The lack of federally funded research on this topic is astounding. It's been like this for a long time, but ignored.
Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia.
They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse.
Edit:
The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the issue. This is a topic that should elicit more curiosity than it does, and we should ask ourselves why it doesn't.
I worked in intel/defense for over 10 years, and part of our post Iraq WMD training was looking for signs of bias/motivated reasoning that are a sign of the group think that allowed for a war to be started based on false pretenses. One of the biggest indicators:
"A lack of curiosity about a phenomenon/event/factor where it should be expected."
Well I mean, given the public discourse of the past decade...it seems to me that they want the population to decline. So it makes sense that no one has in interest in investigating this.
There are plenty of people who are so desperate about anthropogenic global warming that they're willing to forgo having children and proclaim that the disastrous decline in fertility rates in places like Korea (see recent HN thread) are actually good and necessary because we need fewer humans on this earth.
World population is still growing. It seems ironic you are casting aspersions towards people desperately trying to fight climate change, when you are desperately worried about population decline, when it isn't declining.
It IS declining in western countries though, which is where all the “stop having children, you’re killing the earth!” propaganda is concentrated. ALL the population growth is happening in Africa and parts of Asia, that’s it. But curiously, no one is chiding poor Africans for having so many children.
Yo. Number 1 reason I'm not having kids is I don't like kids. Number 2 reason is I don't think it's ethical to intentionally bring a child into a world that's going to be torn to pieces by climate disasters & wars.
He is an "apocalyptic environmentalist" in the sense that he believes climate change is going to be such a catastrophic event that human existence will be miserable. When I was a kid, he was an evangelical Christian who believed the end times were coming any day. He had a nasty divorce, a mid-life crisis, met a woman who worked at PETA, became a radical vegan, and then, surprise surprise, once again embraced a new form of apocalypse to replace the End Times one: climate apocalypse.
He's a mathematically illiterate narcissist, a psychological subtype who is known to be the most prone to apocalyptic ideologies.
Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Climate change is real. Excess CO2 caused warming is going to create major challenges for the planet. Humanity will go on, we will innovate our way out of it, and like every Malthusian cult throughout history, you and your fellow apocalypse believers will be proven wrong until you find a new reason to ruin everyone's dinners with negativity.
The churches my dad had me in when I was a kid taught me how deranged people can be, and how good it makes them feel to be part of a heroic tribe trying to warn everyone the world is ending. I know what it looks like, I've seen it Christians, I've seen it in hippies, and I see it in yuppies now too.
> Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Can you point to me where I said the apocalypse is coming?
> Humanity will go on
I agree.
> we will innovate our way out of it
Too late for that, the impacts are here and more are coming. The question is whether we will be able to deal with the upcoming climate refugee crisis without war. It seems unlikely to me.
> ruin everyone's dinners with negativity
FWIW this isn't like, a major facet of my personality. I'm just explaining in a thread about having kids why I chose not to have kids.
People throughout history continued having children through wars, disasters, and climate changes (ice age) worse than anything that our children will experience. Climate change is a problem, but a manageable one. No need to panic.
> The majority of scientists reacted negatively to The Skeptical Environmentalist and he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book; the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited." His positions on climate change have been challenged by experts and characterised as cherry picking.
If we were actually on a positive trajectory with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I might agree with you. But we're not. Things are bad and the trends are only getting worse. Many places will become uninhabitable; the residents will emigrate elsewhere; the places being migrated to will react by electing right-wing nationalists; some resource or border conflict will result in war. It's gonna be bad. I'm not going to feed more lives into that meat grinder.
Wikipedia is heavily manipulated and not considered a reliable source on scientific issues. Do you have a substantive criticism of Bjørn Lomborg's positions?
I mean unless you're a climate scientist yourself, at some point you have to choose your experts to trust. Almost every climate scientist disagrees with this guy. I'm far more likely to trust the IPCC and their hundreds of experts than I am this single guy.
> People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
I'm definitely not predicting extinction, however massive climate-driven impacts are unavoidable, and large-scale war seems an almost inevitable consequence of those impacts. Large-scale war has definitely happened before, quite a few times.
How do you determine that? As far as I have heard from people working in fertilization clinics, they can help pretty much all couples that have problems with conceiving due to male fertility issues. You need to go there in the first place, but once you request help, you get it.
No, you do not understand. What I am saying is that we understand very well what is happening. 'The science is there'. What does not exist is the policy (to prevent it) and we only react when absolutely necessary. Like with poverty, to give another example.
Its the same with obesity, which has been sharply increasing in much of the world since the 1970s, but pretty much all the conventional explanations (increased availability, excess sugar, excess carbs, excess fat, decreased physical activity, etc.) don't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
Hypothesis: the cause in both cases is likely industrial contaminants considered essential to the running of modern civilization, so nobody wants to, or is encouraged not to, look too hard.
I read an interesting study on this. It showed that obesity rates were lower in places like Colorado, and theorized that the reason was that they were at the headwaters of their water source, so there was less opportunity for contaminants to enter their water.
That is interesting, but probably the reason is the highly active/outdoor culture of Colorado leads to lower obesity rates and people who are less obese move to Colorado.
The science on this altitude effect has been pretty thoroughly conducted, with potential correlating factors accounted for in multivariate regression models.
Denver and its suburbs are FILLED with people who are as unhealthy and inactive as the rest of the country. Even in these places, in the poorest neighborhoods, they are less obese.
I have an identical twin brother who lives in Portland, and since I've moved here I've stayed about 10-15 lbs lighter than him. It's a single, anecdotal data point, and completely unscientific, but he swears he eats healthier than me lol.
In the article series I think parent is referencing[0] they talk about Colorado along with a bunch of other things people come up with based on "common sense".
Notably higher altitude alone seems highly correlated with lower obesity and diabetes rates regardless of physical activity. Again, this points to environmental factors.
Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story? The staple bodybuilding foods are rice and chicken breast. That's about as industrialized as you can get.
If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
There is the idea of a "lipostat" which is the mechanism of the body to regulate it's weight. In a person with obesity or anorexia, the lipostat would be off, so the body would be trying to maintain a higher or lower than regular weight. (I think I read about it first on the slimemoldtimemold blog).
The interesing thing is, in case of underweight, the lipostat might not just cause reduced hunger and increased body temperature for example. It might also affect self-image and cause you to feel you are too fat. This is still speculation of course, and I can imagine that it makes people uncomfortable, since we like to believe our self is in control of our body and not the other way around. But it is entirely possible that "socially transmissible" or seemingly "cultural" disorders are intertwined in a complex way. (What if you need certain widespread contaminants, or microbiome deficiencies, plus trauma experience or unhealty body images in media to cause anorexia.)
> Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story?
No? Genetics is the best predictor of obesity, but as with drugs any contaminant would have varying degrees of effect on the population, including sometimes a paradoxical effect.
> If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
And a whole lot of people are not getting fat at all eating foods like and barely exercising. Why do some people have to pay attention to what they eat and others don't? Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Paradoxical effects are rare and tend to happen only with psychoactive medications. I see very little evidence for paradoxical effects playing a major role, but obviously it can't be ruled out entirely. I don't find paradoxical effects a convincing explanation for anorexia because of how people develop anorexia. You can become anorexic merely by changing your social circle or even your desired social circle, so why would a paradoxical effect occur in that situation when presumably the environment hasn't changed in terms of chemical consumption.
> Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat. Genetics seems to play a role in that some people can eat junk and feel full but most can't.
There can be more than one cause for a trend increasing. The way to look at it would not just be to observe anorexia but also whether or not there has been an increase in the merely underweight in the same time frame as the obese. People who eat and are just sated with very little intake. I am not aware of any data on this.
> Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat.
And as I said I don't think this stands up to scrutiny, and I said why already. Additional: obesity is increasing in wild animal populations too.
On a personal level, I have eaten diets of only foods like you've mentioned and I would still have gone well over my calorie limit if I had done so until sated. As far as I can tell 'satiating foods' is a term with no real science behind it. Believe me, if I was aware of something aside from hardcore stimulants that would actually keep my appetite in check I'd have been eating it for the past 15 years instead of suffering.
The wild animals that become obese are ones that have access to human food and garbage. It's not like fish swimming in the runoff from chemical plants become obese (they develop other disorders but not obesity as far as I'm aware).
Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia.
They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse.
Edit:
The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the issue. This is a topic that should elicit more curiosity than it does, and we should ask ourselves why it doesn't.
I worked in intel/defense for over 10 years, and part of our post Iraq WMD training was looking for signs of bias/motivated reasoning that are a sign of the group think that allowed for a war to be started based on false pretenses. One of the biggest indicators:
"A lack of curiosity about a phenomenon/event/factor where it should be expected."