jnelsoni t1_j8lem28 wrote
Reply to comment by Darkhorseman81 in New study shows Acceleration of global sea level rise imminent past 1.8℃ planetary warming by 9273629397759992
Infertility might be helpful.
Darkhorseman81 t1_j8lt1te wrote
If you mean future inbreeding and extinction, then sure.
Population actually isn't the problem. 10% are causing 90% of the damage.
SaxManSteve t1_j8m5pi4 wrote
Both can be true. It's true that western countries disproportionally use more energy and resources per capita than developing countries. It's also true that global human civilization is in an advanced state of ecological overshoot mainly because of overconsumption and overpopulation. We are currently consuming more resources than our ecosystems can regenerate naturally, we are operating beyond the earth's carrying capacity. On top of that we are dumping entropic waste back into the ecosphere in excess of nature’s assimilative capacities, which only speeds up the process of system wide ecological collapse that will absolutely lead to dramatic population contraction in the near future. In this sense, overshoot is actually the cause of climate change and numerous co-symptoms including plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, landscape/soil degradation, contamination of food supplies, depleting aquifers, the pollution of basically every life-supporting system. Our contemporary growth obsessed technological civilization is literally consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence, and somehow we seem to think that there's nothing that can go wrong by adding a couple more billion humans on the planet.
BurnerAcc2020 t1_j8maaiv wrote
> which only speeds up the process of system wide ecological collapse that will absolutely lead to dramatic population contraction in the near future.
Not according to even the scientists who otherwise agree that the future would be "ghastly", though?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full > It is therefore also inevitable that aggregate consumption will increase at least into the near future, especially as affluence and population continue to grow in tandem (Wiedmann et al., 2020). Even if major catastrophes occur during this interval, they would unlikely affect the population trajectory until well into the 22nd Century (Bradshaw and Brook, 2014). Although population-connected climate change (Wynes and Nicholas, 2017) will worsen human mortality (Mora et al., 2017; Parks et al., 2020), morbidity (Patz et al., 2005; Díaz et al., 2006; Peng et al., 2011), development (Barreca and Schaller, 2020), cognition (Jacobson et al., 2019), agricultural yields (Verdin et al., 2005; Schmidhuber and Tubiello, 2007; Brown and Funk, 2008; Gaupp et al., 2020), and conflicts (Boas, 2015), there is no way—ethically or otherwise (barring extreme and unprecedented increases in human mortality)—to avoid rising human numbers and the accompanying overconsumption. That said, instituting human-rights policies to lower fertility and reining in consumption patterns could diminish the impacts of these phenomena (Rees, 2020).
Not to mention the more mainstream views like those of the IPCC (look at their population graphs).
SaxManSteve t1_j8mfa2n wrote
IPCC population projection models are often criticized for having simple assumptions. They generally model predicted population based on the expected rate of world GDP growth and the correlated predicted reduction in birth rates. They don't use a system dynamics based model, that could model the complexities of overshoot and climate change and its impacts on population. For example global warming will have varying levels of cascading non-linear effects on extreme weather events, things like increases in economic inequality, increase in domestic and international conflict, increase in state fragility, increase in pandemics, increase in population displacement and migration, decrease in ecological biodiversity, decrease in food, fuel, and water resources, increase in droughts and desertification of fertile land, increased fragility of global supply chains, ect..... None of these factors are part of the IPCC models, meaning that their predictions shouldn't be taken as realistic predictions of populations. Rather they should be seen as models that predict population numbers in a world where climate change and overshoot will have little to no impact on human civilization in the near future.
It's also no secret within academic climate science circles that the IPCC has long been politically motivated to underestimate the scale of the problem. Which is why very few climate scientists actually believe that the Paris Accord is realistic. We all know there is no chance the world can avoid 1.5 C mean global warming and that we will likely see a potentially disastrous 2 C increase by 2050. Many already assume that there will be no remaining carbon budget even for the 2 C target
The IPCC infamously fails to account for carbon cycle feedbacks and their associated tipping points when setting their own emissions targets. Meaning that even a 2C warming may well trigger irreversible runaway “hothouse Earth” conditions. In coming years, we will see an ice-free Arctic Ocean, more rapidly melting permafrost, methane releases, an increase in wildfires, and other short-term positive feedbacks that will put climate change on steroids.
Even in the best case, the world can expect more and longer heat waves and droughts, more violent tropical storms, extended wild-fire seasons, accelerating desertification, water shortages, crippled agriculture, food shortages, rising sea levels, and broken supply lines. Coastal cities will be flooded and some may eventually be abandoned. Many other cities are likely to be cut off from food-lands, energy, and other essential resources with the breakdown of national highway and marine transportation networks; this alone would make urban life untenable. According to the recent Environmental Risk Outlook 2021 (2021), at least 414 cities with a total 1.4 billion plus inhabitants, are at high or extreme risk from a combination of pollution, dwindling water supplies, extreme heat stress, and other dimensions of climate change.
From this perspective, it's absurd to even entertain the idea that adding 2+ billion more people on the planet in the next 20 years would be a good idea. We should be currently engaging in an international effort to reduce our current consumption, reduce our energy demand, reduce our birth rates, reduce economic inequality, and ultimately start to move away from a growth for the sake of growth economic model towards an ecologically sustainable economic system.
It's simply immoral and reckless to keep chugging along with the business as usual economic model. Doing so is to condemn billions of people to a brutish, painful and short life.
BurnerAcc2020 t1_j8rc44f wrote
So, my original response got eaten by reddit's spam filter (probably because I included the same link twice, but you'll never know with these things) and I'm going to have to try again, for posterity.
By now, many of the points I made in that comment were already made by others, like Spratt & Dunlop possessing very limited credibility, or that feedbacks are both slow enough relative to human emissions to operate over many centuries and are already accounted for in the IPCC reports to a great extent. In fact, even IPCC report #4 - which was first published in 2007 - already had a whole chapter on carbon cycle and other feedbacks.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chapter7-1.pdf
The feedbacks which are more difficult to account for, like permafrost, still have an impact that's a fraction of human emissions.
I would simply like to reiterate the points around "crippled agriculture, food shortages", etc. It would appear true if you just look at the climate projections and assume that they'll apply to the current amount of land used to grow food. What that assumption misses is that the amount of land won't stay the same: the IPCC assumes that as the population grows and climate change accelerate, people will simply clear-cut down more, more and more forest to the tune of hundreds of millions of hectares and grow crops on that land. Compare the population/GDP graph from my earlier comment (not linking it again in case it also triggers the bot) with the land use graph, where cropland extent and forested land extent simply go in opposite directions in each scenario - to the point where a scenario with 12 billion people cuts down nearly 600 million hectares. This is also why food supply projections for 2050 look like this and like this, and not like what most people assume when only looking at yield reduction projections or the talk of instability.
And finally, yes, we should move to a non-growth and sustainable system. The thing is, it looks like we may well get away with not doing that in this century, even if the cost will simply be paid by the ecosystems and future generation. That is the position of the scientists who collectively wrote the "ghastly future" paper, and at this point, the counterarguments (whether optimistic or the opposite) appear increasingly strained.
Gemini884 t1_j8ns09o wrote
>The IPCC infamously fails to account for carbon cycle feedbacks and their associated tipping points when setting their own emissions targets.
Then why are climate models used in previous IPCC reports so accurate and have predicted the pace of warming so well? Observed warming tends to track middle-of-the-range estimates from previous IPCC reports.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/02/another-dot-on-the-graphs-part-ii/
You probably should listen to what actual climate scientists say on the matter-
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1557421984484495362
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1491134605390352388
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/JoeriRogelj/status/1424743837277294603
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/PFriedling/status/1557705737446592512
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ClimateAdam/status/1429730044776157185
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/Knutti\_ETH/status/1554473710404485120
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ClimateOfGavin/status/1556735212083712002#m
There were some models for the recent ipcc report that overestimate future warming and they were included too
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2
​
There is no evidence for projected warming <3-4C of any tipping points that significantly change the warming trajectory. Read ipcc report and read what climate scientists say instead of speculating:
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/MichaelEMann/status/1495438146905026563
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1571146283582365697#m
"Some people will look at this and go, ‘well, if we’re going to hit tipping points at 1.5°C, then it’s game over’. But we’re saying they would lock in some really unpleasant impacts for a very long time, but they don’t cause runaway global warming."- Quote from Dr. David Armstrong Mckay, the author of one of recent studies on the subject to Newscientist mag. here are explainers he's written before-
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2019/04/01/climate-tipping-points-fact-check-series-introduction/ (introduction is a bit outdated and there are some estimates that were ruled out in past year's ipcc report afaik but articles themselves are more up to date)
​
>www.climaterealitycheck.net/download
David Spratt and Ian Dunlop- authors of this "report" are same people who have written the report which was panned by scientists who fact-checked it- https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-context-james-felton/
No-Effort-7730 t1_j8mptt2 wrote
Bumping for visibility because that's a dank ass based response.
Gemini884 t1_j8oka7k wrote
Except they're wrong.
​
>The IPCC infamously fails to account for carbon cycle feedbacks and their associated tipping points when setting their own emissions targets.
Then why are climate models used in previous IPCC reports so accurate and have predicted the pace of warming so well? Observed warming tends to track middle-of-the-range estimates from previous IPCC reports.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/02/another-dot-on-the-graphs-part-ii/
You probably should listen to what actual climate scientists say on the matter-
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1557421984484495362
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1491134605390352388
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/JoeriRogelj/status/1424743837277294603
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/PFriedling/status/1557705737446592512
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ClimateAdam/status/1429730044776157185
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/Knutti\_ETH/status/1554473710404485120
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ClimateOfGavin/status/1556735212083712002#m
There were some models for the recent ipcc report that overestimate future warming and they were included too
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2
There is no evidence for projected warming <3-4C of any tipping points that significantly change the warming trajectory. Read ipcc report and read what climate scientists say instead of speculating:
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/MichaelEMann/status/1495438146905026563
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/hausfath/status/1571146283582365697#m
"Some people will look at this and go, ‘well, if we’re going to hit tipping points at 1.5°C, then it’s game over’. But we’re saying they would lock in some really unpleasant impacts for a very long time, but they don’t cause runaway global warming."- Quote from Dr. David Armstrong Mckay, the author of one of recent studies on the subject to Newscientist mag. here are explainers he's written before-
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2019/04/01/climate-tipping-points-fact-check-series-introduction/ (introduction is a bit outdated and there are some estimates that were ruled out in past year's ipcc report afaik but articles themselves are more up to date)
>www.climaterealitycheck.net/download
David Spratt and Ian Dunlop- authors of this "report" are the same people who have written the report which was panned by scientists who fact-checked it- https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-context-james-felton/
grundar t1_j8q46kv wrote
> There is no evidence for projected warming <3-4C of any tipping points that significantly change the warming trajectory.
Just to back up this point, r/science discussed a paper in Science which examined known tipping points 5 months ago. I extracted a list of those tipping points, their thresholds, their effects, and their timescales.
As you say, none of the near-warming (<4C) near-term (<200-year timescale) tipping points had significant global effects on warming or sea level rise.
[deleted] t1_j8oj3s9 wrote
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grundar t1_j8qdsbv wrote
> It's also no secret within academic climate science circles that the IPCC has long been politically motivated to underestimate the scale of the problem. Which is why very few climate scientists actually believe that the Paris Accord is realistic. We all know there is no chance the world can avoid 1.5 C mean global warming and that we will likely see a potentially disastrous 2 C increase by 2050. Many already assume that there will be no remaining carbon budget even for the 2 C target
That's an enormous number claims regarding what climate scientists believe, but the only source presented for any of it is a non-peer-reviewed report from an Australian think tank whose previous reports were criticized as alarmist, misleading, and lacking scientific credibility by scientist reviewers
And looking at the report itself, it's easy to see why. Their number 1 "critical understanding" cherry-picks only the IPCC scenarios which support their narrative:
> "Current (CMIP6) climate models project on average a warming of 0.3°C for the decade to 2030 (across the SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios)."
By contrast, the IEA expects CO2 emissions to fall 15-20% by 2030, putting the world roughly in line with the IPCC's SSP1-2.6 pathway -- a pathway they totally ignore*.
It's reasonable that they would want to include higher-emission pathways as well to examine the danger of less likely scenarios, but to exclusively examine higher-emission scenarios and completely ignore lower-emission scenarios that are as or more plausible? It's clear cherry-picking of data to establish a chosen narrative.
On to their number 2 "critical understanding":
> "Due to model limitations, we will not know exactly how the climate crisis will unfold until it’s too late.6 One example is the failure to predict the intensity of extreme heat and flood events in Europe and North America in 2021."
i.e., they're conflating climate and weather.
One heat wave or one flood is weather; by contrast, climate is the broad long-term trend. Failing to predict a particular flood or heat wave no more "proves" the IPCC models wrong than a cold winter "proves" the climate is not warming. They're making an utterly unscientific argument here.
Not everything they say is wrong -- notably they're quite right that warming has already caused significant effects and even 1.5C (which is unlikely) will cause more -- but enough demonstrably biased and unscientific claims are thrown in that this report could never pass robust peer review and is not a scientific source.
[deleted] t1_j8n0575 wrote
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[deleted] t1_j8npo9i wrote
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Hipoko t1_j8my2jo wrote
I dream to be as eloquent as you, SaxManSteve
Ballsaxolotl t1_j8mdh7l wrote
Why do places with virtually no environmental protections have such high birth rates? There will be plenty of people in the future. They'll just all die in their 40s
Darkhorseman81 t1_j8mdmm4 wrote
Humans breed in response to adversity. It's how we've succeeded as a species.
Have 7 children, even if one survives, genes passed on.
We overcome environment with sheer numbers.
[deleted] t1_j8lvcwk wrote
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0comment t1_j8lfncl wrote
It’s not so great for any of our existing economic systems though. Just like capitalism, socialism also relies on the right kind of population growth. Ie you need enough working adults to outnumber every other demographic. To keep this going, you need enough children. The reality is that the retired elderly is about to outnumber every other demographic. Our social safety nets in capitalism and socialism can only work if we can lower the number of retired elderly, or completely end programs like social security and Medicare.
lurker1101 t1_j8nn8h5 wrote
> Ie you need enough working adults to outnumber every other demographic
or corporations to pay their fair share of taxes
0comment t1_j8ogh7b wrote
The research behind birth rate decline accounts for socioeconomic factors ie it doesn’t matter if economy is great and everyone is earning well. The birth rate will still decline due to something that happened with industrialization. The only countries that aren’t seeing this yet are in central Africa.
Dr_Kintobor t1_j8mc77q wrote
Ok so i have a solution. We kill everyone once they turn 65/ stop being productive workers, and then we process them into protein bars. Like a Soylent Logan's Run. I never said it was a nice solution, but it would solve aging demographics and world hunger at the same time.
jnelsoni t1_j8nqoyr wrote
Or maybe we can just let young people have fun and eat free for a few years, then ship them out to biodynamic farms where they can work the soil by hand, utilizing no machinery or chemicals until death. The middle -aged can pull hand carts carrying produce to urban markets. Everyone has their ration cards and gets to eat, but labor is divided such that everyone gets a chance to have fun to the best of their ability in the pain-free years of life, and graduates to working closer to the land. When death comes it is usually closer to agricultural fields or in them, so less work needs to be done to move the bodies to the compost piles that fertilize the fields. In this way we can avoid directly eating people, but we would all still be cycled into food via soil inputs. If we did it without violence and guns, it would be more like the Smurfs than the Khmer Rouge.
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Ryrynz t1_j8lvnaa wrote
The world at this point and time literally cannot sustain the population. It ideally needs to be halved.
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