster phasing out of harmful energy and food usage including farming, by more efficient energy sources and cracking down on illegal overuse of pesticides and crop waste burning. Note that crop waste can be processed into stored fuel with minimal impacts, but the open burning of crop waste accelerates many other processes.

Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.

Another Potential Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Global Pandemic - works for me.

No muss, no fuss, and results have a high probability of "success".
Mother Nature can ( and will ) handle it.

Obviously, back when it was only 1,500 scientists,

[Kogun]

the science on AGW was wrong, because they were in the minority. Now, I guess, 15,000 scientists are presumably the majority, so AGW must be right? Is that how science works?

Re:Obviously, back when it was only 1,500 scientis

[blindseer]

Once you explain that theory then try a stab at explaining this. I saw a YouTube video of a young woman that claims she's a gay man. So she's a woman that cuts her hair short and wears baggy clothes, likes to fuck dudes, and demands to want to use the men's restroom to pee. Preventing this women from using the men's room so she can try to get a peek at some guy's dick is now some outrage. If that's what we should be outraged about then I'm thinking we're doing pretty good.

We've been so well fed, clothed, and healthy now that the outrage is not that this lady has to shit in the street, it's that she has to shit in the women's restroom. We've run out of things to be outraged about that we have to go to new extremes to invent them.

Am I saying that global warming is an invented problem? I'm saying that thought has crossed my mind. It's real easy to get a bunch of signatures that something must be done. It's real hard to actually do something about it. When these people start doing something about global warming instead of just get more signatures then I'd find the problem more convincing.

Do we really need more convincing of the problem? I think we got it already. This outrage has got so bad now I'm wondering if they "protest too much".