Yes, but going from positive birth rates to negative could also have a catastrophic effect on human civilization and send us back to a darkage just when we were supposed to tackle global warming.
Maybe it won't be that bad, I've never ran the numbers, but intuition tells me population reduction has never been good for human civilisation.
Interesting. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with your statement.
However, it only seems different from a moralist perspective. Naturally, the result is the same: a species reaches its carrying capacity and the population declines.
This is paperclip-optimizer logic. Climate change is a problem of irreversible ecological destruction and mass human suffering; pumping out more people as though it's a metric to be inflated is Missing The Point.
> Climate change is bad, because it could reduce the number of human lives.
No, climate change us bad because it can increase SUFFERING. To say that reduction of human lives is bad is to say we should be reproducing as much as possible. Have you maximized the number of people you have had sex with today?
Clever, but incorrect. This is a rhetorical construction which falls apart if you don't overload the word, "reduce."
Climate change is bad because it can end human lives. The lives which it doesn't end may experience significant hardship and unhappiness.
Decreasing the rate of population growth does reduce the number of existing humans, but it doesn't induce that reduction by ending lives. It also doesn't increase the amount of hardship imposed on most humans.
Do you see why climate change and population reduction are not comparable?
Reducing the number of humans reduces a large amount of resource contention.
By not giving birth to more humans we're not killing people off. Alternative, as we see in many places, is war. War is definitely not the same thing as avoiding pregnancies.
Therefore, we will reduce the number of human lives to combat climate change.