I didn't say the IPCC was right. I said that their reports are the product of a very large number of smart people all over the world who study the subject very hard, with essentially no possibility that it's a conspiracy. (If it were, someone would create a big splash by blowing the whistle. Scientists are not intellectual conformists.) I also said that it's a good idea to think they might be more or less correct, and plan accordingly. You're the one who wants us to go blindly into disaster if these people do kinda know what they're talking about.
And my view is that there's no percentage in imagining the conman is right.
What do you need for a smoking gun? We've got major changes in summer Arctic ice. Is the Northwest Passage smoking enough? Increasing temperatures (and we have far more than a few decades of measurements)? We're not going to get unique weather. We're going to get more of some and less of other weather.
Of course it isn't enough. You need to show actual harm commensurate with the cost of the proposed mitigation schemes. Then you need to show the mitigation schemes actually help rather than hinder.
And it's worth noting here that opening up the Northwest passage would be an enormous boon to humanity. How can you convince me of the urgent need to do something about global warming when you can't distinguish between a cost and a benefit?
Your evaluation of possible solutions is based in your firm irrational belief that AGW is not happening, the apparently religious belief that carbon markets must be horribly designed, and a case of blindness about exploration of renewable energy possibilities.
Who said I didn't believe in AGW? It sure wasn't me. I believe there is anthopogenic global warming. I also believe that humanity has other priorities and problems than just keeping climate at the state of 1850. Existence of AGW is not good enough.
It just that most people will realize that it is (maybe) a lot cheaper to subscribe for services than to own your own.
Why isn't it true already?
Urban centers already are very expensive to own cars, but most people don't live in such places. Further, there are considerable costs to providing subscriptions that aren't borne by people who own their own vehicles (such as the moral hazard of non-owners using the vehicle you own or the logistics of maintaining vehicles and securing payment in the face of ever changing users).
If there was another thinkable sink, you likely had pointed it out, or not?
Human landfills, roads (both asphalt and concrete), and buildings; swamps; regrowth of forests and jungles; and sediment at the bottom of oceans.
There are no significant CO2 sinks mitigating the "pollution". No idea why certain circles always claim that.
Because an accounting for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from humanity since the beginning indicates that there's roughly half of what there should be in the absence of carbon sinks (or at least carbon sinks that suddenly kicked ten years ago in order to rationalize your opinions).
What is as several economic analyses have indicated it costs you twice as much to wait as it does to do something about it now?
Unless, of course, that analysis is wrong. My view is that it's probably about an order of magnitude cheaper to just wait than it is to go through a hardcore climate mitigation effort right now to allegedly stabilize global mean temperature below 2 C since 1850 with most of the cost of the latter due to opportunity cost of poor economics decisions and ignoring time value. The cost of moving human civilization over the span of centuries is grossly exaggerated while the cost of restructuring humanity's energy infrastructure when there's still cheap oil and coal in the ground is understated, for example.
And if solar power gets a lot cheaper relative to the cost of petroleum in the next few decades, then we don't have to do a thing to prevent dangerous global warming.
For example, the key parameter of climate research is the temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2. There is an error of a factor of three between lowest bound and highest in the IPCC report. That corresponds to centuries of difference in reaching important thresholds.
This isn't about 100% certainty. It's about making predictions that could already be true, or could be true in 2200. You can't make rational policy with errors that large.
The only sink we have is the ocean, and that was only starting to absorb CO2 during the last decade
Funny how there's no significant change in the slope of increasing CO2 in atmosphere corresponding to this alleged event. It's almost like you pulled that assertion out of your ass without thinking.
You would do well to listen to your own advice. For example, you wrote:
We know enough already that we don't have a century or two to sit back and watch what happens - there are tipping points we are aware of which will tip before even a century is up.
That's not backed by actual evidence. Sure, there are known positive feedback mechanisms such as reduction in snow cover or methane released from tundra, but we don't know of tipping points, much less tipping points that will trigger by the end of the century.
The only sink we have is the ocean, and that was only starting to absorb CO2 during the last decade (in a significant amount), leading to acidification, which also means it is soon again in an equilibrium where only very few CO2 is absorbed while the "acid" goes into deeper areas of the ocean and perhaps gets converted into something else (no idea about the processes, water chemistry is extremely complex).
The carbon deficit in the atmosphere long predates your revisionism. Thus, there are carbon sinks which have been active for much longer than ten years.
No, the key problem here is don't understand the wide range of consequences and impacts climate change will have. Overpopulation is an issue that will be made much worse by climate change (migration). Poverty will be made worse by climate change. Arable land destruction will be made worse (already seeing some of that and it's only going downhill from there). Habitat destruction will be worse (goes without saying). So on and so forth.
Not worse enough to matter. For example, desertification already turns about two orders of magnitude more land into desert than is predicted for a one meter sea level rise by 2100. And somehow I doubt Germany's minuscule reduction CO2 emissions is more relevant to poverty than the doubling of local electricity prices they created.
Bullshit. All it would take is a slightly altered change to mid-level jet stream patterns and most of humanity would be seriously fucked. The largest food exporters on the planet rely on a stable climate to produce said food. The small percent of arable land that produces most of the world's food is within a narrow band of latitudes. A small change and bam, drought. We already had a small taste of that when Russia ceased exports a few years ago due to extreme heat and drought. Imagine if the same thing were to occur in the US midwest where the aquifers are already pretty much exhausted.
Well, that's bullshit. Farmers both already deal with huge local variations in weather and can easily set up shop elsewhere, should food grow better somewhere else.
To put it bluntly, world's "greater problem" is Conservatism which in practice means a mixture of malevolence, selfishness and nostalgia combined with authoritarianism. So how would you want yourself dealt with?
We could start by completely ignoring your straw man.
There are no carbon sinks. CO2 production and consumption is a zero sum game. Unless rare events like the time when forests spawned lots of wood got sucked down below earth before microbes coud digest them.
Sure there are. Humanity has burned about twice as much CO2 as the excess (since the beginning of the Industrial Era) which is present in the atmosphere. That went somewhere.
Obviously you fail to grasp that the population growth will drop to zero when those nations have a higher standard of living, like it did in the rest of the world. And while they grow they shift to renewables, like the rest of the world: solar and wind is cheaper than coal.
Well, that's a different argument than they double forever, isn't it? And while population demographics are a more predictable field than climate change, there's still the chance that they're wrong.
There is no evidence that they could. Perhaps they shift a decade or so back or forth.
Aside from the fact that exponential population growth got us to this point in the first place.
The IPCC predictions for 2100 are pretty dire if we do nothing, and we're likely to hit a tipping point somewhere along the way if we don't do something about AGW.
So what? You have yet to demonstrate the accuracy of IPCC predictions or the existence of those tipping points. It's worth noting here that the IPCC has consistently exaggerated the effects and consequences of global warming (for example, consistent divergence between the actual research and the "Summary for Policy Makers"), still has a factor of three error in the most important climate parameter (the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2), has projected a false confidence on their conclusions which you attempt to further, the predictive models they use are even now diverging significantly from reality (towards exaggeration of global warming, of course), they defended the "hockey stick" paper even when it became clear that the paper was solely based on spurious statistics, and use anti-scientific rhetoric and fallacies.
You blithely disregard the best science available.
I don't want the "best science available", I want good science. That means research backed by evidence not by an imaginary consensus, proof by obfuscation (here's another unreadable 700 page report which proves global warming is a serious problem!), or the usual observer/confirmation bias issues that dominate so much of the research in the field (it's the worst X since we started measuring such things a few decades ago!).
A key warning sign here is that there is no smoking gun. If there was some definitive research, the IPCC and the climate change policy advocates would have presented that research far and wide. Instead, we get a waterfall of research which appears briefly in the press or in an IPCC report and then descends from view to be replaced by the next thing. It's great for generating propaganda, but if any of that were definitive, it'd be quoted for decades or even centuries.
You're also making up that thing about proposed solutions. We don't have a complete solution yet, and some of the ones that have been proposed to mitigate things, such as increased use of renewable energy, are economically sensible even ignoring AGW.
We have as a rebuttal, the Kyoto Treaty which does nothing but hinder the economies of the developed world, increasing poverty throughout the world; we have the Energiewende policy of Germany which again does nothing but double the price of electricity; we have carbon markets which are poorly designed (speculators can profit from the sharp transition in elasticity of supply when demand exceeds the supply of carbon emission credits); and we have pointless publicly funded projects which use renewable energy technologies which are just never going to be very effective or significant on Earth such as solar thermal or biomass power plants.
Nope. It is by default.
Does not matter if 7 billion people use it for 100 years or 1 billion people use it for 700 years.
You do know there are carbon sinks, right? Further, 700 years is 600 years more than 100 years.
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible reductions in population growth.
Would you kindly point out some "third world" countries where this would have a measurable effect? Effect as in: it reduces growth rate significantly faster than doing nothing would?
Asia and Africa. I hear there are countries in those places.
The CO2 output of the 50 poorest nations on the planet is completely neglectible in relation of the output of the rest of the world. Regardless if they double their population every 50 years.
Until they double enough that it is not. You aren't thinking here. Exponential growth combined even with a really small fixed production of CO2 will eventually dominate any fixed sized sources.
In 10 to 30 years, at the latest in 100 years, we are at zero growth. Just like basically every western nation is. So: I'm not unwilling at all. I just know there is no reason to push it.
Unless of course, those predictions turn out wrong. Environmentalists tend to be pessimists in this area BTW.
You keep referring to vague concepts without ever substantiating them.
What is there to substantiate? To assert that climate change can kill us all is a completely ignorant viewpoint. There just isn't enough carbon around to do that either by warming or by poisoning. It's all locked up in the crust with accessible fossil fuels making up a very small part.
Also there are many more ways for global warming to kill us all than CO2 poisoning, which you seem to completely ignore. It's almost as if you don't know what you're talking about...
I ignore it because those ways don't exist. You would have to pump lethal amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere (and greatly increase the mass and thickness of the atmosphere) in order to increase temperature to the point where we wouldn't be able to survive at the poles.
The problem is our reliance on fossil fuels, not on a secondary factor which exacerbates it.
At first, it sounds like we agree. The difference is that if population continues to grow, there will be other environmental limits reached. Meanwhile those limits aren't reached with a much lower population and we could still use fossil fuels as well. That's why I say overpopulation is the problem and not the technology we happen to rely on.
Further with a much lower population, we wouldn't need to develop replacements for fossil fuels for a long time. The rush to develop nuclear, solar, and wind power just isn't necessary.
In other words, scientific illiteracy rears its ugly head. I would suggest here that poetry is a terrible basis for global environmental policy and likely to get even worse in the future.
You sum it up as "collecting more information" but you are actually calling for "do nothing, and if the current understanding is correct (which all the data seems to point to) the problem will get worse, but we should hope that *all* the evidence gathered up to now will be disproved somehow, and we can forget this ever happened".
There are two things to note. I think there is a better strategy than merely doing nothing, but it primarily involves monitoring climate for a century or two to make sure we don't during the course of our normal business actually trigger any tipping points or similar problems.
Second, your data doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't have to be disproved. These gloomy climate predictions have been a parade of empty assertions, fallacies, and untested computer models from the beginning. And the proposed solutions have been remarkably shortsighted and ignorant of non-environmental consequences.
Population growth is not leading to more CO2.
Industrialization with the wrong energy production technology is.
Fossil fuels are only the "wrong" energy production technology precisely because so many people use them.
I doubt that the planet is right now still experiencing a significant growth anyway.
The world is currently adding 80 million people a year. That's the current population of the US in a bit over four years.
And bottom line, with what lever would a western nation be able to limit population growth in a developing country? We don't buy/produce clothes from Bangladesh anymore? To punish them for growing? Or do we sent in shock troops and kill everyone with more than 2 children? I wonder how much CO2 such surgical strikes would "cost"?
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible reductions in population growth.
My view is that environmentalists have already demonstrated they are willing to meddle in such things via climate change treaties. It's not a stretch to go on to bigger problems like overpopulation, poverty, or government corruption.
You don't have to be a complete dumbshit here. The current per capita consumption rate wouldn't be serious, if there was a tenth the number of people on Earth. It's not fossil fuels that are the problem, but rather that there are well over seven billion people burning fossil fuels that are the problem.
None of those problems (except maybe nuclear proliferation) have the ability to end humanity forever.
Neither does global warming. Those doomsday scenarios are pure fiction not science. Humanity would have to try really hard for many centuries to kill itself off through CO2 poisoning.
What really bugs me is that if this is successful now, then it creates precedent. There will be more scary dangers that someone has to restructure all of society in order to pretend to fight it. We need sanity when dealing with global-scale risks not hysteria.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say the IPCC was right. I said that their reports are the product of a very large number of smart people all over the world who study the subject very hard, with essentially no possibility that it's a conspiracy. (If it were, someone would create a big splash by blowing the whistle. Scientists are not intellectual conformists.) I also said that it's a good idea to think they might be more or less correct, and plan accordingly. You're the one who wants us to go blindly into disaster if these people do kinda know what they're talking about.
And my view is that there's no percentage in imagining the conman is right.
What do you need for a smoking gun? We've got major changes in summer Arctic ice. Is the Northwest Passage smoking enough? Increasing temperatures (and we have far more than a few decades of measurements)? We're not going to get unique weather. We're going to get more of some and less of other weather.
Of course it isn't enough. You need to show actual harm commensurate with the cost of the proposed mitigation schemes. Then you need to show the mitigation schemes actually help rather than hinder.
And it's worth noting here that opening up the Northwest passage would be an enormous boon to humanity. How can you convince me of the urgent need to do something about global warming when you can't distinguish between a cost and a benefit?
Your evaluation of possible solutions is based in your firm irrational belief that AGW is not happening, the apparently religious belief that carbon markets must be horribly designed, and a case of blindness about exploration of renewable energy possibilities.
Who said I didn't believe in AGW? It sure wasn't me. I believe there is anthopogenic global warming. I also believe that humanity has other priorities and problems than just keeping climate at the state of 1850. Existence of AGW is not good enough.
It just that most people will realize that it is (maybe) a lot cheaper to subscribe for services than to own your own.
Why isn't it true already?
Urban centers already are very expensive to own cars, but most people don't live in such places. Further, there are considerable costs to providing subscriptions that aren't borne by people who own their own vehicles (such as the moral hazard of non-owners using the vehicle you own or the logistics of maintaining vehicles and securing payment in the face of ever changing users).
If there was another thinkable sink, you likely had pointed it out, or not?
Human landfills, roads (both asphalt and concrete), and buildings; swamps; regrowth of forests and jungles; and sediment at the bottom of oceans.
There are no significant CO2 sinks mitigating the "pollution". No idea why certain circles always claim that.
Because an accounting for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from humanity since the beginning indicates that there's roughly half of what there should be in the absence of carbon sinks (or at least carbon sinks that suddenly kicked ten years ago in order to rationalize your opinions).
What is as several economic analyses have indicated it costs you twice as much to wait as it does to do something about it now?
Unless, of course, that analysis is wrong. My view is that it's probably about an order of magnitude cheaper to just wait than it is to go through a hardcore climate mitigation effort right now to allegedly stabilize global mean temperature below 2 C since 1850 with most of the cost of the latter due to opportunity cost of poor economics decisions and ignoring time value. The cost of moving human civilization over the span of centuries is grossly exaggerated while the cost of restructuring humanity's energy infrastructure when there's still cheap oil and coal in the ground is understated, for example.
And if solar power gets a lot cheaper relative to the cost of petroleum in the next few decades, then we don't have to do a thing to prevent dangerous global warming.
For example, the key parameter of climate research is the temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2. There is an error of a factor of three between lowest bound and highest in the IPCC report. That corresponds to centuries of difference in reaching important thresholds.
This isn't about 100% certainty. It's about making predictions that could already be true, or could be true in 2200. You can't make rational policy with errors that large.
The only sink we have is the ocean, and that was only starting to absorb CO2 during the last decade
Funny how there's no significant change in the slope of increasing CO2 in atmosphere corresponding to this alleged event. It's almost like you pulled that assertion out of your ass without thinking.
You assert we can't model this and we can't model that, but actually, yes, we can, and do.
And the models are terrible even at predicting the near future which is his point.
We know enough already that we don't have a century or two to sit back and watch what happens - there are tipping points we are aware of which will tip before even a century is up.
That's not backed by actual evidence. Sure, there are known positive feedback mechanisms such as reduction in snow cover or methane released from tundra, but we don't know of tipping points, much less tipping points that will trigger by the end of the century.
The only sink we have is the ocean, and that was only starting to absorb CO2 during the last decade (in a significant amount), leading to acidification, which also means it is soon again in an equilibrium where only very few CO2 is absorbed while the "acid" goes into deeper areas of the ocean and perhaps gets converted into something else (no idea about the processes, water chemistry is extremely complex).
The carbon deficit in the atmosphere long predates your revisionism. Thus, there are carbon sinks which have been active for much longer than ten years.
No, the key problem here is don't understand the wide range of consequences and impacts climate change will have. Overpopulation is an issue that will be made much worse by climate change (migration). Poverty will be made worse by climate change. Arable land destruction will be made worse (already seeing some of that and it's only going downhill from there). Habitat destruction will be worse (goes without saying). So on and so forth.
Not worse enough to matter. For example, desertification already turns about two orders of magnitude more land into desert than is predicted for a one meter sea level rise by 2100. And somehow I doubt Germany's minuscule reduction CO2 emissions is more relevant to poverty than the doubling of local electricity prices they created.
Bullshit. All it would take is a slightly altered change to mid-level jet stream patterns and most of humanity would be seriously fucked. The largest food exporters on the planet rely on a stable climate to produce said food. The small percent of arable land that produces most of the world's food is within a narrow band of latitudes. A small change and bam, drought. We already had a small taste of that when Russia ceased exports a few years ago due to extreme heat and drought. Imagine if the same thing were to occur in the US midwest where the aquifers are already pretty much exhausted.
Well, that's bullshit. Farmers both already deal with huge local variations in weather and can easily set up shop elsewhere, should food grow better somewhere else.
To put it bluntly, world's "greater problem" is Conservatism which in practice means a mixture of malevolence, selfishness and nostalgia combined with authoritarianism. So how would you want yourself dealt with?
We could start by completely ignoring your straw man.
There are no carbon sinks. CO2 production and consumption is a zero sum game. Unless rare events like the time when forests spawned lots of wood got sucked down below earth before microbes coud digest them.
Sure there are. Humanity has burned about twice as much CO2 as the excess (since the beginning of the Industrial Era) which is present in the atmosphere. That went somewhere.
Obviously you fail to grasp that the population growth will drop to zero when those nations have a higher standard of living, like it did in the rest of the world. And while they grow they shift to renewables, like the rest of the world: solar and wind is cheaper than coal.
Well, that's a different argument than they double forever, isn't it? And while population demographics are a more predictable field than climate change, there's still the chance that they're wrong.
There is no evidence that they could. Perhaps they shift a decade or so back or forth.
Aside from the fact that exponential population growth got us to this point in the first place.
The IPCC predictions for 2100 are pretty dire if we do nothing, and we're likely to hit a tipping point somewhere along the way if we don't do something about AGW.
So what? You have yet to demonstrate the accuracy of IPCC predictions or the existence of those tipping points. It's worth noting here that the IPCC has consistently exaggerated the effects and consequences of global warming (for example, consistent divergence between the actual research and the "Summary for Policy Makers"), still has a factor of three error in the most important climate parameter (the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2), has projected a false confidence on their conclusions which you attempt to further, the predictive models they use are even now diverging significantly from reality (towards exaggeration of global warming, of course), they defended the "hockey stick" paper even when it became clear that the paper was solely based on spurious statistics, and use anti-scientific rhetoric and fallacies.
You blithely disregard the best science available.
I don't want the "best science available", I want good science. That means research backed by evidence not by an imaginary consensus, proof by obfuscation (here's another unreadable 700 page report which proves global warming is a serious problem!), or the usual observer/confirmation bias issues that dominate so much of the research in the field (it's the worst X since we started measuring such things a few decades ago!).
A key warning sign here is that there is no smoking gun. If there was some definitive research, the IPCC and the climate change policy advocates would have presented that research far and wide. Instead, we get a waterfall of research which appears briefly in the press or in an IPCC report and then descends from view to be replaced by the next thing. It's great for generating propaganda, but if any of that were definitive, it'd be quoted for decades or even centuries.
You're also making up that thing about proposed solutions. We don't have a complete solution yet, and some of the ones that have been proposed to mitigate things, such as increased use of renewable energy, are economically sensible even ignoring AGW.
We have as a rebuttal, the Kyoto Treaty which does nothing but hinder the economies of the developed world, increasing poverty throughout the world; we have the Energiewende policy of Germany which again does nothing but double the price of electricity; we have carbon markets which are poorly designed (speculators can profit from the sharp transition in elasticity of supply when demand exceeds the supply of carbon emission credits); and we have pointless publicly funded projects which use renewable energy technologies which are just never going to be very effective or significant on Earth such as solar thermal or biomass power plants.
it must be said that the human population has outstripped the resources and as such a massive correction will eventually restore the natural balance.
Indeed. Just look at the massive human die-offs that happened when we stopped using whale oil and buggy whips.
Nope. It is by default. Does not matter if 7 billion people use it for 100 years or 1 billion people use it for 700 years.
You do know there are carbon sinks, right? Further, 700 years is 600 years more than 100 years.
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible reductions in population growth.
Would you kindly point out some "third world" countries where this would have a measurable effect? Effect as in: it reduces growth rate significantly faster than doing nothing would?
Asia and Africa. I hear there are countries in those places.
The CO2 output of the 50 poorest nations on the planet is completely neglectible in relation of the output of the rest of the world. Regardless if they double their population every 50 years.
Until they double enough that it is not. You aren't thinking here. Exponential growth combined even with a really small fixed production of CO2 will eventually dominate any fixed sized sources.
In 10 to 30 years, at the latest in 100 years, we are at zero growth. Just like basically every western nation is. So: I'm not unwilling at all. I just know there is no reason to push it.
Unless of course, those predictions turn out wrong. Environmentalists tend to be pessimists in this area BTW.
You keep referring to vague concepts without ever substantiating them.
What is there to substantiate? To assert that climate change can kill us all is a completely ignorant viewpoint. There just isn't enough carbon around to do that either by warming or by poisoning. It's all locked up in the crust with accessible fossil fuels making up a very small part.
Also there are many more ways for global warming to kill us all than CO2 poisoning, which you seem to completely ignore. It's almost as if you don't know what you're talking about...
I ignore it because those ways don't exist. You would have to pump lethal amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere (and greatly increase the mass and thickness of the atmosphere) in order to increase temperature to the point where we wouldn't be able to survive at the poles.
The problem is our reliance on fossil fuels, not on a secondary factor which exacerbates it.
At first, it sounds like we agree. The difference is that if population continues to grow, there will be other environmental limits reached. Meanwhile those limits aren't reached with a much lower population and we could still use fossil fuels as well. That's why I say overpopulation is the problem and not the technology we happen to rely on.
Further with a much lower population, we wouldn't need to develop replacements for fossil fuels for a long time. The rush to develop nuclear, solar, and wind power just isn't necessary.
Global warming is mostly caused by a mere 800 million people on this planet.
Most of the growth in CO2 emissions doesn't come from the 800 million people.
But to the non-denialists it's like poetry.
In other words, scientific illiteracy rears its ugly head. I would suggest here that poetry is a terrible basis for global environmental policy and likely to get even worse in the future.
You sum it up as "collecting more information" but you are actually calling for "do nothing, and if the current understanding is correct (which all the data seems to point to) the problem will get worse, but we should hope that *all* the evidence gathered up to now will be disproved somehow, and we can forget this ever happened".
There are two things to note. I think there is a better strategy than merely doing nothing, but it primarily involves monitoring climate for a century or two to make sure we don't during the course of our normal business actually trigger any tipping points or similar problems.
Second, your data doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't have to be disproved. These gloomy climate predictions have been a parade of empty assertions, fallacies, and untested computer models from the beginning. And the proposed solutions have been remarkably shortsighted and ignorant of non-environmental consequences.
Population growth is not leading to more CO2. Industrialization with the wrong energy production technology is.
Fossil fuels are only the "wrong" energy production technology precisely because so many people use them.
I doubt that the planet is right now still experiencing a significant growth anyway.
The world is currently adding 80 million people a year. That's the current population of the US in a bit over four years.
And bottom line, with what lever would a western nation be able to limit population growth in a developing country? We don't buy/produce clothes from Bangladesh anymore? To punish them for growing? Or do we sent in shock troops and kill everyone with more than 2 children? I wonder how much CO2 such surgical strikes would "cost"?
Just because you are unwilling to think about overpopulation doesn't mean that one couldn't help address it through treaty. For example, two obvious ways to do it are via women's rights, giving money (or perhaps increased immigration privileges) to third world in exchange for credible reductions in population growth.
My view is that environmentalists have already demonstrated they are willing to meddle in such things via climate change treaties. It's not a stretch to go on to bigger problems like overpopulation, poverty, or government corruption.
Not even close to being true. Amazing.
You don't have to be a complete dumbshit here. The current per capita consumption rate wouldn't be serious, if there was a tenth the number of people on Earth. It's not fossil fuels that are the problem, but rather that there are well over seven billion people burning fossil fuels that are the problem.
None of those problems (except maybe nuclear proliferation) have the ability to end humanity forever.
Neither does global warming. Those doomsday scenarios are pure fiction not science. Humanity would have to try really hard for many centuries to kill itself off through CO2 poisoning.
What really bugs me is that if this is successful now, then it creates precedent. There will be more scary dangers that someone has to restructure all of society in order to pretend to fight it. We need sanity when dealing with global-scale risks not hysteria.
overpopulation isn't an issue
Overpopulation is the only reason we have anthropogenic global warming in the first place.