I called this 'dumb' above because you can reliably see such threads deteriorate as you read down and to the right.

One option would be to listen & learn rather than expressing incredulity, assume that dang knows what he's doing and that you're getting downvoted by others for a legitimate reason.

The topic of American consumption is fascinating and important, but this article is about Puffins in Iceland. @dang didn't say it's dumb, he said it leads to dumb. But he did say it was off-topic, because it is. Don't assume that off-topic means dumb, don't take it personally.

FWIW, I think there are relevant on-topic ways to introduce topics of overpopulation and American consumption into this thread. Those are related to both the climate change and to the tourism and Puffin hunting that is affecting the Puffin populations in Iceland.

If you had tied your comment to something the article said specifically, it would have helped. And, of course, you really could have done without the apocalyptic suggestion for a mass human extinction event.

That said, they should probably slow down on the hunting until they've worked out what's going on.

Based on my interests and background, I have very little faith that humanity appreciates the scale of the problem, how intractable it is to short term resolution, and potentially how many people globally could die as a result of it. For example, I think there's a really substantial probability that all people could die within 50 years, because of 1) where climate change is likely to hit worst 2) the desperate nature of famine 3) the number of nuclear armed states in those areas 4) the number of automated counterstrike mechanisms out there.

So, get your cheap laughs in about the puffins while you can.

edit: To support my negativity, I will just say look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857964 to see how complicated something as trivial as building a house is... now, I cannot tell you how to avert global warming, but I can tell you that I have almost no faith at all any given poster here knows what is actually needed to successfully do a climate intervention or durable carbon sequestration program (materials, supply chain, technology, poltical coordination, etc). Another post on here notes we can't even agree to have fewer kids. It's very dire, and very few people seem to appreciate it. For example, the elected leader of the world's largest economy has already reversed policies that reduce CO2 emission and plans on reducing more, and has severely limited research on the subject.

I am 54, married (just celebrated our 23rd anniversary), and childless by choice.

Your move.

And yet, Europe and Japan have plenty of childless people.

If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.

"Population growth has been slowing"

Which of course means it is still growing. How many decades ago should it have started to fall in order to avoid catastrophic climate change or the incessant stream of environmental bad news and loss of species?

No one should feel obligated to sacrifice themselves. They should feel obligated to replicate less if they want their own children to inhabit somewhere worth living.

If only 10,000 people were living an American lifestyle the planet would cope just fine. When it's 1bn it seems like it's clearly becoming problematic. What of when it's 3bn?

If, as seems to be the case, there are 7bn who want, or are advertised at to want, a throwaway Western lifestyle, we're screwed. All 7bn. We can't pretend the numbers are not there or that most are going to happily remain with subsistence lives for all future generations.

It's probably more feasible to make larger families unfashionable or nudge them via the tax system than simply "fixing" climate change globally, habit and species loss.

Misleading phrasing...

"World population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new UN DESA report, “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision”, launched today."

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-r...

Really though we don't need to kill / sterilize all humans, getting off the planet could work just fine.

Err, no. The growth of log(x) is always decreasing and yet it always stays positive. This is true for a huge range of functions and one of the reasons limits are important.

Now, you can argue that the way human growth is slowing suggests it might possibly go negative at some point. But, that's less obvious.

At best we are predicting a peak human population 30+ years from now and those kind of predictions are never very accurate. Further, even if that's one peak it says very little about human population 100's or 1,000's of years from now.