New climate forcings discovered: Girls Education, Pill, changes weather

Funny how the answer to everything always turns out to be a pet lefty cause?

TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE, EDUCATE GIRLS AND GIVE THEM BIRTH CONTROL

Robyn George Andrews has a paradigm shaker: if we could just keep girls in school, and give them contraception — droughts, floods and nasty storms will go away. I wonder if condoms are better than the pill for climate control?

Andrews seems to think that if we could somehow just sneak teachers with emergency girls schools into Rwanda et al, the atmosphere on the Third Rock will right itself and achieve the stable ideal weather that it never had. Too bad about the boys though. As it happens, in Rwanda, they’re slightly more likely to miss out on school than girls are (88% of boys, versus 90% of girls attend primary school). If we could just fix that gender bias…

Nevermind about Rule of Law, endemic crime and corruption, and a complete lack of infrastructure, if the girls had studied The Sociology of Myley Cyrus (at Skidmore) they’d be too busy tweeting about twerking to overpopulate the planet and generate hot spots and cold holes in the atmosphere.

But Andrews seems to have missed the real and devastating implications of female education

On Earth, the more we educate women, the higher our emissions are. I graphed UNDP and World Bank statistics, and the trend is stark:

Give women more than five years schooling, and the planet is facing a crisis. It’s simply impossible to keep per capita emissions below 2 Mt.

Perhaps someone had better let Andrews know, or maybe he does, (he is really a satirist, right?)

Andrews was unashamedly bowled over by a Project Drawdown. That group thought up 80 possible ways to save the world and managed to put a random number ranking beside each one.

Ranked in order of carbon emissions locked down by 2050, the usual suspects made the list. A moderate expansion of solar farms (number 8), onshore wind turbines (number 2), and nuclear power (number 20) would all save tens of billions of tons of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions. Increasing the number of people on plant-rich diets (number 4) and using electric vehicles (number 26) are effective carbon-cutting measures often proposed by climate hawks, and rightly so. The top spot went to managing refrigerants like HFCs, which are incredibly effective at trapping heat within our atmosphere.

There are 19 things above nuclear power? Like solar farms? Vegetarian diets?

He is effusive and passionate, like a very literate twelve-year-old:

But two lesser-known solutions also made this most practical of lists: the education of girls (number 6) and family planning (number 7). This is a stunning revelation, …

The link between the education of girls and a smaller carbon footprint isn’t as intuitively obvious as, say, phasing out fossil fuels. But dig a little deeper, and the evidence is overwhelming.

Though someone can take one correlation and run a bit far:

It’s clear that getting more girls into school, and giving them a quality education, has a series of profound, cascading effects: reduced incidence of disease, higher life expectancies, more economic prosperity, fewer forced marriages, and fewer children.

If only holding her chemistry book could stop her getting cholera, or being kidnapped.

It’s farcical that this isn’t forming a major part of the debate over climate change mitigation. It’s not entirely clear why this is the case, but I’d suspect that regressive societal attitudes,…

Farcical I tell you! Those regressives who think there is more than one variable controlling the climate, or our culture.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]

please wait... Rating: 8.6/10 (53 votes cast)