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Not sure why you emitted this block of text. Let's rewind to what Arne Mooers actually said: Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to d

by temphn 14y ago

Not sure why you emitted this block of text. Let's rewind to what Arne Mooers actually said: Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly. It's rare that it's said so explicitly. But if you can't bring yourself to believe that giving 22 guys the authority to remake the world economy is a bad idea, perhaps you can submit that rapidly killing off billions of people on the basis of a single review article might not be such a great concept.

mkramlich 14y ago
> rapidly killing off billions of people Show us the quote where he said that. You can't because he didn't. This is classic denialist logic. First of all, that statement wasn't in the paper, but in a brief summary. And if you look at the context of it, and the other things said in the paper, the actual details, a more honest interpretation of that summary is that, regarding the climate issue, there would be beneficial effects if we could, say, emigrate out of and therefore de-populate more of the Earth's surface, to let it go back to it's natural state, and/or optimize the density in areas where it would be better for the climate due to system recovery/equilibrium effects, and economic effiencies in the systems that support civilization. And especially reduce the related resource consumption & related emissions due to that, which are the primary impacts, at a system level, of the large human population on the climate and ecosystems. Here's the following sentences in his summary, which you conveniently left out: "More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. " He did NOT say we need to KILL people. Or let them die. Indeed, the whole point of taking action is so that less people will die, and more people can lead better lives than otherwise. There are many ways of literally reducing the population that are relatively benign, such as pushing down on the global birth rate (through birth control or abstinance, for example, to take your pick between liberal-vs-conservative ponies), or in a more high-tech scenario, off-planet colonization (the whole SpaceX, Planetary Resources Inc. model). It's clear that these are scientists looking at systems and the big picture, and being a bit geeky. If you dig into the population numbers and years in their model, many of those "very bad, past sustainable" points are 40 years out and projections based on trends -- that's not overnight so not "quickly" in the layman's sense. Here's a link directly to the actual paper in question. If you can cite or quote something in it explicitly that you think is bullshit, wrong, insane, reckless, etc. (and I'll temporarily overlook the fact that neither you or myself are climate scientists), please reply in a comment with it and I'll consider it: http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...

by temphn 14y ago

mkramlich 14y ago

> rapidly killing off billions of people Show us the quote where he said that. You can't because he didn't. This is classic denialist logic. First of all, that statement wasn't in the paper, but in a brief summary. And if you look at the context of it, and the other things said in the paper, the actual details, a more honest interpretation of that summary is that, regarding the climate issue, there would be beneficial effects if we could, say, emigrate out of and therefore de-populate more of the Earth's surface, to let it go back to it's natural state, and/or optimize the density in areas where it would be better for the climate due to system recovery/equilibrium effects, and economic effiencies in the systems that support civilization. And especially reduce the related resource consumption & related emissions due to that, which are the primary impacts, at a system level, of the large human population on the climate and ecosystems. Here's the following sentences in his summary, which you conveniently left out: "More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. " He did NOT say we need to KILL people. Or let them die. Indeed, the whole point of taking action is so that less people will die, and more people can lead better lives than otherwise. There are many ways of literally reducing the population that are relatively benign, such as pushing down on the global birth rate (through birth control or abstinance, for example, to take your pick between liberal-vs-conservative ponies), or in a more high-tech scenario, off-planet colonization (the whole SpaceX, Planetary Resources Inc. model). It's clear that these are scientists looking at systems and the big picture, and being a bit geeky. If you dig into the population numbers and years in their model, many of those "very bad, past sustainable" points are 40 years out and projections based on trends -- that's not overnight so not "quickly" in the layman's sense. Here's a link directly to the actual paper in question. If you can cite or quote something in it explicitly that you think is bullshit, wrong, insane, reckless, etc. (and I'll temporarily overlook the fact that neither you or myself are climate scientists), please reply in a comment with it and I'll consider it: http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...