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From Bloomberg:
Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the "CO2-climate problem." At the time, with reliance on fossil fuels having helped trigger the 1979 oil crisis, they predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge.
Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet.
[...] The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control. It "must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity," they write.
Others disagree, stating
Fewer people producing less in greenhouse-gas emissions could make some difference in the danger that climate change poses over time. But whether we end up with 9, 10, or 11 billion people in the coming decades, the world will still be pumping out increasingly risky amounts of climate pollution if we don't fundamentally fix the underlying energy, transportation, and food systems.
Critics blast a proposal to curb climate change by halting population growth
Journal Reference:
William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw. World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency[$]. BioScience. doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz088
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:38PM (2 children)
We need to get off this rock - unless we do what the Kryptonians do, or we keep getting some mass genocidal event like the WW every now and then, it is evitable that's we'll outgrow this rock.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 08 2019, @03:26AM (1 child)
We're not technically or socially advanced enough to make that work. Terraforming would be an absolute necessity, and we're doing basically the reverse of terraforming *to* Terra right now as we speak.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 08 2019, @05:01AM
Terraforming isn't necessary... on a small scale.
You could have a Moon colony, possibly with tens of thousands of people. The necessities seem to be there (water ice and solar energy, nitrogen [lunarpedia.org] might be a wild card).
Downsides include everyone needing to live indoors or in spacesuits, strict population management, and lower gravity.
Pretty much a similar story for Mars. *Some* people can live there without terraforming. And we don't want to terraform if the atmosphere is just going to get blown away again.
Who gets to go to these colonies? Rhymes with "bitch".
Getting billions of people off of Earth is clearly dumb, when the planet likely has at least 100 million more years of potential habitability (beyond that the Sun could become a problem, unless we try to mitigate that by blocking sunlight). Manmade climate change might not make Earth completely uninhabitable, but it could ruin certain areas with additional desertification, sea rise changing the coasts, etc. Places like Canada and Siberia will suddenly become much more attractive. Climate change could cost trillions (can "damage" be spun as "stimulus"?), but it won't happen all in an instant, so it will remain easy to avoid responsibility.
In my optimistic scenario, CO2 emissions will plummet as solar and fusion take over, and a little geoengineering (sulfur dioxide atmospheric injection) could counteract unwanted warming.
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