Guest essay by Eric Worrall
For a climate activist, having babies is apparently a troubling ethical dilemma, a distressing personal contribution to the global anthropogenic carbon footprint. But somehow they keep popping them out.
I’m worried having a baby will make climate change worse
Sophie Lewis
Part of my motivation for becoming a climate scientist was my grave worries for our future and my desire to make a positive contribution. In today’s world, this isn’t straightforward.
Earlier this year, I wrote publicly of my qualms around desiring children. I have always loved children and always wanted children in my own life. At the same time, among my friends and colleagues, such ordinary desires are increasingly accompanied by long, complex conversations about the ethics of such aspirations.
Children born today face a dramatically different climate future than their parents did. A child born today is a child of a changing – and extreme – global climate. The decision to have a child is a decision to exacerbate such climate extremes.
…
Nonetheless, in recognising the sadness of our near neighbours, I also feel compelled to recognise the beauty and opportunity of my own life. Despite my uncomfortable internal conflicts, the impending arrival of a much-wanted baby is intensely joyful.
Dr Sophie Lewis is a climate scientist and research fellow at the Australian National University.
Sophie isn’t the first anti-population and climate crusader who somehow made an ethical allowance for their personal needs. Last August WUWT wrote about US climate philosopher Travis Rieder. Rieder travels the country trying to convince students not to have kids for the sake of the climate, and wants to tax your children, but somehow he ended up having a daughter of his own.
No doubt a similar process of personal angst and philosophical self flagellation concludes with the purchase of lots of airline tickets to fly to all those climate conferences.
I like to point out to to people not actively making/raising young children that having a baby is the most polluting thing one can do. I’ll stop burning through the planet’s hydrocarbons in a couple decades or so. My daughters and their offspring will go through all the rest. 🙂
Hmmm…
so that percentage of posters here who believe that we are going to see a new ice age/maunder minimum, with resources short because of the coming intense cold…
are they all thinking of not having kids, because, you know, of the ice age?
No idea, but can imagine them stockpiling idle beach front properties and hydrocarbon shares.
It really is sad when Griff attempts analogies.
Yet another mental ability for him to fail at.
Nope. Two reasons why: 1.) the ice might not return for hundreds of years, and 2.) maybe it’s one of my descendants that invents the technology that allows us to survive the ice. Seriously.
Griff1 We just never really know what the Hell you’re talking about! We know it’s wrong because whenever we take the time to figure it out we prove it. Someone will make a comment that utterly devastates your opinion and then you disappear. You never admit defeat. You just slink away. I can’t help thinking you are paid by someone to be disruptive here. You comment on practically everything and are always wrong. Who would do that unless paid to?
The thing about the climate is that no-one, using currently known science, can accurately predict whether we are heading for an ice age or a continuation of the gentle natural warming which has occurred since the Little Ice Age, and on what timeframes. So best to just enjoy cheap, reliable energy, improve living standards, and have the resources to adapt to whatever is coming.
Well she can cushion the blow to the planet by giving the child thin gruel and a bit of weak tea without sugar each morning and send it forth to gather wild berries and roots for dinner. Is there a picture? Someone pointed out that protester groups had an inordinate percentage of portly young ladies. There seems to be no shortage of portly male climate minions, too. All that foie gras and mocho-caramel-double lattes. Their carbon footprints are deep too I guess!
Apart from the impact that humans have on climate, the increase of the human population as a whole is probable the most challenging issue for the future. Currently (and for some time) the world population grows by a 200.000 individuals per day! Nobody knows what the limit is, but there is certainly a limit and we are bound to hit it. The climate discussion distracts the attention from this much more pressing issue.
See: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
René Dijkstra:
Please explain why you think “the increase of the human population” is a “pressing issue”.
Population growth is required to maintain economic growth. But affluence is reducing indigenous population growth in developed countries. And, therefore, developed countries are importing people from developing countries.
However, population growth will reduce in developing countries as affluence is obtained by those countries. Hence, it is foreseeable that there may be a shortage of the population needed by developed countries for them to maintain economic growth.
But your link indicates the shortage is not likely to occur this century. How is is possible for a potential future problem that is not likely to occur this century to be a “pressing issue”?
Richard
1) The earth could easily support at least 10 billion people.
2) The earth’s population is going to peak out in another 15 to 20 years at not much over 8 billion and then start falling rapidly.
They’ve been predicting that for over 100 years, and have been proved wrong every time. There is no issue.
Less than 5% of the Earth’s surface is taken up by human civilization. While not all areas of the Earth are suitable for widespread human habitation, we aren’t running out of room anytime soon.
Leftivists only lose sleep over this fake issue because a super-majority of them live in big cities, where squalor from localized overpopulation is a legitimate problem. They take a local issue and extrapolate it onto the rest of the world. Just like local severe weather being blamed on so-called global climate change.
Lip service allows all kinds of group think and popularity contests within such groups. It is the birthplace of do what I say, not what I do. Dr. Sophie has it down pat…and likely wonders still why Hillary lost the election, not seeing the evidence in her own writing.
Doesn’t anyone remember Zero Population Growth? It was mainly an American thing, I think, and it was around in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Earnest young women would get their tubes tied so they could help to avert Paul Ehrlich’s nightmare. Say what you will, those poor ZPGers had the courage of their convictions.
That wouldn’t happen with today’s climateers. They only do the easy stuff.
Our little Sophie is extremely moral and conscientious. And a hypocrite! Sorry, I forgot that. A hypocrite.
This is Virtue Signaling B.S. fair and simple. These self absorbed fools were not going to have kids anyways. They make such statements so they can pretend to show everyone else how virtuous they are when in fact they could not be bother with children!
A new ‘Kim’! Note the capitalization and the lack of double underlining. That said, this ‘Kim’ has a point.
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The term HYPOCRITE springs to mind (yes all caps). Of course that is the norm for such people.
That’s one kid that will thank Gaia he can walk to school on his own rather than having to be dropped off by mum in her SUV. Gaia works in mysterious and wonderful ways my son.
“…among my friends and colleagues, such ordinary desires are increasingly accompanied by long, complex conversations about the ethics of such aspirations.”
Then I recommend you immediately QUIT YOUR JOB and GET NEW FRIENDS! Problem solved.
BTW, if you hold firm and never have children, contrary to your own deepest desires, I hope you never have the gall to call anyone else a denier.
“A child born today is a child of a changing – and extreme – global climate.”
Where is this “extreme” climate?! Hiding under my bed?! There is NOTHING “extreme” about today’s climate, and saying the climate is “changing” is like saying the sun rises and sets.
Her kid could always move to tropical Canada. Perhaps she will grow up to “work” in whatever eco-fad is in vogue then.
Several commenters upthread have referenced a type of ‘reproductive gap’ between better-educated and poorer-educated (or perhaps a rich/poor divide) among and even within various nations.
Sounds more and more like the plot of the movie, “Idiocracy”, and if you’ve never seen it, this is a perfect opportunity. Sophie, for all her “education”, is NOT the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I’m not holding my breath on her getting any sharper … … … …
Vlad
“At the same time, among my friends and colleagues, such ordinary desires are increasingly accompanied by long, complex conversations about the ethics of such aspirations.” Ummmm… you need better friends. BTW, enjoy the baby, they’re always delightful!
I work in the nursery at our church. I refer to it as grandparent training.
You play with the kids for an hour, then send them home with their parents.
First, congratulations to Dr. Lewis for discovering intrinsic value in human life, an article of faith and judgment.
Now, discover the separation of logical domains, specifically the narrow limits of the scientific domain, and reject the temptation to indulge in prophetic products.
The first step to adulthood is marked by an acceptance of our limited causality. The second step to adulthood is marked by an acceptance of our limited perception. The third step to adulthood is realized with a reconciliation of moral, natural, and personal imperatives.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is “guided by the belief that every life has equal value”. Deep.
His software company is guided by the premise that all customers are suckers!
“Children born today face a dramatically different climate future than their parents did. A child born today is a child of a changing – and extreme – global climate.”
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The political climate future may indeed be different if some groups have 5 babies rather than 3. That would be an extreme “global climate change” you can believe in and regret. CO2 will not be the accelerating factor.
Another regretful change would come if some groups have only one or no babies rather than two or more. I’m thinking of a group of which I am a member.
Thank you, I always enjoy getting a new slogan for my climate bedwetting, fraud and organized crime list; have added Climate future:
Climate action
Climate action plan
Climate advocate
Climate agenda
Climate agreement
Climate ambition
Climate anxiety counseling
Climate blueprint
Climate budget
Climate cash
Climate catastrophe
Climate challenge
Climate change action plan
Climate change training
Climate chaos
Climate consciousness
Climate coyness
Climate crisis
Climate danger
Climate d*nier
Climate disruption
Climate election
Climate emergency
Climate engineering
Climate enthusiast
Climate failure
Climate fatigue
Climate finance
Climate future
Climate genocide
Climate hawk
Climate interference
Climate justice
Climate leadership
Climate literacy
Climate loss
Climate mitigation
Climate mitigation services
Climate movement
Climate opposition
Climate plan
Climate pledge
Climate policy
Climate preparedness
Climate proponents
Climate protagonists
Climate punishment
Climate questions
Climate reduction
Climate refugees
Climate resilience
Climate risk
Climate scenarios
Climate spending
Climate summit
Climate talks
Climate tax
Climate thwarting
Climate timeline
Climate wars
Climate weirding
Where’s ‘Climate Cult’?
PP,
They don’t use that – not a good tactic. I only compile their BS parrot-points.
Some heavy breathing is involved.
Last time I had a girl doing some heavy breathing….she was having an asthma attack.
Ok – I quickly looked around the web, trying to find out what Sophie’s PhD actually is…Frankly I can’t find a straight-forward statement of the field of science in which she earned her PhD (physics? Chemistry? Astrology?).
Can someone who understands the apparently deliberate obfuscation of Australian academia please tell me the science discipline in which she earned her PhD (i.e.: does this woman have the technical background to even pretend to know what she’s talking about)?
perhaps Kellogs don’t publish the statistics for these packet-top degrees?
My guess is it’s actually in an soft “allied discipline” like Geography, Anthropology, or even [ahem] Sociology. If she was at all proud of her field of study she’d be trumpeting it.
That’s exactly my concern (though she did claim a first-class unspecified “science” undergraduate degree).
I know zip about Sophie (I mean other than yappy virtue signaling about babies), but I find lack of STEM degree goes pretty much hand-in-hand with poor statistics. Poor statistics pretty much goes hand-in-hand with…well, astrology, palm reading, (gulp!) psychology….and virtue signaling.
Once the data has been corrected, I think you will find that these climate activists do not in fact have any children at all….
One Planned child+One unPlanned child = Zero children. Planning is a carbon credit scheme to realize a clean, green utopia with [net] zero emissions.
The correct issue to worry about is what will happen to my public retirement pension if I don’t have 2.0 children? Someone has to pay for it, and it is usually future taxpayers (i.e. your children). Anything more than 2 children is gravy.
Being a warmist is an ethical entanglement.
Not when you’re “on the right side of history”.
Or if you’re not, you can always rewrite it. One of the advantages of academia.
Having a “climate Scientist” is an ethical entanglement.
Visiting Ayres Rock a few years ago My wife and I ran into an American tourist who was bringing his 14 year old grand daughter to see Australia.
He allowed all his grand children a chance to go anywhere they wanted within reason.
She wanted to see a country that had not had a disabling major civil war, as had the US, the originator of modern mechanised warfare.
He was astonished that we had six children.
He was well below the Net reproductive Rate for his family, on of the reasons he could shout his grand children a free world trip.
Fot him, he was saving the planet.
My attitude is that if one can afford children and look after them, educate them, they will look after the coming generations.
One hopes they will be better than we are.
As for climate change, if one still believes we are doomed by inevitable climate change, work at adaptation.
The populations of China, India, Indonesia,Japan, Russias and now the US, the short list, are doing just that.
Make sure there is electricity to run the anesthetic machines, humidicribs and schools where our children will be.
Enter the journey.
This is a very interesting and, I believe, salient point. The only way that having a child is an ethical dilemma is if you feel that you can’t or won’t provide a decent life for that child. For a “climate scientist” who produces nothing, preaches hopeless misery and has no intention of making any effort to actually determine her child’s future, I guess I see a self fulfilling prophecy. I just hope she doesn’t take her anti-depressants while she’s pregnant.
The Morlocks of Australia will come for you, even in the daytime.
The clinical cannibals in America rely on an emotional appeal to Choice.
Social justice adventurism is a first-order forcing of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change including elective regime changes, extrajudicial trials, immigration reform, devaluation of capital and labor, [class] diversity schemes, selective and one-child policies, and scientific mysticism (i.e. conflation of logical domains). However, the solution to CACC is not mitigation or sequestration, but proper characterization that reconciles moral, natural, and personal imperatives. Principles matter.
“Part of my motivation for becoming a climate scientist was my grave worries for our future and my desire to make a positive contribution.”
This is terrible statement for a (supposed) scientist to make as she reveals herself to be an activist first and a scientist second. With that viewpoint, how can anyone ever trust that her hypotheses (and the testing of them) ever comes from an unbiased source? As a scientist who got into the field because of an interest in how things work, I know how hard it is to deal honestly with results which “don’t fit” your hypothesis and when you are already biased subconsciously then you will never be able to do this.
I certainly cannot trust her hypotheses nor her testing of them.