Excellent. Patio heaters are much less expensive to run.

"...GPs should advise their patients against it."

Will they advise also their Muslim patients?

I notice that they do say "3rd child", but one wonders how the first two escape the ignomy of emitting carbon.

Agreed that patio heaters are much cheaper to run, especially here in the South.

Is this what they mean when they're talking about 3rd world nations becoming industrialized?

So what are these two gloomy MDs doing still exhaling? Why is that the ones telling us we need to cull the herd are never ready to show the way?

Patio heaters, however, very seldom found startup companies (or indeed, get any kind of job), make an interesting comment, or carry your values into the future.

It is a CS Lewis point that most moral foolishness comes from inflating one value above its station, until it becomes swollen and infected. I hadn't realised that the purpose of humanity was to reduce its carbon.

As the eighth of nine children, I'm generally against the various "family planning" options since they tend to have as their goal the elimination of people like me, but my parent's third child was a lousy brother growing up. A patio heater would have been better.

"The two medics suggest that choosing to have a third child is the same as buying a patio heater or driving a gas-guzzling car, and that GPs should advise their patients against it."

Since when is it a doctor's job to pretend he's a climatologist? The vast majority of doctors have zero training or expertise in that area and ought to stay well away.

I'm becoming increasingly disturbed by the "mission creep" that seems to be infecting parts of the medical community, from publishing questionable stories in medical journals about war casualties, to telling people to have fewer children based on non-medical reasons, to becoming snoops for every social movement that comes along. What does that have to do with medicine and the practice thereof? Doctors should stick to medicine and the skills they were trained to utilize. If they want to have private opinions about other things, so be it, but don't pretend its part of their professional calling.

If doctors have some extra time on their hands, there are plenty of problems they could address within their own field.

Not only do doctors have no special expertise in climatology, they have no special expertise in the use of mathematical models for the prediction of anything whatsoever. Nor do they have any more moral authority than does, say, a bricklayer.

I think we have a huge problem with physician arrogance, and this is just a small piece of it.