individual,

Scientists don't have the answers to what? What are you talking about?

I hope you haven't been getting into the Bundies & Coke with Hasbeen again!

Dear Bazz,

Linking to an article by Don Easterbook? Really?

This is one of his quotes;

"CO2 cannot possibly cause global warming.”

Such a denial of the science puts this bloke in the crackpot cohort unfortunately. Do you have anyone with a little more credibility for us?

SteeleRedux,

I do! I have someone who is more credible than Don Easterbook.

You guessed it! It's Soot 'Beam up me Scotty' Morrison.

"Scientists don't have the answer otherwise they'd be bleating overpopulation instead of Global warming!"

Um, listen silly!

Global warming is one problem.
Overpopulation is another.
It's not hard! (Slaps hand to forehead!)

And as far as *social* scientists go, the United Nations have studied population growth and guess what they've found, what simple metric they've measured that makes the key variable in societies where populations grow and other populations stabilise?

Education. If you educate and empower little girls as they grow up, they'll be more likely to value some career time and limit how many kids they have. It's such a strong rule, that every 3 years education that a little girl in a developing country receives means she'll have one less kid!

Now, it's more complicated than that because as a society becomes wealthy enough to afford to let the kids move off the subsistence farm and into the local school, they're also more likely to have clean water and health infrastructure. The subsistence farmer parents are more sure to have all their children actually survive childhood, and not get wiped out by some diseases of poverty in dirty water, etc. Also, if the state can provide some small measure of old aged pension (and it doesn't have to be a lot as Kerala, India shows), it also helps the poor not see their kids as their superannuation fund that's going to look after them when they're old.

Education + a little old aged pension. Who could argue against those? You can campaign for population stabilisation without EVER mentioning the over-emotive "P" word by name!

UN Links and stuff here http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/reduce/

Hi Max,

Yes, you're right. See also this UN set of documents on the subject:

http://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth#

Cheers,

Joe

"Linking to an article by Don Easterbook? Really?"

This constant desire to reject the message because you don't like the messenger is the opposite of unbiased investigation.

The Easterbrook article is choca-block with data. But somehow the data is wrong because the messenger elsewhere has said things SR doesn't like.

The data is denied because the messenger is disliked. Yet,somehow, others are the deniers.