There's that word "just" again. The countries where it's happening don't want to let their people starve; you'd have to make them. You'd have to use military force to guard vast forests all over the world from hundreds of millions of desperate people. Good luck with that.

Does nerve gas harm trees?

This comment, along with many others posted from this account, violate the guidelines for being unsubstantive and flamewar (nerve agent, rather) style. We ban accounts that continue to post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why not nuke metropolitan areas while you're at it? Most of the population is in the coastal cities anyway, who cares about New York, Shanghai or Mumbai. Quick fix. Or force serialization for > 60% of the world population. I mean sure, there are "solutions" but there is ethics to consider too …

I've already suggested in another thread that any 'solution' to global warming that doesn't involve mass genocide will be too slow to have any effect.

Even sterilization might not be quick enough.

Obviously, neither is acceptable from a humanist perspective.

Actually, now that I've read your comment closer, I noticed you mentioned serialization. Do you mean digitizing people's minds and killing them afterwards?

For a start, the cities you list contain many valuable people. Places doing lots of slash-and-burn farming, not so much. My original comment was a bit facetious, but if it is a civilization-ending threat (and I'm not saying it is), better to start the killing sooner when we can control who dies than collapse the whole thing and lose thousands of years of scientific and cultural progress.

By the way, we already do this! We let millions starve to death in squalor already. Why? For the sake of civilization. Or do you think it'd be smart to ship them all over here? Amazing how timid we are about weighing life against life in a controlled fashion when this is already happening every day. We can't even have a little hypothetical chat on the Internet about it.