Global Warming is teh TRUTH

[Beckwin]

Also has to do with having enough kids to take care of you when you're old/help you do agricultural work.

[guartz]

So it all boils down to arbitrary ethics.

good job BG forums.

[RustyMetal]

I'm with the George Carlin school-of-thought. Humans are extremely arrogant to believe that we could, in 150 years, fuck up what nature took millions to perfect. We are a self-destructive species, deal with it. If the ozone doesn't kill us, the nukes will or the diseases, or the overpopulation, or cyborgs or something.

This is true. Humans are more of a threat to humans then the environment will ever be. I don't think overpopulation will become a problem. I mean when the last time you heard of a wild animal with cancer?

[Enkidu]

Why even quote me since you answered your own fault? Education is one of the problems, and who is in charge of education? The family of 8 that lives in a hut?

And they have more children for a multitude of reasons, raging from cultural, and as you've already stated, decease, if, as you've sead, their kids die every 2 seconds, then they are going to have as many as possible to make up for it. Of course, this all ties into economics and the lack of stabel government. So without these two being strong and stable, you have short life span and poor education, all which will lead to having more children as a response. You were trying to apply a 1st world point of view to a 3rd.

Because I didn't make a mistake. I never said that people in 3rd world countries were stupid, I clearly said "maybe they'll learn". Fact is that you can't say "they have more children for X reason", since they can't care for that child. People who have 8 kids in Idaho because they need a large family to help with potato farming is not the same as people who have 8 kids in Africa and 5 of them die from starvation before they're 10 years old. If they're having more children to "replace" the ones that died of starvation, then they are stupid. Honestly that concept is just retarded.

Of course the reason why they can't care for their children is tied into global economics and things like that, but that has nothing to do with why they're having so many children they can't care for.

[Atlasion]

Because I didn't make a mistake. I never said that people in 3rd world countries were stupid, I clearly said "maybe they'll learn". Fact is that you can't say "they have more children for X reason", since they can't care for that child. People who have 8 kids in Idaho because they need a large family to help with potato farming is not the same as people who have 8 kids in Africa and 5 of them die from starvation before they're 10 years old. If they're having more children to "replace" the ones that died of starvation, then they are stupid. Honestly that concept is just retarded.

Of course the reason why they can't care for their children is tied into global economics and things like that, but that has nothing to do with why they're having so many children they can't care for.

So you're saying they'll learn not to have too many children? These families need to have children to care for them when the parents grow old. As you said, a child dies about every 2 seconds from starvation. With the poverty they live in they probably cant afford to support themselves, let alone a child. I don't see how you can claim that having multiple children is retarded. Not only is multiple children not the reason for their poverty, but it also helps them when the parent grows old and needs caring for.

The concept of having lots of children due to high infant mortality rate is not even a new one. It was the same in Western countries before the industrial revolution (I think someone mentioned this already).

[Charla]

The concept of having lots of children due to high infant mortality rate is not even a new one. It was the same in Western countries before the industrial revolution (I think someone mentioned this already).

That works when the infant mortality rate is high due to disease or something, but less so in a famine. The historically high rates of disease/war/natural disaster/whatever presumably led to the high birth rates, which have yet to change to account for modern medicine and other sources of higher survivability as they have in the west. Overpopulation is naturally the result.

[Kuya]

The historically high rates of disease/war/natural disaster/whatever presumably led to the high birth rates

However, i'd like to add to this that high birth rates do not equal high population.

[Ivve]

All I see is alot of "If's". And all of them are true, IF they happen. I hope we do find cleaner fuels and use alternative energy sources. I hope you save money on your electric bill. That doesn't change the fact that the world will be over over-populated by 2050 and viable food sources (as we know them) will be scarce. So your ifs dont change the fact that society will not be able to sustain itself at the current status quo.

That's kind of the point. There really are a good deal of viable solutions right now, or that are being developed and can be implemented. The problem is that people just don't feel like doing those things. They have the exact attitude you described: Oh we're fucked anyway, so let's just give up.

As for overpopulation and fighting over food in the future, that has nothing to do with the environment or anything I said. It's an entirely separate problem that could also be solved if we just had the desire to solve it, rather than the attitude that it's too bad to do anything about. If anything, we'll war over food and/or resources until enough of the population dies to get us in check. It's not like there are 100 pounds of rice here and 1000 people, and everyone is going to die. The 900 people that don't get a pound of rice will die of starvation, and there's still a remaining population of people who do get fed. Fuck, the world is overpopulated right now and people die as a result. That doesn't mean we're going anywhere.

[Atlasion]

As for overpopulation and fighting over food in the future, that has nothing to do with the environment or anything I said. It's an entirely separate problem that could also be solved if we just had the desire to solve it, rather than the attitude that it's too bad to do anything about. If anything, we'll war over food and/or resources until enough of the population dies to get us in check. It's not like there are 100 pounds of rice here and 1000 people, and everyone is going to die. The 900 people that don't get a pound of rice will die of starvation, and there's still a remaining population of people who do get fed. Fuck, the world is overpopulated right now and people die as a result. That doesn't mean we're going anywhere.

Well it is kinda linked. We're getting cases now where large areas of land that were once used for food production are now being used for biofuels instead. Growing biofuels requires larger plots of land to produce a decent amount of potential energy. So whilst people are starving in developing countries, we're growing crops to keep our energy production up. Of course, we have a surplus of food that we could give to them anyway. So producing less food in the developed countries at the moment is not going to make much of a difference to them. That being said, its never going to be us who are disadvantaged from a lack of food. Over population is only really a problem in developing countries so its going to be them who die from a lack of food, not us.

[Acturus]

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html? ... 905363&p=1

This thread turned me on to the debate over global warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_McIntyre