World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

[BethK]

"Hm. We have too many people. Oh, I've a bright idea! Let's wax the lot!"

I've always maintained that 99% of the total world population should be shot for sheer stupidity (starting with the lawyers and politicians)

Actually, reducing the world population from 7 billion to 70 million would be a pretty good idea.

Starting with the lawyers has been suggested before. Willie Shakespeare said in Act 2 King Henry VI "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".

Some of you have the subtlety of a garbage truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant.

Why thank you!

Both sides of this are pretty disingenuous. The Christians with their evident hatred for contraception as well as abortion, and their "quiverfull" movement, shows that they are right on board with overbreeding humankind, while insisting, as their Bible says, they are the stewards of the earth - of God's creation. The green movement, or the ecology movement continues to have children, and are still leaving a huge footprint as compared to our ancestors.

So if you have children, calling for limits on population growth is disingenuous? Preposterous. Scale - you've no sense of.

Actually, the way to slow population growth is to START with limiting the number of children YOU have. Children are born one at a time, not millions or billions at a time. Anyone with the technology to them where they could possibly read this board are in the upper echelon of consumers, and thus their/our children would use more than children of primitive tribes.

There's something wrong with someone saying, "YOU need to limit the number of children you have.", while the person making that statement has children, they are unlikely to be taken seriously, or be labeled a bigot, or be labeled with supporting eugenics, then compounded with argumentum ad Hitlerum.

No Moros...I think BethK is just pointing out the hypocrisy of both sides. Which is basically my main point of angst.

You've got the main point. BOTH sides of the debate have a good deal of hypocrisy, which means that essentially nothing happens to stem the tide of population.

All this crap by governments to "reduce green house gases" is just ...
1. Doing to little to late (as padraic has stated)
2. Doing diddly squat to ACTUALLY reducing CO2 via legislation as others
have queried
3. Ignores the pollution issue and goes no where to addressing that
4. Relies on 'revenge' factor towards Big Corporations to get the average
Joe Schmo on board
5. So that the average Joe Schmo can be taxed even more.

And agreed.... the planet SHOULD have done something about this Pollution issue long before this. There have been inroads into reducing emissions..right now (here) we are finding that the current Diesel motors have a much lower footprint and emissions than say the LNG powered heavy-vehicles.

Still can't understand why we (Australia) don't have a huge Solar Power plant in each state.... then again there would be all those involved in BAU electricity production out of work and begging off the government.

Yes Moros...the scale is HUGE

You've got it. Something should have been done long ago, but everyone was extremely tied up with "us" having to give up more than "you" or "them". In reality, this is a problem for all of us.

At this point, continuing to burn fossil fuels - by anybody - for any reason - anywhere, is contributing to a problem, which it might be too late to fix at all.

Suppose something were to happen that would reduce the population by a large amount 90% or 99%. Yeah, nature would take care of all that "rotting flesh", although it would be something of a biohazard for the survivors for a period of time. We've got other problems, especially with chemical and biological waste being contained in some ways, buried in other ways, and it was in hope that somebody in the future could come up with an effective way to handle such waste. The containers won't last forever, and population could be too low or no one will know how to maintain the containers. And, it leaks out creating another problem up the road.

Active nuclear plants will also have some major problems, without sufficient people with sufficient tools or abilities to adequately man or control them.

Note that knowledge won't be lost, assuming this is something that only effects humans - such as a disease. Libraries will exist, information on computer disks will exist (for a period of time), and different people could learn the information.

For more of my upbeat look at the future, see cynics4bettertomorrow.org - or the blog on that.