Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

With all this Al Gore ozone talk going on, and alternative fuel conversations, I have a solution to all our green problems: This world was meant for half the current population, we have to have a limit on the amount of kids born per couple. I say we limit the amount of children per couple to two. Eventually, to unforeseen deaths and couples having less than two children, we will eventually lower the world's population.

My dad wanted me to post this, but I agree with this. He also wanted me to do the poll.

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Limiting the number of children one can bear is pretty fascist.

Gb2/Constitution.

Personally I think that the only thing that will happen due to global warming is that some coastal places will become uninhabitable and there will be a lot more food in places in northern Canada and such when it was before too cold to grow anything. As such, the benefits actually outweigh the detriments for some time.

In addition, species always adapt to different environments, as seen in Ice Ages and stuff.

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Tell your dad to leave eugenics to Nazi Germany and China. This planet can support the 6.2 billion we have now and the billions that will come later.

The problem is not the size of the population but the practices of the population. Address those and you can solve Global Warming.

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Well, he DOES have a point, bad as I hate to admit it.
If we REALLY cared about the environment, people would have less children. There's nothing one can do to reduce their impact on the world more than not bringing another person into it.

However, I don't think it's something that should be done.

I think people could take some common sense steps to limit pollution. Those steps wouldn't even have to be as drastic as the ones you'd find in something like Kyoto.

I'm not as worried about Global Warming as I am about real environmental problems like factories pumping out toxins by the ton, ground level ozone causing 1000's of days of lost work and school, and sewer-polluted lakes, streams, and rivers.

If I were a conspiracy type, I'd say Global Warming was made up by industries to make environmentalists chase boogie men while they continue to pollute with things that are a lot worse than CO2.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

I agree with this. Not to mention how it could/would destroy the economy.

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Problem: There is no Global Warming. It's something conjured up by the media. I mean, the temperatures on the earth go through a cycle. There was the Ice Age, remember? And back in the Viking's times, the temperatures were so high that cows could stay in the pastures all winter. It's just a cycle.

Therefore, there is no need to get uppity about the number of people on the earth.

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I don't know about you but when you go through 5 consecutive Christmases without snow(10 of the last 15), you being to wonder.

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^This is the problem when you're home schooled in Alabama.

Actually there's a direct link between Co2 emittance and average temperature, the former of which has been increasing since the industrial revolution. It's pretty difficult to say that doesn't exist.

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I tend to agree with him here, albeit weakly. We like to forecast trends. In the 40's, we were worried about global warming. In the 60's-70's, we "knew" the next ice age was on its way. Now, things are getting warmer, so it's back to the whole "we're going to bake!".

From a personal standpoint, I think global warming is the new boogie man used to scare children.
From a scientific one, I'm very unsure. Depending on how you cherry pick your data, you can prove either one. If you don't cherry pick the data, you really can't do anything with it, since it's too noisy.

If human-induced global warming were a religion, I'd be agnostic.
The more I've learned, the less I'm actually sure of.

What I DO know is that people should conserve energy whenever convenient and possible. Not necessarily because I'm sure we're going to melt the ice caps and kill the polar bears, but because it's a good way to save the planet from the things we know we're doing (acid rain, smog, etc.).

See my above post for my environmental concerns.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

Global warming may exist but it's not at a really bad stage like everybody says it was. I found some thing on racerx's site once about the hottest year being in the 1930's or something.

But no, don't limit the population. It's a pretty crappy idea. The practices just need to be changed. We're humans. We can adapt.

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Emittance of cobalt?

Actually, a lot of CO2 emittance is natural, though. When a volcano erupts, it puts way more carbon dioxide and other stuff into the atmosphere than any factory, so you could maybe argue that it's natural.

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As a matter of fact, a good sized volcano can have an immediate negative impact on the ozone layer that would make all human contributions seem like nothing.

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Signed,

China, Ender's Game, and Brave New World



What the... who says this? How do you determine something like "the maximum population Earth is meant to have"? Have you seen places like Wyoming and Montana Texas and Russia and South Africa and Brazil and hundreds of other countries with millions and billions of acres of open space?

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I suspect that people who make these kinds of assessments base them on the crowding found in urban centers, and completely ignore the tiny percentage of the earth that is actually urbanized. I agree with BTG, though. The problem isn't the size of the human population, but rather human practices that might contribute to environmental problems. If humans would just be smarter with the way we handle resources and technology, we could do a great deal more to improve the environment than we could by forcing population limits.

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I have no idea where you've been the past few years, but what you've said here is one of the most ignorant things you could say. There IS Global Warming. Does it have a dramatic effect on the earth right now? Perhaps not right this minute, but it eventually will. And if future generations keep doing the same thing we're doing now ("oh it's fine it's too far in the future for us to care about"), then I feel bad for the generations in the future.


China does this and it still has problems.

Your idea won't work. It's the practices of the population that need to change, not the number of people. Also, it would hurt the economy.

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I was speaking of it in general right now. It is not a problem at the moment. As has been stated before, more pollutants are spewed into the air naturally then by humans.

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Thomas Malthus, Neo-Malthusian scholars.

In a nutshell, their idea is that the earth can support a certain number of people, a "carrying capacity", if you will.
In the Neo-Malthusian ideas, once the population exceeds that, people die from starvation, disease, etc. until the balance is restored.

This thinking has been used as an attack on the birth control policies of the Catholic Church before, and I think population control advocates use it all of the time.

I tend to believe the idea of a carrying capacity of the Earth is correct. From a purely mathematical sense, this makes sense. There's only so much of X resource to go around and if the population demands more of resource X (say, food), then people will die because they don't get what they need to live.

I don't, however, believe we've reached that capacity and, knowing very little about population, don't know that we will for some time, if ever.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

I agree with this. From a technical standpoint, could we overpopulate the earth? Sure... the landmass we have isn't infinite. But we're not even close to reaching that point yet.

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Well there are some places that we can't live and there are places that we should not live in. Brazil should be off that list. The Amazon is an extremely vital part in controlling the world's temperature. Siberia is as well. There is a Taiga Forest in Siberia that is so large produces 1/3 of the world's oxygen supply.

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My human geography professor claimed that landmass isn't quite as limiting a factor as food or energy.
He couldn't "prove" it quantitatively, but the qualitative proof he offered made a lot of sense.

If I can find my notes from that class, I'll try to post the proof he presented, assuming I wrote it down and wasn't flirting with the girl sitting in front of me.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

Well, it's pretty simple. There's a whole bunch of people living in Japan, and they live on a few small islands. But they're doing fine. Of course, Japan's economy is one of the most well-developed in the world, so they have no trouble building skyscrapers and things to help keep things under control. But that's a problem of resources, not landmass.

- Kef

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I'm all about population control, but it has to be a conscious choice made by the current populace. It should not require governmental intercession. As StrongRad mentions, it's simple math. You've got X population drawing on Y resources, where X is increasing exponentially while Y remains more or less stable. I prefer "have fewer babies" as a superior alternative to "starve the surplus population." As the Ghost of Christmas Present so wisely told us, "forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is."

As for global warming, the jury is still out -- on anthropogenic causes, anyway -- but I think we should be cautious. I can't think of any good reason why we shouldn't cut emissions, lessen pollution, and explore alternative energy sources. Sure, this will come with a price tag, but the economy will adjust. Our economy is definitely more adaptable than our ecology. As time goes by we will gain a clearer picture of the level of human contribution in global warming, but in the meantime I don't see any sense in just ignoring the problem.

Mike

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Logical fallacies ahoy! I'd also like to say: graaaaagh!

New York City is the same way. They can't build out so they build up.

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Then technically it is real, and not some "media conspiracy lies".

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Well, global warming or not, the Earth most definitely has a limited carrying capacity. That's Bio 101. Personally, I'd love for people to limit how many kids they have. Heck, I'd advocate only allowing people with at least a certain IQ and/or income have children. If I recall correctly, the Constitution doesn't explicitly prevent laws like this.

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Sincerely,

Vitruvian Zeno

I voted a tentative yes. It won't "solve" anything, but I'm all for less rugrats. I don't think we're in any danger of having the problem that Russia is having with too few babies being born.

You can't make it law and restrict the number of children. But I think it should be encouraged. This, in combination with increasing adoptions, I think would go a long way towards helping to ease many problems.

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Listen to the Black Crowes.

Wow. You're entirely too cavalier in your desire to take away people's freedoms. Maybe you'd feel more comfortable in China or North Korea.

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Riddle me this, then. Why is it that someone needs a college degree and a license to be a teacher, but any two bums off the street can have a child?

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Sincerely,

Vitruvian Zeno

Well, for one, teachers get paid.

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Look, I agree there are a ton of bad parents out there. But how do you measure who will be a good parent and who won't? What if you want a kid someday and a governmental agency says you can't so they go in and give you a vasectomy?

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