Cite please?
> The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
Apparently I'm a hateful person for noticing this discrepancy.
Probably because imposing natality rates would be quite unpopular. Humans tend to think having kids is an inalienable right.
China got away with it because China, but this would not work in other countries.
Imagine that all the people who believed in climate change - globally - committed suicide in some appropriately low-carbon manner. Everyone remaining does not believe in climate change. How long does it take the population to bounce back, and what sort of global warming mitigation do you think happens? Does the world in this thought experiment end up emitting less carbon?
Individual actions might have next to no effect, but institutional actions will. Giving up your opportunity to influence those institutional actions (whether through your own efforts or those of your children) is not beneficial to the environment. Of course, this calculus is different for the average person. But if you're the sort of person who's contemplating suicide to help the environment, you're exactly the sort of person that the world needs to not commit suicide.
Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything.
Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough.
Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain there for thousands of years.
Because of climate lag we are now only seeing the effects from the emissions from the 70s and early 80s. Even in 30-40 years when we can see the effects from our current emissions it will not stop there. There are many self sustaining climatic systems that will have been triggered and will continue to change the climate.
Humanity needs to invest all possible resources into clean energy and carbon sequestration. If we don't go all in during the next decade we are done.