this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Is there any reason to be optimistic about it, or are we all doomed? As far as I've looked it up, the more optimistic projections predict a 1-2° global temperature rise in the next few decades, which is pretty bad.

Is it a smart decision to start moving to higher/colder regions yet? What can we do?

And is there a good resource or video essay or whatever for this? There is so much misinformation and fearmongering around climate change. It's a hassle to weed out any trustable information.

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Not sure there is a sensible way to "choose" the outcome of having 5% population.

Reducing the fertility rate already happens on a steep level, even if the fertility rate is reduced to something like 0.1 births per woman, it will still take 50-70 years for that to have a meaningful effect on the population size.

The only way to reduce climate change via population control would be to kill the large majority of the world's population. And we know that it won't hit the wealthy high-polluters.


The other way would be to limit the pollution per person, at least until the natural population decline has gone far enough that we don't have a climate change problem any more.

That's, btw, the only thing that's something of a reason to be optimistic: Climate change is dependant on the population, so if the world population drops back to a few 100 millon, climate change will also go back down comparatively rapidly (in the order of maybe 50-100 years). So if we manage to limit it now, it will likely automatically become a solved problem.

Limiting the pollution now would be quite easy. We'd just have to remove the world's top 1% (preferrably by cutting their wealth down to manageable levels), stop motorized travel, stop globalized production, stop building new buildings, stop any livestock keeping, stop using fossil fuels and a handful of similar things and climate change is gone within 12 years.

We'd basically have to get rid of capitalism for that to happen.

[–] bryophile@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I was talking about choosing less development.

But yeah, I agree on the necessity of getting rid of capitalism for these scenarios to work out

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

So it depends on what you mean by less development. At this point since most of easy fossil fuels have been mined, we may no longer be able come back from a civilization reset. There’s no way to fuel an industrial age.

Consider LED lighting and solar panels. These are vital to have any hope of turning things around but they require a certain level of development of civilization. If we drop below the ability to k produce things like this, we’ve suddenly increased our dirty energy needs. And some people are hoping for nuclear or even fusion saving us but the require even more advanced civilization.

[–] bryophile@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 days ago

Hence my phrasing: going back, whatever that may mean, or forward, whatever that may mean.

We will always progress into the future. Going "back" to a more local agricultural society coexisting with nature can also be seen as progress. Progress is not the same as technological advances, we can progress as a society or as humanity. And we probably need a mix of both: coexistance with our environment and technological innovation. A framing of the question being either about progress or regression is utterly useless.