WTF Climate Change News

[Innula Zenovka]

Nordic countries endure heatwave as Lapland records hottest day since 1914

Kevo in Lapland recorded a temperature of 33.6C after Finland registered record heat in June

www.theguardian.com

Evernote link because why not

 

[Beebo Brink]

I'm sure that, as a statement of a general fact, reducing population growth would help reduce global warming, but I'm finding it difficult to turn that into something specific... How are they going to fill in the numbers...

The numbers are out there; I'm not sure why you see that as a difficulty. I'd be surprised if the formula you posed hasn't already been calculated by someone. Such as this from the BBC:

In the developed world the carbon footprint of a child is roughly 58.6 metric tonnes annually, whereas that of a Malawian child has consistently been estimated between 0.07 and metric tonnes annually.

The couples rethinking kids because of climate change

In the age of climate crisis, childbearing has become a fraught question for couples around the globe.

www.bbc.com

.

...and then go about stopping people from having children?

I addressed that very part of your post earlier. It would take a draconian authority which simply does not exist (at least not yet) in the Western World; China is easing up on its own dictates already, essentially admitting defeat because the short-term pain of depopulation is too high. As a species, we simply aren't constructed in a way to voluntarily refrain from having offspring.

And it's that fact of our nature that informs some of my pessimism for mitigating climate change. Asking people to reduce their carbon footprint is difficult enough. A few (such as the couples in the article I cited above) are curbing reproduction as well, but they are (at least for now) a minority. Without both efforts, we're not going to make much of a dent in our carbon emissions.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The numbers are out there; I'm not sure why you see that as a difficulty. I'd be surprised if the formula you posed hasn't already been calculated by someone. Such as this from the BBC:

For the action 'have one fewer child,' we relied on a study which quantified future emissions of descendants based on historical rates, based on heredity (Murtaugh and Schlax 2009). In this approach, half of a child's emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child's offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth. This is consistent with our use of research employing the fullest possible life cycle approach in order to capture the magnitude of emissions decisions.

This is Murtaugh and Schlax (and since it's a 2009 article, the data are presumably pretty old by now). I have to say it seems a mite speculative to me, since an estimate of the "child's emissions" has to depend how power will be generated at various stages through that child's life -- the carbon footprint of a child born today in the US has to depend on how many air-miles she racks up a year during her lifetime, I'd have thought, and what kind of fuel her daily transport runs on, surely, when she grows up.

When today's children grow up, will they be working from home or commuting? Where will their food come from, and where will they live? Are they using electrical or gasoline-fuelled cars, and what kind of power keeps the lights on? Will the answers be the same 40 years from now as they will be 20 years hence?

Has any more recent work been done on the topic? We need a lot more detail, it seems to me, to turn it into a coherent policy proposal, and even then all the figures have to depend on assumptions about the outcomes of other initiatives (investment in alternative sources of energy, for example) that we have also to be doing to have any meaning.

 

[Beebo Brink]

We need a lot more detail, it seems to me, to turn it into a coherent policy proposal...

Well, good luck with that?

I don't know what to say since you keep skipping over the part where I say, very clearly and repeatedly, "Humans aren't going to do this."

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Well, good luck with that?

I don't know what to say since you keep skipping over the part where I say, very clearly and repeatedly, "Humans aren't going to do this."

I suppose my question is, why on earth should? An individual woman's choice to have children or not will have no appreciable effect on the climate crisis -- only governments can do that, so why should she waste time even considering it, rather than campaigning for goals that we know will achieve particular results.

 

[WolfEyes]

I suppose my question is, why on earth should? An individual woman's choice to have children or not will have no appreciable effect on the climate crisis -- only governments can do that, so why should she waste time even considering it, rather than campaigning for goals that we know will achieve particular results.

Why should humans be willing to stop having children for a while to ensure there is a habitable planet for them to live on? Why bother to leave our only home a better place for those who will come after us? Why on earth should anyone care? It's just a planet. We're just humans. None of it matters so why care?

Why not just nuke it all from orbit and be done with it.

There's a whole big picture out there you seem to be missing.


ETA: I apologize for what may seem like rude sarcasm. It wasn't meant that way. Sometimes people can be so blind that I just want to shake them to try to get them to see what has been right in front of their noses for 250,000 years.

As a species, we are young and we have evolved far faster than any other. Perhaps we were meant to burn brightly but briefly. Why not change our stars* if we can?

* Knight's Tale reference

 

[Beebo Brink]

I suppose my question is, why on earth should? An individual woman's choice to have children or not will have no appreciable effect on the climate crisis -- only governments can do that, so why should she waste time even considering it, rather than campaigning for goals that we know will achieve particular results.

It's a fair question, if somewhat theoretical since few are going to do it anyway. If we had stopped having children in the 1960s/70s and we had reduced our carbon footprint at the same time.... but we didn't. So here we are.

But in this same vein, I find it somewhat ludicrous for people to be proud of themselves for small acts of green, as if that's going to make a difference, and meanwhile having children. If choosing to have a baby is of negligible value, then re-using your water bottle, or even giving up your car, is equally meaningless, right?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

It's a fair question, if somewhat theoretical since few are going to do it anyway. If we had stopped having children in the 1960s/70s and we had reduced our carbon footprint at the same time.... but we didn't. So here we are.

But in this same vein, I find it somewhat ludicrous for people to be proud of themselves for small acts of green, as if that's going to make a difference, and meanwhile having children. If choosing to have a baby is of negligible value, then re-using your water bottle, or even giving up your car, is equally meaningless, right?

Yes, right.

Whatever benefits may accrue from voluntary "small acts of green," I don't see "long term on the climate crisis" as being among them, unless they're the result of some greater government initiative that encourages everyone to take particular acts to achieve a particular goal (places levy on single-use water bottles, encourages use of alternative fuels for private transport through taxation and legislation, with a known estimate reduction of CO2 and other emissions per year of whatever it is).

Certainly our government here, and I would imagine in most other places too, is forever promoting particular initiatives to reduce our CO2 footprint in various ways, saying they're estimated to contribute so much to our CO2 reduction targets, but that's as part of coordinated government action.

Outside of government action, though, there may well be all sorts of other reasons why people should undertake "small acts of green" and ways in which those small acts can effect important results, including building public awareness and putting pressure on government to act, but I'm not sure that they actually mitigate global heating any, or not directly.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Outside of government action, though, there may well be all sorts of other reasons why people should undertake "small acts of green" and ways in which those small acts can effect important results, including building public awareness and putting pressure on government to act, but I'm not sure that they actually mitigate global heating any, or not directly.

On this we're in full agreement.

I believe that green efforts, and population control as well, offer all sorts of benefits in the short-term, for the quality of life we currently experience. I don't believe those benefits include climate change mitigation. It's way too late in the progression of the climate emergency for these gestures to matter any more.

 

[Beebo Brink]

New record high temperature for Antarctic continent gets official confirmation

The climate crisis is reaching all corners of the globe.

www.cnet.com

 

[Romana]

 

[danielravennest]

I'm sure that, as a statement of a general fact, reducing population growth would help reduce global warming, but I'm finding it difficult to turn that into something specific. How are they going to fill in the numbers and then go about stopping people from having children?

The reliable way to stop having children is to educate women and move to cities. It has happened multiple times in multiple countries.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Evernote link because why not

 

[Beebo Brink]

B.C. heat wave 'cooks' fruit crops on the branch in sweltering Okanagan and Fraser valleys
Up to 75% of some fruits are too damaged to sell fresh, according to farmers

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

The tree outside my window? Most of the leaves are brown and falling off.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

"a team of raccoon and octopus scientists"

I'm already sold on this idea.

 

[Free]

 

[Beebo Brink]

Scientists Studying Temperature at Which Humans Spontaneously Die With Increasing Urgency

"Wet-bulb" conditions are when heat and humidity can cause otherwise healthy humans to overheat and die. They're happening more often than ever.

www.vice.com

Matthew Lewis, director of communications at housing advocacy group California YIMBY, noted in a recent Twitter thread that wet bulb temperatures could soon be a factor at the helm of climate migration.

“Many of the places humans currently live on the planet are on their way to being functionally uninhabitable by humans,” he said. “They will have to move.”

The Twitter thread referenced above is worth the read, too. Here's just one excerpt:

 

[Cindy Claveau]

Study: Northwest heat wave impossible without climate change

An international team of 27 scientists calculated that climate change increased chances of the extreme heat occurring by at least 150 times, but likely much more.

The study, not yet peer reviewed, said that before the industrial era, the region’s late June triple-digit heat was the type that would not have happened in human civilization. And even in today’s warming world, it said, the heat was a once-in-a-millennium event.

But that once-in-a-millennium event would likely occur every five to 10 years once the world warms another 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius), said Wednesday’s study from World Weather Attribution. That much warming could be 40 or 50 years away if carbon pollution continues at its current pace, one study author said.

This type of extreme heat “would go from essentially virtually impossible to relatively commonplace,” said study co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist. “That is a huge change.”