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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Should You Have Children Despite Climate Change?, published by Jeroen W on May 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Background information This is the script of what would've been A Happier World's video on climate change if Kurzgesagt hadn't published theirs. The main ideas we wanted to convey were: Climate change is important but the doomerism is overstated The best actions you can take are participating in political activism and donating to effective charities The question whether or not to have children despite of climate change was just our way of framing the video to promote these two ideas. And since (1) has been covered by Kurzgesagt and (2) in our response video, we decided it doesn't make that much sense anymore to create a video on the question of having children. Instead, it seemed a low effort with potential positive impact to publish this script on the EA forum instead. Note that there could still be a few mistakes, since we never got to entirely finalizing it. Should You Have Children Despite of Climate Change? Intro In october 2020, the then 33-year old swiss national Marc Fehr got a vasectomy. The reason? He wants to save mankind from extinction. Fewer offspring means fewer emissions, the argument goes. He’s not alone in this reasoning. Even Prince Harry has said he doesn’t want more than two children because of climate change. Miley Cyrus doesn’t want to bring children on this “piece-of-shit” planet. British front woman Blythe Pepino gave up on the idea of having a family after listening to a lecture by Extinction Rebellion, and then started a movement of women not procreating in response to the coming ‘climate breakdown and civilisation collapse’. And even David Attenborough has stated several times that we need fewer people on this planet in order to solve our environmental problems. A poll last year found that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of climate change. The main reasons are that they’re scared of the future their offspring will face, and that having children could contribute to even more climate change. Climate change is definitely bad. There’s no doubt about it. Many animal species are at risk of extinction, natural disasters significantly worsen the lives of a lot of people especially in the southern hemisphere, but increasingly also affect the population in western countries. But how bad will our future exactly be, and will having children really make things worse? What are the best actions we can take to help the climate? Will the future really be that bad? When climate activists or politicians talk about climate change, their rhetoric tends to be very drastic, sometimes even apocalyptic. Many claim we have less than a decade left to save the planet. Johannes Ackva: I think where this idea comes from, is from IPCC report that says if we want to hit the 1.5 degree target, we need to reduce emissions by 50 percent over this decade. This is very different from saving the planet, which is very, very underspecified to begin with. But it's not that we either reach 1.5 degree or the world ends. The IPCC is an internationally accepted authority on climate change, and its work is widely agreed upon by leading climate scientists as well as governments. We’re currently at 1.1 degrees celcius of warming compared to the average temperature between 1850 and 1900. Maarten Boudry: Climate change is a problem that will get worse and worse. And we have agreed on some artificial thresholds that we don't want to cross, but that's partly arbitrary. It's not as if there's a specific moment in time when suddenly all hell will break loose. I think we should be aiming for as little warming as realistically possible. Two degrees is worse than one degree, three degrees is worse than two degrees, etc.. But the idea that we o...