A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children
Ihad the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”
Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.
…
An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”
Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
And 30 years before that. And 30 years before that.
I mean, if you don’t want to have kids more power to you. I get it.
But what I’m reading is far more a consequence of a social stigma against having kids without sufficient economic independence. And extraordinary rates of inflation in housing, food, health care, and education make kids utterly unaffordable even if the climate situation looks great.
“We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”
I think that’s true up until a point. When I see the genocide in Gaza or forced sterilization policies aimed at black and Hispanic women in police custody in the US or caste violence in India or Myanmar or the Bill Gates Foundation’s effort to quash population size in West Africa…
What values are we transmitting when we’ve got a policy of eugenics? What does it say about the western impulse to homogenize and euthanize everything it comes into contact with?
I can very easily see a world in which the impulse towards mass extermination gets us before the heat pushes us all into the upper reaches of Canada and Russia. And I’m loathe to see anti-natalism harnessed as one more tool in the bigot’s bag of tricks, to justify why a population with high birth rates is an efficient target for population rightsizing.
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1/5th is low, and doesn’t appear very different to the general female population.
This really just highlights the underlying problem and why our “efforts” are destined to amount to little more than shuffling deck chairs on the titanic — humans are selfish, and most of us are not willing to make major sacrifices to avert disaster; hell, most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.
due to the environmental crises afflicting the world
You’re removing the context behind the reasoning. Unless you’re claiming 1/5th of the general female population does not want to have kids due to climate change as well.
I was referring to the general female population not having kids for any reason.
A quick search resulted in articles indicating that the average for the 21st century is somewhere between 1/6 - 1/9 around the developed world. One would expect the people most aware of how fucked the future will be would be dramatically less likely to expose their own children to that — not 20-80% less likely.
most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.
This is the really jaw dropping thing whenever I see it. I just have no idea what to say and don’t get how people don’t have an instinct for when there might be a bigger picture.
Some are really cruising through life just trying to maximise convenience and comfort.
COVID lockdowns demonstrated that we could kick climate change with enough will power. Id start by mandating work from home where possible.
COVID lockdowns weren’t sustainable and while they reduced pollution to some extent they didn’t come close to eliminating it. Like in my country we turned off coal, but only because we don’t have much coal to begin with. We were still using plenty of gas power, as that’s our second largest energy source. Here in the UK our largest energy source is Wind, and we aren’t even doing that well compared to France or Spain on the energy front.
Things also still got manufactured and sold, and that’s where a lot of pollution comes from. Food and goods production. Eliminating transport pollution would help for sure, but it’s like 14% of the problem. Electricity generation, heating, and agriculture are the things we need to fix the most. Fixing electricity generation would also help with transport emissions as we could use more electric vehicles and trains.
Exactly so.
Is that really surprising to you?
humans are selfish, and most of us are not willing to make major sacrifices to avert disaster
I am sick and tired of this cynical bullshit argument. It’s wrong in two ways (and neither are the way you think):
- It assumes that we have to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce our fossil fuels consumption, instead of innovating
- It presumes that the lifestyle changes that we do have to make (e.g. higher density zoning and walkablity) represent some kind of deprivation, rather than the improvement they would actually be.
Something something literally Idiocracy (2006)
At least the president in Idocracy had the humility and self awareness let the smartest guy in the room advise him on policy.
I donno, you really think that guy was that smart? He wanted to give plants water. Like, you know, what is in the toilet.
Seriously. Plants crave Brawndo.
Yeah, you quote that meme! Don’t go having any original thoughts there champ!
Hmmm, what would Krishnamurti do?
+ Don’t look up
“Current policies alone likely keep warming below 3°C (5.4°F), nowhere near the “worst-case” scenarios.”
- Dr Michael Mann, rather well-known climate scientist
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/202310/backpage.cfm
So only most of us die instead of all of us?
You might want to read the article. Doomism isn’t climate science.
you might wanna read the article.
We can avoid catastrophic climate impacts if we take meaningful actions to address the climate crisis. Yes, that’s an important “if.”
this asshole buried the actual crux of the issue way deep in the fluff. these two sentences contradict the headline.
which part of what is currently happening in the world is making you pretend that the “if” qualification is being even remotely met?
The whole point of the article (written by Mann) is that the policies already in place keeps us below 3 degrees.
Regarding your “currently happening”, this quote seems fitting:
“I often encounter, especially on social media, individuals who are convinced that the latest extreme weather event is confirmation that the climate crisis is far worse than we thought, and scientists and climate communicators are intentionally “hiding” the scary truth from the public. It is the sort of conspiratorial thinking that we used to find among climate change deniers, but increasingly today we see it with climate doomists.”
Do you consider yourself better educated on climate science than Mann?
point of order, madam speaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
I do appear to have better reading comprehension than Mann expected from his audience. otherwise he wouldn’t have have tried something underhanded like that.
tell me, do you place value in peer review and consensus when it comes to science? you know Mann is out of step with scientific consensus in his view, yeah? I am inclined to believe you’ve cherry picked the one opinion piece which affirms a pre-existing perspective on your part.
also I adore that you completely failed to acknowledge a direct question I posed to you: which part of what is happening in the world right now is causing you to behave like Mann’s “if” condition is fulfilled in any way whatsoever? I want an answer from you in your own words. don’t quote an appeal to authority again.
Nobel prize-winning climate scientist
“Current policies alone likely keep warming below 3°C (5.4°F), nowhere near the “worst-case” scenarios.”
Dr Michael Mann, rather well-known climate scientist
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/202310/backpage.cfm
3 degrees Celsius is already social collapse type of threateningly bad. Sure, we might not go extinct (aka the “worst case”, although tipping points could bring us the rest of the way there), but that doesn’t mean we’ll enjoy any sort of comfortable and stable life. We’d see major food and water shortages, we’d see terrible weather events such as prolonged droughts and massive flooding, we’d see vast areas of the equator becoming unlivable hellscapes, we’d see hundreds of thousands climate refugees, we’d see hundreds of thousands climate fatalities, we’d see exploding prices in every single sector, we’d see civil unrest dismantling the very fabric of our societies.
So maybe inform yourself what those 3 degrees would actually mean for the world.
You might want to read the article. Doomism isn’t climate science.
Highly ironic considering of your cherry picking and hiding of the truth. The author very much points out that the hope there is if we finally take action, consequently limiting us to not even reach those 3 degrees Celsius, which so far is still not happening.
We can avoid catastrophic climate impacts if we take meaningful actions to address the climate crisis.
But frankly, what you’re doing is even worse, because you simply call everyone a “doomer” who literally just wants the world to take the proper action needed to tackle this crisis, to even properly ACKNOWLEDGE this crisis. None of this is happening. Just because I think we’re fucked, does not mean I am not doing my part. My footprint is ridiculously small even compared to your average one person household, and there’s a lot of people in the middle and upper class who live so much worse due to their lavish lifestyles.
As the article correctly points out, 3 C warming is still really fucking bad. Just because it can technically be worse and we won’t all die does not mean it’ll be nice to live through. Bringing about the extinction of 29% of all species is madness. To quote the article:
“The most comprehensive and authoritative assessment of risk across all sectors — health, food, water, conflict, poverty, and the natural ecosystem — by the IPCC in 2018 basically concluded that we don’t want to warm the planet beyond 1.5°C (2.7°F), and we really don’t want to warm it beyond 2°C (3.6°F). And if we do happen to overshoot those targets, we want to keep the duration of overshoot to a minimum.”
yeah and this is through the narrow lens of just temperature. If there was no climate change we would still be pretty effed up due to habitat loss and pollution and such. Climate change is just sorta a knock on effect.
What’s with all the climate science deniers here downvoting a statement from an actual climate scientist … !?
It’s because we have brains and can read further than the headline 🤷🏻♀️
you’re trying too hard. read the article again, this author is lying to you.
“this author” being Dr Michael Mann, climate scientist.
Why do you claim Mann is lying?
Mann being a human being who is not infallible, yes that Mann.
I am the same person from the other thread where I quoted to you the the bit in the article where Mann does intellectual dishonesty.
giving your opinion piece a clickbait and dishonest headline, and then burying two sentences deep in the body of the text which contradict your headline, is incompetent at best and corrupt at worst.
Hey I found this cool post from that guy you’re quoting.
lol… so wait, what you’re saying is, believers of the climate change doomsday scenario are less likely to have kids?
Climate change is real! And we only have 20 years left… again. And again. And again… Annnnd again.
Bruh, we practically only have 2 seasons where I live now.
I always thought my children, if I’d have them, might die a horrible death due to climate change.
Now, knowing that humanity with climate change in mind, only increased spewing CO2 in to the atmosphere, I think I actually eillmdie a horrible death due to climate change.
The no children thing for the climate is multiple generations too late already.
Also, keep the idiocracy effect in mind. Only the good and caring people decide not to have children, the idiots and selfish assholes will have ten for them.
As an adoptive parent of two kids from foster care, I know this is biased. And actually now that I’ve got a few years of parenting kids with trauma under my belt I actually think most people shouldn’t take on this challenge, because they actually wouldn’t be able to handle it. That said, I think that’s the only real way to counter the idiocracy effect. Adopt kids of the least responsible people to those who are most responsible. It’s mostly an opt-in, self selecting process that generally only moves things in the right direction. It’s also not really enough to actually offset the problem as a whole.
Still a good thing for folks to pursue though.
no or fewer children
So… they killed other people’s children?
Fewer than they otherwise would have had.
Gotta fight climate change somehow
Climate scientists out here doing 40+ week abortions.
Adopting counts as -1?
Starting
Lol
“We’ll figure it out in time. Even the oligarchs can’t be that greedy and short sighted.”
Yeeaah, that is what I thought too, 25 years ago, when we still could make a difference.
Now we’re in it and we’re only going harder. Gotta get richer sooner!
1/5th want no or fewer kids… so 4/5 were pushing forward like normal.
Ohe of the 4/5. I have 3 kids under 13. You gotta.be optimistic that they’re the generation to finally fix the mess we made.
If everyone stops having kids then hope disappears.
When we have exhausted all other options, we will do the right thing.
Edit - I love that having hope and optimism for a future is downvotes lol
I’d say they are accelerating! Gotta make up for the people choosing reality.
lmao ‘starting’ ?? I believe starting should have been done years ago.
Reminds me of this South Park clip XD (youtube link)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Title could have said majority of millennials
I think the opinions of experts are more relevant than the trends of a generation.
Also consider that many millennials are having fewer children because of the rising cost of living. Personal, rather than worldwide circumstances.
… “starting” feels like a horrible word to use in this context, in my humble opinion. Not as bad as not thinking about it tho.
You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world
For threatenin’ my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain’t worth the blood That runs in your veins
Oh no! Think of the hypothetical children!
This is a powerful lyric from the song masters of war by bob dylan.
It is a song about how the Rich and powerful use and abuse normal people as Grist for the war mill or in this case Grist for the oil mill.
How the fuck is this being downvoted?
Because on face value it looks like an anti-abortion lyric.
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I personally don’t see how. But this is probably the correct answer. Cheers.
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Because everyone is shit now
I didn’t recognize it.
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Well five people recognized it anyway.
Apparently the others didn’t bother to read it.
The population is actually tipped to massively reduce on the next 100 years due to a large portion of people not have babies simply due to crappy economic conditions, inflation, war the lying flat movement in china and the ever increasing destruction of the middle class into the homeless poor. Aside from rich people destroying peoples ability to have happy lives, there’s also the plastic problem that’s quite literally made every male living thing have a reduced sperm count and it continues to drop as plastic is in the air, our clothes carpet and oceans. Endocrine disruptors in our bodies are being effected by chemicals found in vinyl products, thermal receipts and Tupperware releasing chemicals when heated in microwaves. These things are so small they enter the bloodstream and pass through the blood brain barrier… Fuuuck
So if you want to save the future start by sniping off rich oligarchs and ban plastic completely
It’ll start to level off around 10 billion, in 35 years.
The thing about a growing population is that fewer people having babies has a diminished effect when there are so many more people. Each new pair having a slightly smaller chance of reproducing doesn’t matter when there are twice as many new pairs.
The population won’t decrease dramatically, save for some catastrophic event.
The population very well might drop suddenly. Clearly that 10B is too many, but what happens after that. Some projections have a very steep decline, looking at developed countries approach an average closer to one child instead of closer to replacement value. What happens when most of those 10B age then pass, but there are only 5B to replace them? In the time of one generation, we could see a very serious depopulation in places
i agree with your general idea, but not with all the reasons. war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before (and much worse that the current situation), but I’ve never heard that there were large portion of people choosing not to have kids before (please, correct me if I am wrong)
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before
And they’ve all been paired with downturns in new births. The Thirty Years War, the Bengali Famine, and the Great Depression all resulted in sharp declines in birth rates.
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
I don’t think its limited to mental health. Two big changes from historical periods have been the sharp decline in dying kids and introduction of effective contraception. Historically, the only thing that countered a human’s innate horniness was malnutrition, massacre, and high rates of infant mortality. With vaccines and contraception, the idea of family planning isn’t “Have five kids and hope two live” but “Have two kids and hope you can pay for their college”.
A big contribution to the 40s-era Baby Boom was the fertilizer revolution, which dramatically boosted crop yields. This, combined with early vaccine technology, saw a drop in maternal deaths and infant deaths, leading to parents with enormous family sizes who all lived to adulthood. These adults arrived just in time to start taking The Pill. Consequently, the Millennial second-tier Boom was much smaller than the first. And now Millennials are having even fewer kids, because contraception is trivial to obtain and large families are stigmatized against.
But as to mental health? I think that’s tangential and hardly unique to the modern moment. If we didn’t have fertilizer and contraception and vaccination, we’d have just as many mentally ill people running around and making babies who died before they turned three years old. And the population downturn would look the same as any other 18th or 19th century trend line.
i think another factor is that we are reaching or have maybe surpassed the earth’s carrying capacity for humans, which is only going to get worse with climate change. in the past, more kids also meant more labor and there was still lots of land to colonize and spread into with those extra people. but we already have more than enough people and no realistic places left to expand.
but we already have more than enough people and no realistic places left to expand.
…in the current economic model. Currently we have enough built housing and grow enough food globally and produce enough consumer goods that ever single person can be fed, clothed and shelter. But the wealthiest few would rather crops rot in fields, hoard houses to extract rent and burn unsold clothing instead of slightly lowering ther profit margins.
i totally agree, i didn’t quite state it but was basing my comment in the status quo. without being able to personally change the world’s economic model, one has to make decisions in the context of the current one.
The earths carrying capacity thing is old eugenic nonsense.
I mean, yes eugenicits have used carrying capacity in bad faith arguments. But why do the same and discount carrying capacity entirely?
TLDR: carrying capacity has been used by eugenicists in bad-faith arguments, but the finite nature of Earthly resources is a fact; ignoring it entirely makes any counter-argument against eugenics inherently flawed and weaker. When paired with the uncertainty created by human invention and potential extra-planitary resources, carrying capacity can be acknowledged as fact but effectively caveated, and instead debate can be shifted away from absolute limits on resources we are unlikely to hit, and to the much more important matter of the distribution of resources.
There is a finite amount of stuff in/on this little space-ball we call home. Some of that stuff is more rare, and some of it we need more of. There are physical limits to resources on Earth and I think it is fair to acknowledge that as well as helpful to avoid being wasteful with those resources or blind to the disparity of how they are distributed. Not acknowledging such a clear fact instantly gives the people using carrying capacity in an argument ammo to support their other non-factual claims and discount any other claims you make because you made this clearly unfactual claim about carrying capacity being just a made-up thing.
However, no other earthly species is as adept as humans at modifying their environment and the way they use resources. We find new ways to use resources, or replace resources entirely. See anyone using whale oil for lamps anymore? Nope, we changed what resources we need by advancing our lighting and power technology. We can’t determine carrying capacity for humans on Earth because we don’t know the limits of our ability to invent and adapt.
Also, at some point people have the potential to get off our home rock and start exploiting resources on other space-balls. The actual carrying capacity for Earth suddenly becomes meaningless. Will we make it that far as a species? I donno, but the possibility needs to be considered when discussing carrying capacity.
Much more important than carrying capacity is the distribution of resources. Currently, our resource distribution systems are incredibly inequitable and wasteful. As other have pointed out in this thread, at current capacity the resources we extract could address the basic needs of all humans many times over. It’s a human issue that we don’t do that, and that we polute/waste/etc, not an environmental/system capacity issue. We have improved these systems in the past, and we could improve them going forward.
Have them. Just raise them to be resilient little cockroaches.
Or better yet, adopt!
