[lsd5you]

We will have overpopulation and environmental crises in the future and they will get explained away mindlessly as being completely caused by climate change, when that may be only a partial or even not significant factor in the events.

Not enough fresh water - climate change! Not the fact that the population increased by a factor of 4, and the local acquifers have been drained.

[Certhas]

Hu? Climate change causes changes in rainfall patterns. These are hard to predict, but it's where a lot of research is focusing right now. The IPCC also says so. In some regions it might be helpful, in others it will hurt.

So climate change interacts with everything, but I think it's obvious to everyone invlved that it isn't the main driver of everything?

[lsd5you]

There have always been droughts though, and things have varied from location to location. This effect you are invoking needs actually quantifying, and then comparing to the change in population. Would these regions coped if their populations hadn't drastically increased? Has water supply actually even decreased?

e.g. Yemen, population has gone up x4 in 40 years (or something like this). They have wars, and water shortages. What is the relative contribution of climate change?

So, see this article.

https://climateandsecurity.org/2016/08/03/a-storm-without-ra...

It is fairly balanced and fact filled, but when it comes to reduced rainfall and climate change, they are invoked, but left completely unquantified. No source, no estimate, no numbers (let alone a nice impartial unmanipulated graph). Did it decrease 10%, 1%. So if they have absolutely no handle on the quantification how can they make the claim at all? If there is a large uncertainty then that should be expressed.

This is what I mean, we are being primed to accept climate change as an explanation. When we have other massive, dominating factors - massive population growth and running out of acquifer runway (i.e. they have been in deficit for a long time).

[Certhas]

Literally in the first paragraph of the article you cite as problematic it says:

> Like other unstable situations in the region, climate change may be an exacerbating factor in the country’s instability, not a primary cause, and to what extent is uncertain.

It's simply a hard question to quantify the impact of climate change on rainfall. Major effort in the IPCC report just goes into adequately representing the uncertainty in precipitation changes. And this is not hidden it's front and center in the Summary for Policymakers:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/AR5_SYR_FINA...

Figure SPM.7

So yeah, people now look for the contribution of climate change to all sorts of things. It will often not be a dominating driver, and often hard to quantify, but I don't see anything terribly problematic here in the sense that the dominant reasons are ignored. (Population growth in this context is often also indirectly taken into account through land change uses, which mostly means turning nature into farmland.)

[lsd5you]

Which is problematic.

They are citing it as a cause but have no quantative basis for it what so ever apparently. The effect could be 0, or negative, they've apparently just brought feelings on the situation.

So figure SPM.7 looks pretty serious. It is 60-80 years in the future (probably further at the time of the models) and based on models (albeit on the agreement of presumably independent models). However current shortages are being attributed to climate change. To do this it should be possible to a) show a long term drop in precipitation and b) show climate related causality somehow. This should be easier than accurately predicting the future - but of course is less easy than innaccurately predicting the future.

So what you show I would say reenforces my point. We have predictions based on models (which we can take seriously or not), but then we also have current events which are being attributed to climate change with no quantifiable basis for doing so - despite the fact it should be possible to come up with some kind of proxy for climate induced problems(other than just a shortage happened).

[Certhas]

Actually it's just the opposite.

But literally SPM.7 is the summary of the summary of the summary. There is so so much research published on precipitation, the vast majority of which is careful and precise in giving uncertainties.

It's also actually harder to attribute causality to long term trenda for individual current events than to look at model based predictions for the future. The entire extreme events due to climate change business is incredibly tricky to quantify, even though there are some good heuristic reasons to think it might hold.

[lsd5you]

So you won't conceed that this is problematic that there is according to you presumably relevant data they could cite - even if it doesn't directly apply to yemen in that particular perioud, but they chose not to? I mean what ever happened to 'citation needed'.

I mean uncertainties is a bit of an umbrella term. You should be able to be certain about predictions if you make the error bars big enough. If you still can't come up with a reliable assertion doing this then things are spurious.

[keanzu]

There's already a lack of fresh water in various parts of the world but the problem is particularly concentrated in the Middle East where 70% of the world's desalination plants are located.

For example Kuwait meets more than 90% of its water demand through desalination.

[tonyedgecombe]

So what is your solution to overpopulation?

[beatgammit]

Personally, I think the overpopulation argument is weak. The places that have overpopulation issues are the places where people don't listen to people talking about overpopulation. It's the same problem with plastic use, non-green electricity generation, etc. Most policies are just going to negatively impact the minority without actually solving anything.

I firmly believe that necessity is the mother of innovation, so we should be encouraging those who feel a need to cut back to reproduce, because those are the people who will innovate for the rest of the world. If you have the means to make positive changes, you have the means to raise children to continue that effort. If food starts to become scarce (globally, not just regional distribution issues), we'll innovate new ways to produce food. If water starts to become scarce generally, we'll innovate ways to conserve it and/or desalinate. If pollution gets out of hand, we'll innovate solutions there too.

So I think all of the talk about overpopulation is counterproductive. We should be discussing the problems overpopulation causes and solve those since there's no way to force another individual or group to stop reproducing, but you can make living more sustainably more cost effective.

[lsd5you]

I dunno, either we lurch from crisis to crisis and possibly end up with an ungovernable world, or look at implementing something like a one child policy in countries with very high population growth (or pressuring them to do so by preventing them from exporting population).

Certainly move the discourse beyond ... so well population is going up, nothing can be done about it.

[tonyedgecombe]

Fertility has already fallen below replacement levels in most of the world. The only exception is Africa however carbon emissions from that part of the world are so small it barely makes a difference. Even if you wanted to focus in on Africa you will find the countries with the highest emissions like South Africa have a fertility rate barely above replacement level.

The reality is nearly all the increases in population are built in already, it's caused by people surviving into old age. The population is going up and nothing can be done about it.

This is why arguments about population are pointless with regards to climate change, we resolved that years ago through education and better health provision.