Oh, it’s worse than that. We may have fucked the planet and all life on it.
Anything that is in motion - like the climate - has an “inertia”.
In past warming events, the planetary ecosystem was able to migrate across thousands of kilometers to provide “resistance” to that inertia, because said climate changes were happening across tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Our current changes are happening in 0.01% of the time.
That means it has massive inertia, and there is far too little time for carbon-sequestering ecosystems to migrate in order to survive. That even if we stop pumping out CO2e - and no, our output is still accelerating - the feedback loops that are kicking off across the planet will push us into +12-16℃ of warming without any more input from us.
You know what happens at +12-16℃ of warming? A Venus Scenario.
And we are now discovering credible evidence that warming has kicked into overdrive in the last 2-3 years, in that we will see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50. Think +3℃ by some time in the late 2030s, and +4℃ by the 2050s.
And you know what will happen at +4℃? The extinction of megafauna - anything over 45Kg - planet-wide. Including humans.
The Socratic Method tends to be effective in many cases so long as the other person remains open to reason and logic, especially the requirement for evidence.
Brainwashing gets increasingly easy the younger the subject is. Children, in particular, have an evolutionary need to automatically trust adults and what adults tell them, as they don’t yet have the cognitive tools to handle the world around them. Trusting adults have been baked into that part of childhood development because, historically speaking, it gave a distinct evolutionary advantage. Those children that listened to adults had a much stronger probability of surviving until adulthood.
It’s why religions so strongly proselytize the young -- get them young, get them for life.
Take a large country, like Canada. Promote some truly leftist politicians (and not just solid centrists like the NDP) to see if the country can go left on political merit alone.
Then, if that happens, move to a minimalist socialist state using UBI and degrowth policies. Nationalize any truly inelastic needs - healthcare, education, utilities, mass transportation, Vienna-style social housing, the like.
Go with a hands-off policy for anything else - including corporate welfare. Loans for small businesses, yes, but a complete and abrupt end to corporate hand-outs of any kind. If a company cannot compete, it should be allowed to collapse no matter how big it is.
In the end, the only government left would be institutions to nurture the people, maintain their safety and rights, protect the country, uphold laws, redistribute wealth, and preserve the environment.
All you have to do is make it illegal to expose or proselytize religion to anyone under 22, and religion would likely die out within 2-3 generations.
When you have been raised as a rationalist and know, at a fundamental level, the bullshit detection system called the Scientific Method, you need to have some pretty powerful mental illness in play to willingly grasp at religion.
Once these feedback loops thoroughly take off, there will be no stopping the warming. There is enough carbon there to put palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. And maybe a lot worse than even that.
The problem with all these “smart people” is that they have failed to answer one vitally important question:
How will computationally hot AI survive on a planet that has tipped over into a full-blown Venus Scenario?
Because if you cannot cool yourself, if the runaway heating has gotten hot enough to start melting lead, there ain’t much an AI can do to survive here.
And yes - just like anything that “moves”, the current speed of climate change has an ”inertia” to it’s nature that normally the planetary ecosystem would act as the “friction” to retard. Normally the biosphere would “migrate” across thousands of kilometers, keeping pace with the climate changes, and sequestering carbon as it went.
But that was previously done on time scales that went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. The biosphere had the power to migrate and adapt on those time scales.
But our current changes have happened in only a century, thousands of time faster than the planet has ever seen before, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed in geological time. The ecosystem will have no capability to react under these timelines, and will fail to act as any sort of “friction” to the “inertia” of climate warming.
And humanity is still solidly on its “worst case scenario” path, where “business as usual” causes us to continue accelerating the release of CO2e -- and this is before the feedback loops that are kicking off in nature (methyl hydrate boiling, permafrost melting, etc.)
So we are still firmly on the path of the +12-16℃ temperatures where heating will no longer be stoppable under any scenario, and the planet will turn into a second Venus, killing all life on it.
But of course, we will be extinct long before that, somewhere around the +4℃ level that will kill off all megafauna (animals over 45kg). And with climate change showing a dramatic acceleration over the last 2-3 years, which projects more warming over the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50, +4℃ could conceivably come as early as the 2040s-2050s, with +8℃ - which will see palm trees and crocodiles at the North Pole - happening before the end of this century.
So I agree with them that having children is a bad thing. I just agree for totally different reasons. Bringing a child into a world that has such a violent civilizational end is the height of selfishness and narcissistic ego. You’re creating a life that will experience only pain and suffering and a brutishly nasty and early end in the second half of their lives. Things might be fine, now, but just wait a decade and compare back… the civilizational and environmental decline by that point won’t be pretty, and will only point towards much worse in the future.
My wife named her first SUV - a dinky Equinox - “pebbles”, purely because it was a light stone grey.
Her next SUV - a more beefy 4Runner that can actually hold the Gunner dog crate comfortably - is “snowflake”, purely because it was a pristine snow white.
If they voted Republican, they voted for exactly this.
There is just no other way to spin it.