Pure unmitigated gall!

What makes snert thing that people living on $2 a day would be able to spend $3 a day on contraceptives? Or take out a mortgage on the family bullock for $200 to get the tubes tied in a private hospital?

Maybe they should just cut their own nuts off...

Honestly, snert, sometimes your ignorance is simply too appalling to be believed. If you think most of those women who end up with 5-8 mouths that they now have to find food for actually want another mouth to feed, or have any say about who shares their bed at night, with or without violence, then you haven't done enough thinking to earn your next meal.

zalm

And just how much do contraceptives really cost?

Why would I bother to think when you do such a crappy job for me. Go back and read what you wrote and then let me know just who it was that came up with such drivel.

Overpopulation is a major problem. All I suggested was that it not be ignored and further to that, in the grand scheme of things it ranks higher than climate change as a problem that needs a solution.

Hmmm, you seem to have become what it is you think you are trying to prevent.

$15-35 a month in India

$90-150 a month in South Africa

Overpopulation is but one symptom of the real problem which is inequity. Fix that and the population problems vanish like Quebec in the 1960s.

You obviously haven't travelled any further in the world than your corner store and no conception of what the world is really like for the 2.3 billion who live daily on the change you drop on the floor after buying your beer'n'smokes.

The very little I've seen is shocking, and it included some death too. For you to blame consequential actions of poor people elsewhere in the world to salve the conscience of your addiction to comfort is inexcusable.

Still talking countries?

Money has no flag. Lemmee fix that for ya: " Rich people must take the lead in fixing climate"

zalm

Once again with the specifics when I'm generalizing. I fail to see how you actually have the grasp on reality that you claim.

Overpopulation, both present and future, is and will be of serious concern. Fixing the inequities in life is only one part of the overall solution.

Any area with a high population density could be said to be overpopulated regardless of the financial status of it's population.

There's no easy solution to this problem and that's a given but it's no reason to totally ignore it and fixate on climate change.

I would suggest that any travelling that you may have done has not removed the perceptual blinkers you seem to be wearing.

Oh, and just how do you suggest that the inequities in life get rebalanced and at what point do you think equilibrium should be declared?

First of all, there is nothing to fix

Rising CO2 has had little or no effect on temperature, but the biosphere certainly likes it. For plants, more is better. Everything is growing faster.

You bet your sweet ass, I'm "addicted to comfort", and anybody who tries to make me feel guilty about it has a hidden agenda.

http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/greening/pressrelease.php

"1. The productivity of the planet's terrestrial biosphere, on the whole, has been increasing with time, revealing a great greening of the Earth that extends throughout the entire globe.
- Satellite-based analyses of net terrestrial primary productivity (NPP) reveal an increase of around 6-13% since the 1980s.
2. There is no empirical evidence to support the model-based IPCC claim that future carbon uptake by plants will diminish on a global scale due to rising temperatures. In fact, just the opposite situation has been observed in the real world.
- Earth's land surfaces were a net source of CO2-carbon to the atmosphere until about 1940. From 1940 onward, however, the terrestrial biosphere has become, in the mean, an increasingly greater sink for CO2-carbon.

- Over the past 50 years, for example, global carbon uptake has doubled from 2.4 ± 0.8 billion tons in 1960 to 5.0 ± 0.9 billion tons in 2010.3. There is compelling evidence that the atmosphere's rising CO2 content - which the IPCC considers to be the chief reason behind all of their concerns about the future of the biosphere (via the indirect threats they claim it poses as a result of CO2-induced climate change) - is actually most likely the primary cause of the observed greening trends.

4. In the future, Earth's plants should be able to successfully adjust their physiology to accommodate a warming of the magnitude and rate-of-rise that is typically predicted by climate models to accompany the projected future increase in the air's CO2 content. And factoring in the plant productivity gains that will occur as a result of the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2, plus its accompanying transpiration-reducing effect that boosts plant water use efficiency, the world's vegetation possesses an ideal mix of abilities to reap a tremendous benefit in the years and decades to come."

UN Climate Change Ruse

Climate change, at best can only be accommodated. If we shut down every car, train and bus in the whole world, and turned out most of the lights, perhaps and only perhaps, the rate of climate change might slow a little bit. The UN gambit is all about richer successful nations paying money to non-successful nations, in the name of climate change. It is the attempt of wealth transfer through guilt. Tax the rich and give it to those who have not earned it. Ever hear that before, locally or nationally, and where did it get us. The UN climate schemes go far beyond providing a reasonable social safety net and financial aid. It is the politics of envy, resentment and projecting of blame. Behind the UN climate change, is the political push of forced wealth transfer. On the science side, the best they say we can do, is to stop putting non-biodegradable chemicals into the atmosphere and the ground, and learn to live with less of an environmental footprint. The climate politics of the UN is primarily about money, and not about the environment.

Consumption is the issue

Snert, you want to drive down population, then support equal rights for women and education for girls. But population is not the issue, consumption is. Somebody from North America consumes 30 to 40 times as much as somebody from South Asia. That renders the carbon footprint of two North American children as the equivalent of 60 to 80 South Asian children. There are lots of North American families with two children, and no South Asian families with even 60 children.

That means, Snert, that we are the problem.

Anyway, the climate effects of carbon are cumulative over time. Since we in the West launched the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere from then until now continues to warm the planet. That means that the carbon contribution of a tiny country population-wise like Canada, what with consumption, industrialization and deforestation, is probably not much different from the carbon contribution of a megacountry like India simply because they haven't been polluting nearly as long or nearly as effectively.

Bottom line, the West caused the problem, the West should lead in solving it.

the earth is not a linear system

climate is by definition 'changing'. it is only the brief time available to individual humans to sample that would have us think of climate as something stable so that after 40 years of not seeing a warming, we find the warming to be 'a departure from OUR NORM'. if we could live for a few hundred years, we would have seen the prairies as a place too dry for agriculture; e.g. "Palliser's Triangle is a largely semi-arid steppe region in the Prairie Provinces of Western Canada that was determined to be unsuitable for agriculture because of its unfavourable climate" in 1857.

as for carbon entering the earth-system, it does not accumulate, but moves on through into plants and into sea animals and precipitates. e.g. the white cliffs of dover contain the carbon in limestone (calcium carbonate) that the ocean precipitated after it had absorbed it from the atmosphere and reduced the CO2 concentration therein.

christy has his facts straight. Ban's statement is representative of a religion, not science.

FatherTheo

How is this a problem that the "west" has created. I have absolutely no issue with equal rights for women but and here's the big but it is not a western problem hence any population reduction must come from within the countries where overpopulation exists. Sounds like a job for the UN and a job that might be more important than blaming the west for climate change. The over crowding of the plant is a growing concern whether the climate warms or not.

Many times, in this forum, I have used numbers that show that even though lower per capita production of greenhouse gases exists in many countries the population densities of those countries can simply overwhelm an changes that we as Canadians make to our own consumption.

Sorry, FT, but when you use the word "we" please remember to exclude Canada as a nation from you example. We may be part of the "west" but we, because of our low population density, are not anywhere near the top of the heap of destroyers of the planet. In essence we have earned the right to a higher energy consumption without guilt by keeping our population density in check, intentionally or otherwise.

Although Zalm tried to drag our conversation down his particular path he did mention one point that is very germane to the whole issue of population moderation and that is the changes that have taken place in Quebec since the tossing aside of the yoke of an oppressive religion. This has everything to do with your "equal rights for women and education for girls".

Now, let me know when you are willing to go to war against those religions that oppress, not only women and children but men as well and I will buy your gun. As it stands this is not and never will be a western problem other than at some point in time we may very well get overwhelmed.

World population, the other elephant in the room that not everybody wishes to acknowledge. I believe it is the bigger of the two.

97% Believe

Science or belief? Truth is not democratic.

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." - Galileo Galilei, contrarian astronomer.

the 97% prefer clean logic

The 97% is a measure of the proportion of ‘linear thinkers’ in science. a linear thinker is a person that divides everything up into independent parts and uses clean logic to makes predictions based on the parts. take the male for example, the linear thinker starts from the assumption that the male is a ‘thing-in-itself’. one can combine this with the observation that males are capable of producing not only more valuable labour than women but more children than women (by impregnating multiple females). the fastest way to ‘grow a dynasty’ is for the patriarch to abort females born into the family and maximize the production of males. the females are like ‘weeds in the family garden’.

the clean logic that assumes that the male is a ‘thing-in-itself’ does not understand that while this tactic will work for a while, it runs into the fact that in order to make more males, more females are needed. linear thinking does not acknowledge that the things we are producing are consuming the means of their production. Monsanto’s roundup-ready genetically engineered (GMO) alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, sugarbeets, wheat work on the same principle of aborting the weeds to maximize production of ‘the more valuable plants’ [to our anthropocentric capitalist economy]. those plants we called ‘weeds’ are meanwhile participants in sustaining the health of the soil-ecosystem, something that is needed to ‘make more valuable foodcrops’. linear thinking is like trying to fit a line to a curve. it works for the first little bit and then the ‘predicted’ diverges from the ‘actual’.

CO2 is not a ‘thing-in-itself’. carbon and oxygen move through nature taking on many different forms as they do. plants consume it, water absorbs it, glaciers and permafrost kidnap it, sea animals digest and excrete it, acids form from it and are neutralized and salts incorporate it; i.e. it is included in a self-buffering ecosystem. 97% of scientists like to use clean logic to keep things simple and linear. corporate interests (the source of paychecks and university research funding) demands it.