Since 2021, as part of the research for What We Owe the Future, I have been working on a report on climate change from a longtermist perspective. The report aims to provide the most complete treatment of that question yet produced. The executive summary is below and the full report is here, available at the What We Owe the Future supplementary materials webpage. I am grateful to the expert reviewers of the report for their comments. Views and mistakes are my own.
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Executive Summary
In this report, I will evaluate the scale of climate change from a longtermist point of view. Longtermism is the idea that influencing the long-term future, thousands of years into the future and beyond, is a key moral priority of our time.
In economics, longtermism is embodied by the idea that we should have a zero rate of ‘pure time preference’: we should not discount the welfare of future people merely because it is in the future. Economists who embrace a zero rate of pure time preference will tend to favour more aggressive climate policy than those who discount future benefits.
Climate change is a proof of concept of longtermism. Every time we drive, fly, or flick a light switch, each of us causes CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. This changes the amount of CO2 that is in the atmosphere for a very long time: unless we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere ourselves, concentrations only fall back to natural levels after hundreds of thousands of years. The chart below shows long-term CO2 concentrations after different amounts of cumulative carbon emissions.
Source: N. S. Lord et al., ‘An Impulse Response Function for the “Long Tail” of Excess Atmospheric CO2 in an Earth System Model’, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 30, no. 1 (2016): 2–17, https://doi.org/10.1002/2014GB005074.
Some of the ecological effects of climate change get worse over time. The clearest example of this is sea level rise. On current policy, the most likely sea level rise this century is 75cm. However, over 10,000 years, sea levels will rise by 10 metres. Over the long-term, the world will look very different.
From a longtermist point of view, it is especially important to avoid outcomes that could have persistent and significant effects. These include events like human extinction, societal collapse, a permanent negative change in human values, or prolonged economic stagnation. If we go extinct, then that would be the end of the human story, and there would be no future generations at all. If civilisation collapses permanently, then future generations will be left much worse off than they could have been, living lives full of suffering rather than ones of flourishing.
The anatomy of climate risk
The overall size of climate risk depends on the following factors:
Greenhouse gas emissions
The climate change we get from different levels of emissions
The impacts of different levels of climate change
There is uncertainty about all three factors. The main findings of this report are as follows.
Emissions are likely to be lower than once thought
Due to recent progress on clean technology and climate policy, we look likely to avoid the worst-case emissions scenario, known in the literature as ‘RCP8.5’. The most likely scenario on current policy is now the medium-low emissions pathway known as ‘RCP4.5’. Moreover, climate policy is likely to strengthen in the future. For instance, as I was writing this report, the US Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant piece of climate legislation in American history.
Climate change is a great illustration of how society can make progress on a problem if enough people are motivated to solve it. This does not mean that climate change is solved, but there is significant momentum, and we are at least now moving in the right direction.
The amount of carbon we could burn in a worst-case scenario is also much lower than once thought. Some of the literature assumes that there are 5 or even 10 trillion tonnes of carbon remaining in fossil fuels, mostly in the form of coal. However, these estimates fail to recognise that not all fossil fuels resources are recoverable. Estimates of recoverable fossil fuels range from 1 to 3 trillion tonnes of carbon.
It is difficult to come up with plausible scenarios on which we burn all of the recoverable fossil fuels. Doing so would require (1) significant improvements in advanced coal extraction technology which is not part of the energy conversation today, but (2) a dramatic slowdown in progress in low carbon technologies that are already getting substantial policy support.
Warming is likely to be lower than once thought
Warming will likely be lower than once feared, in part because of lower emissions and in part because the scientific community has reduced uncertainty about climate sensitivity. Where once current policy seemed likely to imply 4ºC of warming above pre-industrial levels, now the most likely level of warming is around 2.7ºC, and the chance of 4ºC is around 5%. Moreover, where once there seemed to be a >10% chance of 6ºC on current policy, the risk now seems to be well below 1%.
On a worst-case scenario in which we burn all of the fossil fuels, the most likely level of warming is 7ºC, and there is a 1 in 6 chance of more than 9.5ºC.
Climate change will disproportionately harm the worst-off
The climate impacts literature suggests that climate change will impose disproportionate costs on countries at low latitude, which are disproportionately low- and middle-income and have done the least to contribute to climate change. People in Asia will have to deal with increasing flooding due to rising sea levels. Climate change will damage agricultural output, and cause droughts in countries reliant on rainfed agriculture. People in the tropics will face rising levels of heat stress. Fossil fuels also kill millions of people from air pollution in both poor and rich countries.
Many low- and middle-income countries have essentially never experienced sustained improvements in living standards, and a significant fraction may be left worse-off than today due to climate change. This undermines one common argument for discounting the future costs of climate change - that future generations will be richer and so better able to adapt to the effects of climate change.
We have a clear moral responsibility not to impose this harm, to reduce emissions, and to encourage economic development in poorer countries.
Average living standards will probably continue to rise
Climate-economy models confirm that the costs of climate change will fall disproportionately on poorer people, but almost all models also suggest that global average living standards in the future will be higher than today, on plausible levels of warming. Income per person looks set to increase by several hundred percent by the end of the century, notwithstanding the effects of climate change.
‘Bottom-up’ climate-economy models included in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report that add up the effects of climate impacts in different sectors and plug them into modern economic models suggest that warming of 4ºC would do damage equivalent to reducing global GDP by around 5%. One recent model, Takakura et al (2019), includes the following impacts:
Fluvial flooding
Coastal inundation
Agriculture
Undernourishment
Heat-related excess mortality
Cooling/heating demand
Occupational-health costs
Hydroelectric generation capacity
Thermal power generation capacity
For instance, in agriculture, the message from the climate impacts literature is that although climate change will damage food production, average food consumption per person will be higher than today, even for 4ºC of warming, due to progress in agricultural productivity and technology. This is illustrated on the chart below from van Dijk et al (2021), which shows per capita food consumption on different socioeconomic pathways.
Source: Michiel van Dijk et al., ‘A Meta-Analysis of Projected Global Food Demand and Population at Risk of Hunger for the Period 2010–2050’, Nature Food 2, no. 7 (July 2021): 494–501, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00322-9.
I have previously been critical of climate-economy models, but now believe they are more reliable than they once were. Until recently, a key determinant of aggregate impact assessments was how to model the effects of >4.4ºC because the chance of that level of warming was so high. Estimates that models arrived at were unmotivated and arbitrary in part because the literature on the impacts of >4.4ºC was sparse. However, warming of >4.4ºC now seems increasingly unlikely (<1% given likely trends in policy), and there is a rich and voluminous literature on the impact of warming up to 4.4.ºC. This makes recent bottom-up models more reliable.
However, even the best bottom-up climate-economy models underestimate the costs of climate change because they do not account for some important direct costs:
They do not include tipping points
They do not explicitly model the potential effects of climate change on economic growth and technological progress
It is unclear how much these factors would increase the overall direct costs of climate change; that is an important area of future research for climate economics. However, for levels of warming that now seem plausible, these effects seem unlikely to be large enough to outweigh countervailing improvements in average living standards.
Bottom-up climate-economy models also do not account for indirect effects, such as conflict, which I discuss below.
‘Top-down’ climate-economy models try to directly measure the effects of climate change on aggregate economic output, and some of these find much higher impacts from climate change, on the order of a 25% reduction in GDP for 4ºC warming. However, these results are highly model-dependent, rely on questionable econometric assumptions, and exclude several important climate impacts. In my view, the best bottom-up studies are a more reliable guide, notwithstanding their flaws.
Although average living standards are likely to continue to rise, we also need to consider the possibility of societal collapse for other reasons, such as a pandemic or nuclear war. If there were to be a major global catastrophe, then future living standards may not actually be higher than today. Future generations trying to rebuild society would have to do so in a less hospitable climate.
Some tipping points could have very bad effects
In my view, the most concerning tipping points highlighted in the literature are rapid cloud feedbacks, collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Some models suggest that if CO2 concentrations pass 1,200ppm (compared to 415ppm today), cloud feedbacks could cause 8ºC of additional warming over the course of years to decades, on top of the 5ºC we would already have experienced. The impacts of this sort of extreme warming have not been studied, but it seems plausible that hundreds of millions of people would die. Moreover, people would be stuck with an extreme greenhouse world for millennia. This would extend the ‘time of perils’: the period in which we have the technology to destroy ourselves, but lack the political institutions necessary to manage that technology. It would also make it much harder to recover from a civilisational collapse caused by something else (such as a pandemic or nuclear war). However, given progress on emissions, it is now difficult to come up with plausible scenarios on which CO2 concentrations rise to 1,200ppm.
Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation would cause cooling and drying around the North Atlantic, and more importantly would probably weaken the Indian monsoons and the West African monsoons, with potentially dire humanitarian implications. For 4ºC, models suggest that the chance of collapse is 1-5%, though they probably understate the risk.
There is deep uncertainty about potential sea level rise once warming passes 3ºC. For higher levels of warming, there is a risk of non-linear tipping points, such as collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would cause sea levels to rise by around 5 metres over 100 years, which would probably cause flooding of numerous highly populated cities, especially in Asia.
Due to progress on emissions, these tipping points now look less likely than they did ten years ago, but their expected costs (impact weighted by probability) may still be large. Furthermore, our understanding of the climate system is imperfect, and there may be other damaging tipping points that we do not yet know about.
All this being said, contra some prominent research, the evidence from models and the paleoclimate (the deep climate history of the Earth) suggests that it is not the case that, once warming passes 2ºC-4ºC, runaway feedback loops will kick in that make the world uninhabitable.
Direct impacts fall well short of human extinction
Given progress in emissions, the risk of human extinction from the direct effects of climate change now seems extremely small. The most plausible route to human extinction is via runaway feedback loops. However, models and evidence from the paleoclimate suggest that it is impossible to trigger such runaway effects with fossil fuel burning. Models suggest that we could only trigger a runaway greenhouse if CO2 concentrations pass 3,000ppm (at the very least), which is out of reach on revised estimates of recoverable fossil fuels.
Moreover, global average temperatures have been upwards of 17ºC higher several times in the past without triggering runaway feedback loops that killed all life on Earth. Indeed, since the Cretaceous, 145 million years ago, periods of high temperatures and/or rapid warming have not been associated with ecological disaster. However, prior to the Cretaceous, climate change was linked to ecological disaster. In the report, I discuss the theory that this was because of ecological and geographical factors unique to the pre-Cretaceous period.
I construct several models of the direct extinction risk from climate change but struggle to get the risk above 1 in 100,000 over all time.
One argument that climate change could directly cause civilisational collapse is that it could be a contributing factor (along with deforestation, human predation, and pollution) to ecosystem collapse, which could in turn cause the collapse of global agriculture. I argue in the main report that this risk is minimal.
Indirect risks are under-researched but now seem fairly low
Because interstate war has become increasingly rare since the end of World War II, most of the literature on climate change and conflict has focused on the connection between climate and civil conflict: conflicts between a government and its citizens in which more than 25 people are killed.
Scholars in the field agree that, so far, climate-related factors have been a much weaker driver of civil conflict than other factors such as socioeconomic development and state capacity. However, there is strong disagreement in the field about how important climate change will be in the future. It is widely agreed that the risk of climate-induced conflict is greatest in low- and middle-income countries, and that the most important mechanism is damage to agriculture.
The potential impact of climate change on the risk of interstate, rather than civil, war is potentially much more important but also much less studied. Among interstate conflicts, conflicts between the major powers pose by far the largest risk to humanity. This is because the major powers have far more destructive weaponry and have the capacity to alter the trajectory of humanity in other ways.
The most plausible way that climate change could affect the risk of interstate war is by causing agricultural disruption, which causes civil conflict, which in turn causes interstate conflict. Indeed, there is some evidence that countries embroiled in civil conflict are more likely to engage in military disputes with other countries.
It is difficult to see how climate change could be an important driver of some of the most potentially consequential conflicts this century - between the US and Russia, and the US and China. It is more plausible that climate change could play a larger role in driving conflict between India and Pakistan and also India and China. However, for plausible levels of warming, other drivers of this conflict seem much more important.
It is extremely difficult to provide reliable quantitative estimates of the risk of Great Power War caused by climate change. Nonetheless, I have built a model that attempts to put some numbers on the key considerations. I think this is valuable for several reasons. Firstly, it clarifies the cruxes of disagreements and allows focused discussion on those cruxes. Secondly, it allows us to prioritise different problems. If we do not quantify, we will still have judgments about how important different considerations are. Models make these considerations precise.
The downside of quantitative models is that they can cause false precision and anchor readers, even if the model is not good and has not been subject to scrutiny. Many of the considerations I have discussed are very difficult to quantify because there is essentially no literature on them.
With those caveats in my mind, my best guess estimate is that the indirect risk of existential catastrophe due to climate change is on the order of 1 in 100,000, and I struggle to get the risk above 1 in 1,000. Working directly on US-China, US-Russia, India-China, or India-Pakistan relations seems like a better way to reduce the risk of Great Power War than working on climate change.
My personal thoughts on prioritising climate change relative to other problems
My primary goal in this report is to help people to answer the following question:
If your goal is to make the greatest possible positive impact on the world, what should you do with your time and money right now, given how the rest of society is spending its resources?
Crucially, this question is about what people should do on the margin. It is about what people should do given how society allocates its resources, not about how society as a whole should allocate its resources. Thus, when I say that working on some other problems, such as nuclear war or biosecurity, will have greater impact, this doesn’t mean that society as a whole should spend nothing on climate change and everything on nuclear war and biosecurity. Rather, it is a claim about what we should do with our resources given how other resources are currently spent.
Moreover, the question I am trying to answer in this report is specifically about how to make the greatest possible impact on the world. This is the highest possible bar. In my view, climate change is one of the most important problems in the world, but other problems, including engineered viruses, advanced artificial intelligence and nuclear war, are more pressing on the margin because they are so neglected. One can visualise this in the following way. Green projects are beneficial on the margin, and red projects are harmful on the margin. Deeper green projects are more beneficial whereas deeper red projects are more harmful on the margin.
To emphasise, we should not confuse the claim that other problems are more pressing than climate change with the claim that climate change doesn’t matter at all. I am glad that climate change is a top priority for millions of young people and for many of the world’s smartest scientists, and I would like governments and the private sector to spend more on climate change. I helped to set up the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund (donate here), which has helped to move millions of dollars to effective climate change charities. The point is that I would like other global catastrophic risks to receive comparable attention, not that I would like climate change to receive less than it does today.
Imagine that only a few hundred people in the world thought that climate change is an important problem (rather than at least tens of millions), that philanthropists worldwide spent a few million dollars a year on climate (rather than $10 billion), that society as a whole spent a million dollars on the problem (rather than $1 trillion), and that the international institutions trying to tackle the problem either don’t exist or have a similar budget to a McDonald’s restaurant. How bad would climate change be? This is how bad things are for the other global catastrophic risks, and then some.
The final important piece of context is as follows: although I am taking a longtermist perspective in this report, my conclusions about the priority of climate change relative to other global catastrophic risks are also true if you think only current generations matter. In my view, the risks from AI, biorisk and nuclear war this century are much higher than commonly recognised.
AI: Forecasters on the community forecasting platform Metaculus think that artificial intelligent systems that are better than humans at all relevant tasks will be created in 2042. The most sophisticated attempt to forecast transformative AI is by Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project and her model now suggests that it is most likely to be developed in 2040. A 2017 survey of hundreds of leading AI researchers found that the median judgments implied that there is around a 4% chance of human extinction caused by AI before the end of the century.
Biorisk: Combinedforecasts on Metaculus imply that the chance of synthetic biology killing more than 10% of the world population by 2100 is around 7%. The implied chance of synthetic biology killing more than 95% of the world population before 2100 is around 0.7%.
Nuclear war: Forecasters on the community forecasting platform Metaculus think that there is an 8% chance of thermonuclear war by 2070.
These risks are not speculative possibilities, and the case for working on them is not contingent on ignoring the suffering of the current generation for the sake of a tiny probability of techno-catastrophe. I think it highly likely that my daughter will have to live through nuclear war, pandemics created by engineered viruses, and/or the emergence of transformative AI systems that will radically alter society. It is deeply unfortunate that few people acknowledge these problems, and that many people who are aware of them dismiss them as sci-fi fantasies without attempting to engage with the arguments, or grappling with the fact that many people working in these fields agree that the risks are large.
Although, I contend, my conclusions follow on both neartermist and longtermist perspectives, it is important to reiterate that, in my view, a longtermist ethical point of view is the correct one. I see no compelling arguments for ignoring the welfare of future generations, and an ethical system that does ignore them is obviously difficult to square with concern about climate change.
While many people accept that the direct risks of climate change are lower than these other risks, some argue that the indirect effects of climate change may be large enough to make the total risk of climate change comparable. I do not think this is plausible. As discussed above, my rough models suggest that the total risk of climate change falls well short of the direct risk posed by the other global catastrophic risks. Moreover, the other risks also have indirect effects. As a rule, we should expect greater direct risks to have greater indirect effects. For instance, the indirect effects of trends in biotechnology seem to me much larger than the indirect effects of climate change. If biotechnology does democratise the creation of weapons of mass destruction, the indirect effects for the global economy and geopolitics are hard to fathom but seem enormous.
Overall, because other global catastrophic risks are so much more neglected than climate change, I think they are more pressing to work on, on the margin. Nonetheless, climate change remains one of the most important problems from a longtermist perspective. If progress stalls and emissions are much higher than we expect, then there is a non-negligible chance of highly damaging tipping points. Moreover, climate change is a stressor of political upheaval and conflict, which can in turn increase other global catastrophic risks. Finally, extreme climate change would make recovery from civilisational collapse more difficult.
Here are my high-level thoughts around the comments so far of this report:
This is a detailed report, where a lot of work has been put in, by one of EA's foremost scholars on the intersection of climate change and other global priorities.
So it'd potentially be quite valuable for people with either substantial domain expertise or solid generalist judgement to weigh in here on object-level issues, critiques, and cruxes, to help collective decision-making.
Unfortunately, all of the comments here are overly meta. Out of the ~60 comments so far on this thread, 0.5 of the comments on this thread approach anything like technical criticism, cruxes, or even engagement.
Compare, for example, thefollowingcomments to one of RP's cultured meat reports.
After saying that, I will hypocritically continue to follow the streak of being meta while not having read the full report.
I think I'm confused about the quality of the review process so far. Both the number and quality of the reviewers John contacted for this book seemed high. However, I couldn't figure out what the methodology for seeking reviews is here.
To be clear, I'm aware that this is an isolated demand for rigor. My impression is that very few other EA research organizations have a very formal and legible process for prepublication reviews.
However, I think for a report of this scope, it might be valuable to have a fairly good researcher sit down and review the report very carefully, in a lot of detail.
If this is not already done, for people who are not satisfied (or at least queasy) with the report, it might be helpful to commission 1-3 months of research critiquing and redteaming this report in a lot of detail.
I think John is understandably frustrated by the lack of technical engagement and the overly metaness (and possibly personal acrimoniousness? ) of the comments so far.
I think John has acted badly in accusing A.C.Skraeling of being a sock puppet account.
I think every loosely organized emerging research field has "duds," or low-quality work that in a poorly filtered ecosystem will suck up a lot of the oxygen.
For both politeness and practical time-constraints reasons, people tend to ignore the bad work and only engage with the good/mediocre work.
Larks is one of the few people who point out this explicitly (for AI alignment). I think his summary of the situation (including why people do this, and downsides) is a worthwhile read, will recommend!
My impression is that academia and other relatively formal systems deal with this via more explicit notions of prestige, conference/paper rejections, etc.
However, this comes with its own dysfunctions and risks ossification.
Taking a step back, I'm a bit confused about why longtermist researchers continue to spend such significant intellectual resources on studying climate in this fashion. My guess is that anyone who was convinced by earlier research by John, 80k, etc, plus the relevant research and communication into other, riskier, domains, are unlikely to change their minds by critiques of this deeper report. And anybody who wasn't convinced by the earlier reports are unlikely to be convinced by this one.
So I don't really know the value-add of more intellectual attention into this.
I looked into climate change for myself for several weeks in 2019 (back when I was substantially worse at both research and judgement). I think I was fairly satisfied that it should not be one of EA's top priorities, even ignoring neglectedness. My reasoning then was fairly simple.
My main reason for thinking that climate change was a significant existential risk (or at least a GCR) was that I had the vague impression that this is a position in academia.
My main reason for not believing that was because a) weak inside views about historical resilience to temperature variability and b) other smart and thoughtful EAs didn't believe this.
Thus, the appropriate way to evaluate the evidence is to try to look at the climate change literature, in a way that does not reference past EA work (so as to not be clouded as much by biases/information cascades).
I looked at it for a while, and concluded that the literature mostly did not say that climate change was a significant existential risk (of course it was not framed in those terms).
I thought that climate risk experts should be predisposed to overestimate rather than estimate risks, so there is additional evidence beyond just their conclusions.
Given that my reasons for thinking climate change was a significant existential risk weren't very strong or robust to begin with, I didn't need that many bits to be convinced that the risks are low.
I think my research quality/rigor at the time was pretty meh. Still I don't think it should swing the overall conclusion.
I'm more worried about motivated reasoning/selection effects. Motivated reasoning because I felt like part of the reason for doing that research was convincing myself and others, rather than because I fully impassionately wanted to know the truth. Selection effects because I went into it using an EA methodology and ways of thinking about the world, and of course I'm selected to be one of the people who think in that way.
Since then, I had 3 updates re: how high climate risk should intuitively "feel", in my head, in different directions:
Jan-March 2020 Covid was a large update for me against a) trusting the object-level of a lot of expert modeling and b) trusting that experts will uniformly overestimate rather than underestimate risk (as opposed to "don't panic" justifications and conservatism bias). This caused me to worry more about climate stuff.
I did not look into or investigate their reasoning, and generally have not prioritized looking into climate much since 2019.
Compared to myself in 2019, I placed relatively more trust in the relative judgement of EAs over that of external people. This caused me to worry less about climate stuff.
I think the first update is the largest.
My understanding is that a lot of the purported value of engaging on the object-level details of climate, and of WWOTF's aims in general, is to draw in the climate change people as allies.
I'm a bit confused about this reasoning. I think:
the arguments for working on AI risk/biorisk over climate risks seems fairly simple to me, and resilient to a practical range of empirical disagreements within climate.
to the extent the arguments are bad or poorly communicated, I strongly suspect that they come in almost entirely because AI risk/biorisk arguments are insufficiently grounded, rather than because the climate arguments are insufficiently sophisticated.
from a persuasion perspective, I think this is maybe a bad move anyway. Maybe better to be "yes, and" than to explicitly and immediately tell people that the thing they've devoted their lives to is >100x less important.
Given that it might not be realistic to find (and may not be very valuable) a senior-ish EA researcher to critique and red-team John's report, I'd be excited to have several junior EAs try this.
Roughly, a summer-long project for someone of the calibre of CERI/SERI might be to go line by line in the report (or pick a few chapters) to find the relevant potential mistakes/disagreements/cruxes (from an LT perspective).
This helps train critical thinking abilities and thoughtfulness.
To be clear, this is premised on domain-general critical thinking abilities and thoughtfulness being among the most valuable things for junior EAs to train.
I'm genuinely confused about how much we want less thoughtful people as allies. I think an increasingly common position in longtermist EA nowadays is that the things that matter is AI risk and biorisk (sometimes just AI risk), and what we most/only need are people who are either extremely technically competent (for solving the technical problems) or who are very good at politics (for policy/persuasion).
Whereas I feel like I sort of represent the older guard of people who still think that thoughtfulness is a huge asset.
But I acknowledge that this is something I have a (large?) bias to believing is true (because I'm relatively worse at being very technical or social, compared to being thoughtful).
Unfortunately, all of the comments here are overly meta. Out of the ~60 comments so far on this thread, 0.5 of the comments on this thread approach anything like technical criticism, cruxes, or even engagement.
I think this is mainly because of the length of the report which makes it hard to make meaningful critiques without investing a bunch of time
Yes, and I note that as/after I wrote my comment, there are more thoughtful object-level comments. So perhaps I commented too early and should've just waited for people to have time to read the report first and then provide object-level comments!
I don't have time in the next several days to give your write-up the attention it deserves, but I hope to study it as a learning opportunity and to expand my grasp of general arguments around what I call steady-state climate change, that is, climate change without much contribution from tipping points this century and without strong impacts at even higher temperatures (eg., 3-4C). I appreciate the structure of your report, by the way, it lets a reader quickly drill down to sections of interest. It is clearly written.
At the moment, I am considering your analysis of permafrost and methane contributions to GAST changes. I have a larger number for total carbon in permafrost than you, 1.5Tt carbon, but now have to go through references to reconcile that number with yours. Your mention of an analysis from USGS deserves a read through articles from the reference you gave, and I am attempting that now.
There are several parameters involved (only some independent), to do with:
source type (anearobic decomposition, free gas deposit, methane hydrate dissolution),
source size,
source depth and layering,
rate of release (obviously dependent on other parameters)
geographic location (gulf of mexico versus arctic ice shelf),
temperature gradient (at a location),
water column height (near-shore vs slope),
in deciding whether methane (edit:carbon in methane) reaches the atmosphere as methane, carbon dioxide, or not at all, and over what time period.
The significance of field observations over the last 10 years, and differences between particular regions (eg, Arctic seas), should be taken into account. Before reviewing counterarguments, I tend to take specialist claims about conclusions that factor in these parameters uncritically, but now that you've mentioned one parameter, aerobic bacteria acting on methane, as implying conclusions contrary to mine, I should delve deeper into how these parameters interact.
If you want to offer a comment about Greenland's ice sheet, and its potential contribution to sea level rise this century, I am curious to check sources with you and do more reconciling (or at least partitioning) of references. I've seen reports that changes to Greenland's ice sheet are accelerating and lead to estimates of sea level rise that are higher than, say 50 cm, more like meters, actually, over the next 80 years, but would like to know more from you.
In general, my observation is strong drivers of change to specific tipping points haven't found their way into climate models used by the IPCC (for example, physical processes driving some Greenland ice melt). They might at some point.
BTW, I did take a read through the comments here, and consider the the mentions of analyses of systemic and cascading risks to be useful. I hope you won't object if I ask a few questions about those risks, just to understand your perspective on those models. However, if you consider those questions to be out of scope or not of interest, let me know, and I'll hold off.
(Just noting that I'm not ignoring your comments about methane clathrates, but I don't think you were asking for a response there, but were instead just highlighting some issues for you to look into? Correct me if I'm wrong)
Yes I note that there is deep uncertainty about sea level rise once warming passes 3ºC and that sea level rise might be much higher than estimated. I discuss the impacts this might have in the sea level rise section and the economic costs section
I agree that many specific tipping points haven't made their way into IPCC models
About 1 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost.325
and you include the footnote:
325 “The new northern permafrost zone carbon inventory reports the surface permafrost carbon pool (0–3 m) to be 1,035 ±150 Pg carbon (mean ±95% confidence interval, CI).” E. a. G. Schuur et al.,‘Climate Change and the Permafrost Carbon Feedback’, Nature 520, no. 7546 (April 2015): 171–79,https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14338.
In the Nature paper you cited for a listing of permafrost carbon, you find the following quote on the same page as lists total carbon in the top 3 meters of permafrost. I list the geographic regions in braces for clarity:
Taken together, the known pool of terrestrial permafrost carbon in the northern permafrost zone is 1,330–1,580 Pg carbon, accounting for surface carbon as well as deep carbon in the yedoma region [in Siberia and Alaska] and [Arctic] river deltas, with the potential for 400 Pg carbon in other deep terrestrial permafrost sediments that, along with an additional quantity of subsea permafrost carbon, still remains largely unquantified.
So a total amount of carbon in permafrost between 1730-1980 Pg, or 1.73-1.98 trillion tonnes of carbon, not the 1 trillion tonnes you list. This is typically described as being twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere, but how quickly it causes heating given some rate of thaw depends on whether it is released as methane or carbon dioxide. As you know, methane has 100X the heating potential of carbon dioxide, but that drops off rapidly over a couple decades, so rate of release is very important.
If you look elsewhere for amounts, you find the usual figure listed is 1.5Tt for total carbon in permafrost. I think that represents updates to estimates but have not looked into it in detail. A slight rephrase of your sentence "About 1 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost." to either mention the top 3 meters of soil explicitly for the trillion tonnes number or to use some figure closer to 1.5Tt (NOAA's mid-range for total northern permafrost). will bring the announced total closer to what people typically mean by total carbon in permafrost, just the permafrost in the North.
Earlier in the same Nature paper, you read:
Deeper carbon measurements were initially rare, and it was not even possible to quantify the uncertainty for the permafrost carbon pool size estimate. However, important new syntheses continue to report large quantities of deep carbon preserved in permafrost at many previously unsampled locations, and that a substantial fraction of this deep permafrost carbon is susceptible to future thaw15. The permafrost carbon pool is now thought to comprise organic carbon in the top 3 m of surface soil, carbon in deposits deeper than 3 m (including those within the yedoma region, an area of deep sediment deposits that cover unglaciated parts of Siberia and Alaska16–18), as well as carbon within permafrost that formed on land during glacial periods but that is now found on shallow submarine shelves in the Arctic.
For the reference you cite, it's clear that carbon deeper than 3m is considered "susceptible to future thaw", and so is relevant to discussions of permafrost contribution to global warming. In fact, some existing examples of that thaw are mentioned in that 2015 paper.
I think there are numerous taking off points for discussion of the effects of permafrost thaw aside from the box 5.1 sections of the IPCC technical report that you cite.
The parameters deciding the effects of permafrost include:
abrupt vs gradual release of carbon
carbon release as methane (CH4) vs carbon dioxide (CO2)
geological shaping of ice and organic matter within permafrost
release of ancient microbes (bacteria, viruses) and others (anthrax, smallpox) in the soil
subsidence rates (causing effects on current or future infrastructure)
biophysical rates of change to permafrost (ground fires and microbial action)
stored chemical release on permafrost lands (sump chemicals, other chemicals)
if you decide that you want to expand on those in a later version of your research.
EDIT: I included some light edits to this to make my comment more clear. Also I would love to discuss more of the topics you raise in your research report, including the models suggesting different levels of contribution from carbon release from permafrost.
I noticed this quote at the end of the box highlight on "Permafrost Carbon and Feedbacks to Climate" in Chapter 5 of the IPCC Technical Report that you cite:
In conclusion, thawing terrestrial permafrost will lead to carbon release under a warmer world (high confidence). However, there is low confidence on the timing, magnitude and linearity of the permafrost climate feedback owing to the wide range of published estimates and the incomplete knowledge and representation in models of drivers and relationships.
And this is why considering the highs and lows in a bit of depth is worth doing.
It is projected that CO2 released from permafrost will be 18 (3.1–41) PgC /°C by 2100, with the relative contribution of CO2 vs CH4 remaining poorly constrained. Permafrost carbon feedbacks are included among the under-represented feedbacks quantified in Figure 5.29.
Those projections, if we accept them as accurate, do not address nonlinear release of carbon, particularly as Methane. That leaves it to you to summarize expected heating over the short term of an abrupt release of carbon involving significant amounts of CH4. As I wrote, CH4 has 100X the heating potential of CO2 but over the longer term of a century, that drops to 25X.
Would abrupt release of a large amount of CH4 create a jump in average temperature of 1-2C? What would the impact of that be? How would it amplify other feedbacks and with what consequences for humanity, give that the effect is temporary?
Your report could address those questions with more interest than it does.
Right, I wasn't looking for a response about methane, more just excitedly listing, I guess. My motivated thinking, going in, is that there's plenty of exposed methane hydrates and free methane on shallow parts of the continental shelves exposed to much warmer waters in the Arctic and Siberia. A Nature paper from Ruppel is a bit old, and includes discussion of deeper deposits in warmer waters much further south. The paper does make exceptions for shallower deposits, as in the Arctic sea. She notes technical difficulties in resolving the origin of the methane even in those cases, but there's been efforts to resolve the questions since then. A later Reviews Of Geophysics paper confronts predictions about sources and distributions.I have to dig into that.
Carolyn Ruppel is also a proponent of drilling undersea methane for fuel, and has been for the last decade. Treatment of the melting arctic as a tipping point seems politically unpopular, now that various projected benefits of its melt have been identified. We can drill for natural gas or oil, fish, establish shipping lanes, or fight over sovereignty up there, but I'm not seeing much government attention on the ice-free Arctic as an actual climate problem.
Still, Ruppel holds an important position, and I will give her research more attention now. Thank you.
Yes, as far as sea level rise, I read the sections you mentioned, thank you. The West Antarctic is less of an immediate concern than Greenland, so I am puzzled why you haven't mentioned Greenland explicitly. Your discussion of sea level rise doesn't include Greenland's contribution, but Greenland will melt before the West Antarctic, and it holds several meters of sea level rise in its ice. I believe that Greenland's melt could shutdown the AMOC as well.
I think processes like fires on permafrost land go ignored in models of permafrost thaw, just like lubrication of the bottom of Greenland Ice goes ignored. Some discussions about climate change suggest that people move north, but north into areas of melting permafrost? That seems dubious.
Anyway, thanks again, I'll come back to you with whatever I actually conclude once I compare the two points of view that I have on arctic methane:
dangerous tipping point
harmless, possibly irrelevant, source of natural gas
Thanks, I'm actually surprised that members of the community have such energy around its concerns about the quality of climate change scholarship. I didn't expect that that the OP would generate these concerns.
I posted a radical opinion about climate change here some time back that got a few downvotes and almost no readers. Basically, I think global warming is now self-amplifying. Anyway, I don't mind the lack of interest, it wasn't scholarly work.
The meta comments are about research process, how best to represent differing viewpoints, and whether John gave fair weight to considerations outside the point of view that John holds. I don't have a comment here, I think I'll take what was given as where to start my own learning efforts.
What I would like from others who post here is more engagement around specific scenarios of risk. From my review of comments made in discussions of climate change, the obstacle seems to be lack of commitment to the plausibility of specific scenarios.
So for example, a discussion of a multi-breadbasket failure would include a few sentences about how our civilization would respond by choosing to grow its own food, eg., in cities. I would like to see someone work that through. We're talking about locally producing calorie-dense sources of carbohydrates and proteins in a situation in which grain stocks become limited worldwide. Vegies on your windowsill won't do the job. More generally, there's a question about stocks vs flows, we have some grain reserves, but how much, and how should they be managed in case of what percentage of global crop failures? George Monbiot has some conclusions (hint, he wants to use some old NASA tech), I'm looking forward to reading his work. Then there's the reason for failure. Hurricanes inundating low-lying farm areas (like Vietnam) would have a longer impact on soil productivity than would a 6-week heat wave, or would it?
Another example would be how we handle internal and global migration, given some specific scenario. For example, a famine and water shortage in Bangladesh during a heat wave inducing power outages and heat stress enough to kill people. What does an altruistic response to that situation look like?
In any prediction where the claim goes, "It would be very bad if....", there's usually a discussion of 100's of millions of deaths. What does that mean? Do they die in place, suddenly, or was there a predictable build-up but no response for a long time? I see this happening with a multi-breadbasket failure, there's hardly anyone working to prevent this scenario in realtime. There's one UN organization, a small one, and then there's ALLfed, who seem to be focused on Nuclear Winter. And how long is realtime? There's supposed to be a network coordinated from the UN that tracks when a global famine is looming and arranges stocks and flows to prevent the worst of it. Are they funded and effective?
I have also noticed a lack of interest in the states about the impacts of small heat waves elsewhere, for example, China's recent heat wave. But these tiny examples are a good start for creating predictions. People fried eggs on city stones for fun over there (yes, the heat island effect). Bridges buckled from heat, and their hydroelectric dams are dry. The immediate predictions, sadly, are just focused on their GDP. There's not much good prediction work to explain what happens if their water and hydropower shortage continue. I know only a little, that different geographic regions have different levels of dependency on hydropower. But the industries effected are critical to some sections of the global economy, and their shutdown, long-term, should be a concern for the economics-minded. Will they turn to coal to make up the difference and does it matter (coal, btw, has an interesting silver lining, the aerosol effect)?
Then there's Britain's recent heat wave, and the heat wave in the Northwest of the US a few years ago. All quite odd, linked to the meandering jet stream. The rain on Greenland's summit, another anomaly, which sets a new precedent for Greenland melt. We don't want an atmospheric river dumping on Greenland for days on end.
Then there's the recent prediction of a historical flood of California, a recurring event, but worsened by climate change.
Yes, so there's plenty to start from, and when building a scenario, you can take what's happened, make it worse, and make it last longer or occur repeatedly. Use that to explain why climate change is bad. Conversely, to reject climate change as a catastrophic risk, explain how we go about handling these difficult situations successfully, in time to prevent risks like the deaths of 100's of millions of people. I would like to read some of those rejections.
Thanks for mentioning ALLFED. We do tend to focus on nuclear winter, including with NASA tech like hydrogen single cell protein. However, a lot of the foods we research are relevant to climate catastrophes such as multiple breadbasket failure, including seaweed.
Yes, the protein production technology is certainly relevant. I don't think the seaweed is unless you are confident that it would survive various changes in ocean temperature, acidity, pollutant levels, flora, and fauna that progress with climate change. What do your models say?
What geographic range would growth of the seaweed serve depending on what forms of food transport? Is the use of seaweed as a food source likely restricted to the coasts and coastal populations?
Seaweed can be dried and transported long distances. It can also be used for reducing climate change, including sequestering CO2 and reducing methane emissions of cattle.
Can it be grown in tanks? I think fallout from a nuclear war would contaminate all open areas used for agriculture, including the oceans, for example, from fallout on winds, dust, rain (if there is any?), or water contamination carried on ocean currents. Do your models suggest that agriculture and aquaculture and use of open areas is a strong contamination risk or no?
There was an algae-based oil called Thrive, totally monounsaturated, if I remember right, that until recently was commercially available. I used it several times and liked it as a salad oil.
Seaweed can be grown in tanks, and so can microalgae. But from what I've seen, the cost is significantly higher in tanks. Radioactive contamination is a concern, especially in target countries. But it is likely not the most important concern, as Hiroshima was continuously inhabited. Radioactive contamination would be diluted in the oceans, so I think seaweed would be better than land crops in this regard.
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few more questions:
1. If you can find the research about seaweed growth in lower-pH conditions with heat waves in nearshore waters, and changes in nutrient availability (probably declines), I want to know more. I think seaweed might be a good near-term choice of replacement agriculture in the next 10-20 years, but during that time, it makes sense that the world scale up the kinds of food sources that you and ALLFED explore.
2. I like dextrose monohydrate, as a food product, it's widely available and dissolves clean in water. With flavoring and in combination with whey (and of course casein, but I really favor whey), it makes a replacement milk. I understand that anhydrous dextrose has different properties in foods. What form of dextrose would paper mills produce? Are you more thinking something with less sweetness, like maltodextrin (also a possibility in a milk substitute)? Could the mills produce different types of carbs?
3. Assuming a 2400 kcal diet, what are your targets for macronutrients? Given a source of concentrated carbohydrates, people need a protein source, a fat source, and additional sources of minerals and vitamins and other compounds. I lik carbs (510g-450g), proteins (40g-100g), and an EFA source (1g-10g), but that's just me. Adding in fats, you need to choose a carb minimum, as I think the trade-off would be carbs for fats, not proteins for fats. There's a variety of reasons to choose different kcalorie totals and macronutrient balances, do you have a list of your criteria and final decisions or have you looked into that in detail?
4. Have you looked into the manufacture of: * individual essential amino acids? * essential fatty acids? * vitamin and mineral supplements?
5. Based on UN studies, there's a lower limit on protein consumption that maintains protein balance in a person[1]. Has ALLFED chosen a minimum daily human EAA requirements, per kg bodyweight, and something similar for children?
6. With the dried seaweed you mentioned, how do you prepare it, or what sort of food products can you prepare with it? With dextrose, the easiest choices are sweet treats. What do you do with the seaweed?
7. I suspect that in a time of crisis like a multi-breadbasket failure, both refrigeration and heating (cooking) are lacking resources for transport and storage. Therefore, ability to store food for long periods without spoiling is important. Dried foods or powders work the best there[2]. If it were me, I'd choose carb+ protein powders and vacuum-sealed EFA plus vitamin/mineral supplementation powder. How does your modeling and knowledge differ from my conclusions?
Given different food sources of proteins, and differences in absorption from those sources, as well as balance of aminos present in those foods, people require more or less food to meet their EAA requirements. This is actually an important argument against the use of natural food vegan protein sources available globally, because although total protein requirements are easily met by local food sources, EAA requirements are much to meet without the addition of milk or meat, unless you rely on soy. I don't object to soy in the diet, but in terms of environmental footprint required to meet human EAA requirements, vegan diets might be a concern if they don't include soy. Of course you know that individual EAAs cannot be substituted for each other.
I think supplementation of manufactured foods with aminos would serve for countries with less access to milk or meat. So EAA's to bring foods into balance with ideal EAA profiles, and individual amino acids like glutamine that have higher metabolic demand. Ajinomoto corporation does use aminos as a food additive and animal feed suppliers do this with animal feed but most amino acids taste terrible, except for lysine, glutamine, and maybe a few others. Some people like glycine but I do not like the taste.
Imagine that only a few hundred people in the world thought that climate change is an important problem (rather than at least tens of millions), that philanthropists worldwide spent a few million dollars a year on climate (rather than $10 billion), that society as a whole spent a million dollars on the problem (rather than $1 trillion), and that the international institutions trying to tackle the problem either don’t exist or have a similar budget to a McDonald’s restaurant. How bad would climate change be? This is how bad things are for the other global catastrophic risks, and then some.
This seems to overstate how bad the situation is (although qualitatively it remains an absurd underinvestment, with painfully low-hanging fruit to avert pandemics and AI catastrophe at hand). Surveys of the general public and area experts do show substantial percentages in the abstract endorse nuclear (in particular), bioweapon, and AI risks as important problems (as you mention later). Governments wage wars and spend very large amounts of attention and resources on nuclear proliferation and threats. Biodefense has seen billions of dollars of spending, even if it was not well-crafted to reduce catastrophic bioweapon risk. The low budget for the BWC is in significant part a political coordination problem and not simply a $ supply issue. Annual spending from Open Philanthropy and the Future Fund on catastrophic risks, with priorities close to yours, is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Didn't separate karma for helpfulness and disagreement (frequently used on LessWrong) get implemented on the EA forum recently? This post feels like the ideal use case for it:
There are some controversial comments with weakly positive karma despite lots of votes, where I suspect what's going on is some people are signalling disagreement with downvotes, and others are signalling 'this post constitutes meaningful engagement' with upvotes.
There are also some comments where the tone seems to me to be over the line, with varying amounts of karma (from very positive to very negative), from various people.
Were a two-karma system available, I think I would use both [strong upvote, strong disagree] and [strong downvote, strong agree] at least once each.
the forum did offer the chance of having agree/disagree on the post, I just forgot to respond. I think it is a beta feature but happy for it to be used on this post
I think we also need renewed discussion of how the karma system contributes to groupthink and hierarchy, things that, to put it gently, EA sometimes struggles with somewhat.
As far as I can tell, the system gives far more voting power to highly-rated users, allowing a few highly active (and thus most likely highly orthodox) forum users to unilaterally boost or tank any given post.
This is especially bad when you consider that low-karma comments are hidden, allowing prominent figures (often with high karma scores) to soft-censor their own critics.
This is especially worrying given the groupthink that emerges on internet fora, where a comment having a score of -5 makes it much more likely for people to downvote it further on reflex, and vice versa.
I disagree that the problem here is groupthink, and I think if you look at highly rated posts, you can't reasonably conclude that people who criticise the orthodox position will be reliably downvoted. I think the problem here is that some people vote based on tone and some on content, which means that when something is downvoted different people draw different conclusions about why.
I think the problem here is that some people vote based on tone and some on content,
I hope to encourage more people to instead upvote based on rigor/epistemics/quality on the margin, rather than based on tone or based on agreement (which is some of "content") or vibe.
EDIT: I also think a surprisingly high number of people upvote low-quality criticisms that have a good tone, which makes me surprised when others assert than the movement is systematically biased against criticisms ("insufficient discernment" will be a fairer criticism, but that's a mistake, not a bias).
Doubtful if you look at Gideon's first comment and remember it was downvoted through the floor almost immediately.
Questioning orthodoxy is ok within some bounds (often technical/narrow disagreements), or when expressed in suitable terms, e.g.
(Significant) underconfidence, regardless of expertise and/or lack of expertise among those criticised
Unreasonable assumptions of good faith, even in the face of hostility or malpractice (double standards, perhaps a lesser form of the expectation of a 'perfect victim')
Extensive use of EA buzzwords
Huge amounts of extra work/detail that would not be deemed necessary for non-critical writing
Essentially making oneself as small as possible so as not to set off the Bad Tone hair-trigger
This is difficult because knowing what you are talking about and being lazily dismissed by people you know for a fact know far less than you about a given subject matter makes one somewhat frustrated
As several EAs have noted, e.g. weeatquince, this is time-consuming and (emotionally) exhausting, and often results in dismissal anyway.
This is even harder to pull off when questioning sensitive issues like politics, funding ethics, foundational intellectual issues (e.g. the ways in which the TUA uses utterly unsuitable tools for its subject matter due to a lack of outside reading), competence of prominent figures, etc.
I actually think this forms a sort of positive feedback loop, where EAs become increasingly orthodox (and confident in that orthodoxy) due to perceived lack of substantive critiques, which makes making those critiques so frustrating, time-consuming, and low-impact that people just don't bother. I've certainly done it.
4 are straightforwardly criticisms: ("Free-spending EA might be bad...", "Bad Omens", "case against randomista development", "Critiques of EA")
4 are partial criticisms ("Long-Termism" vs. "Existential Risk", "My mistakes on the path to impact","EA for dumb people?", "Are you really in a race?")
1 (the most upvoted) was a response to criticism ("EA and the current funding situation")
1 was about the former EAForum head leaving ("Announcing my retirement")
This is a total of 40-80%, depending on how you count.
(In the next 10 posts, I "only" see 3 posts that are criticisms, but I don't think that 30% is particularly low either. It does get lower further down however).
I don't find this example convincing. I just read the review and found it pretty underwhelming. Take this:
MacAskill’s personal position is to basically to throw up his hands, declare that none of the solutions to the problems with utilitarianism look very good, and we should just compromise between various repugnant theories of how to deal with populations, hoping that whatever compromise we take isn’t that bad.
The paragraph is reacting to the following passage in WWOTF:
There is still deep disagreement within philosophy about what the right view of population ethics is. . . Indeed, I don’t think that there’s any view in population ethics that anyone should be extremely confident in.
If you want to reject the Repugnant Conclusion, therefore, then you’ve got to reject one of the premises that this argument was based on. But each of these premises seem incontrovertible. We are left with a paradox. One option is to simply accept the Repugnant Conclusion. . . This is the view that I incline towards. Many other philosophers believe that we should reject one of the other premises instead.
Like all views in population ethics, the critical level view has some very unappealing downsides.
There is still deep disagreement about what the right view of population ethics is. . . Indeed, I don’t think that there’s any view in population ethics that anyone should be extremely confident in.
But MacAskill is here describing problems with rival views in population ethics, not problems with utilitarianism! Because the author (1) conflates the two, (2) mischaracterizes the Repugnant Conclusion ("worlds where all available land is turned into places worse than the worst slums of Bangladesh"), and (3) fails to distinguish the Repugnant Conclusion from standard "repugnant" implications of utilitarianism that have nothing to do with it, he ends up attributing to longtermism a number of "ridiculous" views that do not in fact follow from that position.
Separately, if criticizing WWOTF is considered to be a paradigmatic case of "heterodoxy", it seems worth mentioning that a recent critical review by Magnus Vinding has been very favorably received (179 karma at the time of writing).
This response completely ignores the main point of my comment.
Separately, if criticizing WWOTF is considered to be a paradigmatic case of "heterodoxy", it seems worth mentioning that a recent critical review by Magnus Vinding has been very favorably received (179 karma at the time of writing).
Please reread my comment because the whole point was that A.C.Skraeling said that criticism is accepted within some boundaries, or when expressed in suitable terms. You essentially just repeated Linch's point except that my whole point was that Linch's point is perfectly compatible with what A.C. Skraeling said.
Regarding Hoel's review, you seem to have read my point as being that it was particularly good or convincing to EAs, which is incorrect. My point was that it was downvoted to -12, a karma score I associate with trollish posts, despite its content being much better than that, because of the combination of criticizing EA orthodoxy (longtermism, utilitarianism, population ethics etc) and not expressing it in a suitable manner. This makes it a decent example of what A.C.Skraeling said. You are free to disagree of course.
Please reread my comment because the whole point was that A.C.Skraeling said that criticism is accepted within some boundaries, or when expressed in suitable terms.
I did misread some parts of your original comment. I thought you were saying that criticizing WWOTF was itself an example of criticism that is beyond the bounds Skraeling was describing. But I now see that you were not saying this. My apologies. (I have crossed out the part of my comment that is affected by this misreading.)
Regarding Hoel's review, you seem to have read my point as being that it was particularly good or convincing to EAs, which is incorrect.
That is not how I read your point. I interpreted you as saying that the quality of the book review justified higher karma than it received (which is confirmed by your reply). My comment was meant to argue against this point, by highlighting some serious blunders and sloppy reasoning by the author that probably justify the low rating. (-12 karma is appropriate for a post of very low quality, in my opinion, and not just a trollish post.)
Regarding the Hoel piece, the fact that you highlighted the section you did and the way you analyzed it suggests to me you didn't understand what his position was, and didn't try particularly hard to do so. I don't think you can truly judge whether his content is very low quality if you don't understand it. Personally, I think he made some interesting points really engaging with some cores of EA, even if I disagree with much of what he said. I completely disagree that his content, separate from its language and tone towards EAs, is anywhere near very low quality, certainly nowhere near -12. If you want to understand his views better, I found his comments replying to his piece on why he's not an EA illuminating, such as his response to my attempted summary of his position. But we can agree to disagree.
Edit note: I significantly edited the part of this comment talking about Hoel's piece within a few hours of posting with the aim of greater clarity.
I frequently catch myself, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, being more likely to upvote posts of users that I know. I also find myself anchoring my vote to the existing vote count (if a post has a lot of upvotes then I am less likely to downvote it). Pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Furthermore, I observe how vote count influences my reading of each post more than it should. Groupthink at its best.
I suspect if the forum hid the vote count for a month, there would be significant changes in voting patterns. That being said, I'm not sure these changes would actually influence the votesorted order of the postings - but they might. I suspect it would also change the nature of certain discussions.
The dynamics in this post seem weird. John is very well-respected within EA for his work on climate change, and having this report commissioned by Will makes it even more likely to be disseminated quickly and widely throughout the community.
In my opinion that means it's particularly essential that thoughtful critiques are brought up earlier rather than later. Of course the report has already been reviewed by a lot of people I respect, but in general I'm in favour of people asking questions and raising concerns here, even though I would expect most concerns to have already been thought about and be relatively easily addressed, or in some cases not worth addressing.
So I'd like to encourage people to post these questions, concerns and critiques, but I think the environment in these comments hasn't always been encouraging. People have been significantly downvoted for reasons I don't understand, and John has in one case accused someone of misrepresenting their identity which I don't think was helpful.
Do people agree with me that we should encourage people to post their questions and concerns here, even if you don't agree with the specific questions? Do people agree the current environment isn't ideal for that?
I didn't downvote any of the criticisms but I can understand why people would downvote the following quote as it is quite close to assuming intention:
"Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise."
I haven't managed to read the full report yet unfortunately, but I have a few questions/criticisms already- sorry to move onto these so quickly, but nonetheless I do think its important. (I tried to write these in a more friendly way, but I keep on failing to do, so please don't take the tone as too aggressive, I am really not intending it to be, it just keeps coming across that way ! Sorry (: ) :
There are no mentions of systemic or cascading risks in the report. Why is this?
You don't seem to engage with much of the peer-reviewed literature already written on climate change and GCRs. For example: Beard et al 2021, Kemp et al 2022, Richards et al 2021. Don't get me wrong, you might disagree or have strong arguments against these papers, but it seems to some degree like you have failed to engage with them
You don't seem to engage with much of the more complex systems aspects of civilisation collapse/ existential risk theory. Why is this?
There are no mentions of existential vulnerabilities and exposures, and you seem to essentially buy into a broadly hazard based account. The subdivision into direct and indirect effects further seems to support this idea. In this way you seem to ignore complex risk analysis. Why is this?
You seem to broadly ignore the work that went on around "sexy vs unsexy risks" and "boring apocalypses" and the more expansive work done to diversify views of how X-Risks may come about. Why is this?
Thanks for the report, and I am sure I will have more questions the more I go through it. I guess my major concern with this sort of stuff is it is likely that this work will go down (unrelated to its quality, and I am not saying its bad) as a "canonical" work in EA, so I think you perhaps have a responsibility, even if you in the end reject some of this scholarship, to engage in a lot of this (peer reviewed) scholarship on GCRs and X-Risks that has occurred in the "third wave" research paradigm of Existential Risk Studies, and I am slightly concerned that you appear not to have engaged with this literature!
I don't think explicit discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions, and cascading risks are implicitly discussed at several points in the piece.
I have read the papers you mention. You will find (attempted) refutations of many of the points in those articles scattered across the report. In earlier drafts, I did have a direct response to those papers, but it is now all dealt with in different sections of the main report.
I don't agree with the 'everything is connected' idea of society, such that society is incredibly sensitive to mild climatic changes. If that is what you mean by complex systems theory. And I defend that view at length in the report.
There are many many different ways of conceptually dividing up an analysis of climate risk. The direct/indirect way is conceptually exhaustive and so insofar as I have accurately covered the direct/indirect risks, I have accurately covered overall climate risk
True that I did ignore this, explicitly at least. I do not see how it would affect my conclusions. There is no indication from the climate literature that climate change would cause anything close to a boring apocalypse. Also, I think it is very obvious from study of sexy and unsexy risks that the sexy risks (bio, AI) are far far bigger than the unsexy risks.
I did engage a lot with that literature, I just don't talk about it directly. One could also say that Beard et al and Kemp et al don't engage with a lot of relevant literature, which I do discuss in my piece. eg Beard et al doesn't engage with the literature suggesting that we are not going to run out of phosphorous and soil; Kemp et al doesn't engage with the literature on assumptions about coal use in integrated assessment models.
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I'll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of 'direct' and indirect' risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one's methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
The work was reviewed by experts, as I discuss in the other comment.
I do discuss tipping points at some length. I don't see how the idea of cascading risks would change my substantive conclusions at all. If you want to argue that cascading risks would in fact affect my conclusions, I would be happy to have that debate.
In fairness to me, the Kemp et al paper was only published a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn't include it in the report. I think much of that paper is incorrect, and the reasons for that are discussed at length in the report. The conclusions of the Beard et al and Richards et al paper are, in my view, refuted mostly in section 5 of my report. If you have a criticism of that section, which largely leans on the latest IPCC report, I would be happy to have that discussion
I have read the Richards et al complex systems paper. It contains the following diagram purporting to show how climate change could cause civilisational collapse
I am open to the possibility that my argument that climate change will not destroy the global food system is wrong. I am happy to discuss substantive criticisms of those arguments. I do not see one in the Richards paper, or in what you have said.
Your critique here seems to me to miss the mark, as illustrated by your own example. If I am assessing biorisk and categorise viruses according to whether they have an odd or even number of letters, then so long as I got my risk assessment right for the odd and even numbered letter viruses, I would have actually evaluated biorisk. I don't know whether I am taking a 'techno-utopian approach' but I thought the Cremer and Kemp paper was not very good and I am not alone in thinking that (it's also not peer reviewed, if that is the criterion we are using). As I have said, I seldom depart from the IPCC in the report. If you think I do, which of my arguments do you think are wrong?
It's a bit weird to argue that a 400+ page report is radically incomplete without making any arguments and then to criticise my response as just making assertions. Which of my substantive arguments do you disagree with and why?
It is true that those papers are short but they also do not engage with literature that is inconsistent with most of their main claims. They lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, which is extremely controversial and I argue against at length in the report.
Given the review process was not like normal peer review, would it be possible to have a public copy of all the reviewers comments like we get with the IPCC. This seems like it may br important for epistemic transparency
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I've always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we're making are so important, shouldn't we have really robust ways of making sure they're right?
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn't most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?
I respect this for being a substantive critique and have upvoted, even though it does read as pretty harsh to me.
I do think the way this comment is written might make it hard to respond to. I wonder if it would be easier to discuss if either (a) you made this comment a separate post that you linked to (it's already long enough, I reckon) or (b) you split it into 3-4 individual comments with one important question or critique in each, so that people can discuss each separately? My preference would be for (a) personally, especially if you have the time to flesh out your concerns for a less expert audience!
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven't seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying 'On point #4...'
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon's get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I'm discussing both your response and Karthik's here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
I meant 'I'll leave the in-depth response to Gideon'. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I'm puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they're getting such a hostile response.
I strongly upvoted this because it was at -4 karma when I saw it and that seems way too low. That said, I understand the frustration people feel at a comment like this that would lead them to downvote. It raises far too many questions for the OP to answer all at once, and doesn't elaborate on any of them enough for the OP to respond to the substance of any claim you make. This is the kind of comment that is very hard to answer, regardless of its merit.
Perhaps that's fair, certainly the asking too many questions part. I am less sure that it doesn't expand enough, because I would like to give John credit to suggest he knew what bits of the literature he was excluding.
More generally, I think my concern is a post like this may quickly establish itself as "orthodoxy" so I wanted to raise my concerns as early as possible, but perhaps I should have waited a bit of time to do a more comprehensive response. Perhaps I will learn for next time
To be fair a 'comprehensive' response would include even more questions, so I'm not confident there's any way to win here.
Yes I am also very worried about the orthodoxy point; EA is often a closed citation loop, where a small number of people and organisations cross-cite one another and ignore outside ('non-value aligned') work. Most reading lists are absolutely dominated by ~5 names, sometimes a few more.
Halstead, as a semi-big name at a prominent organisation (and, for better or worse, the movement's de facto authority on climate change) is extremely likely to have his work accepted into the canon without significant challenge from climate experts (with training in climate science and policy, rather than philosophy...).
Thus, a fresh crop of undergraduates on will be told that climate is no big deal compared to sexier and more EA-friendly stuff like AI without ever being aware of all the climate-related GCR work Halstead doesn't engage with (or even mention). I suspect, perhaps uncharitably, that this is because most of it disagrees with him. This in turn is partially because it has to be peer-reviewed by people selected on the basis of their expertise in climate risk, rather than EA value-alignment.
This lack of internal critique is probably because EA talks down climate so much (not least due to the influence of Halstead) that there simply aren't very many climate-focused people around, and those that are around know the kind of response they get when they speak out of turn (see above haha).
I love so much of EA but for a community so focused on epistemics we really are bad at accepting criticism, especially when it's directed at the big boys.
The report was reviewed by various people with expertise in various different aspects of climate change. The reviewers are pasted at the bottom of this comment.
The criticism raised by GIdeon seems to be that it doesn't cite some studies that take an extreme stance on climate risk relative to mainstream climate scientists and climate economists. I discuss many of the claims made in these papers at considerable length. If you disagree with some of my substantive claims, then I would be happy to discuss them.
I don't think my report is outside the mainstream of IPCC science. I can't think of any substantive claims that are inconsistent with the latest IPCC report, with the exception of my criticism of the Burke et al (2015) paper and the ecosystem collapse stuff.
The reviewers for the report are below, though they may not agree with everything I have written.
Matthew Huber, Professor, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University
Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, Bristol University
Jochen Hinkel, Head of Department of Adaptation and Social Learning at the Global Climate Forum
R. Daniel Bressler, PhD Candidate in Economics at Columbia
Cullen Hendrix, Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter
Peter Kareiva, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Christina Schädel, Assistant Research Professor Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University
Joshua Horton, Research Director, Geoengineering, Keith Group, Harvard
Laura Jackson, UK Met Office
Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute
Matthew Burgess, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
David Denkenberger, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Peter Watson, Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol
Goodwin Gibbins, Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Linus Blomqvist, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute, PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara
Luca Righetti, Research Fellow, Open Philanthropy Project
Johannes Ackva, Climate research lead, Founders Pledge
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn't you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an 'extreme' stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.'s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
"it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist"
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I'd pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I've not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks - there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I've seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn't do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
It might be good to zoom out here and get a sense of what the criticism is here. I am being criticised for not citing four papers. One of them is by you and Kemp, is not peer-reviewed and is not primarily about climate change. The other one is Kemp et al 2022 which was published two weeks before I published my report so I didn't have time to include discussion of it. The other papers I am being criticised for not mentioning are Beard et al and Richards et al. If you want to explain to me why the points they raise are not addressed in my report, I would be happy to have that discussion.
The Jehn et al papers make claims which are wrong. It is blatantly not true to anyone who knows anything about climate change that the climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3ºC.
I can see where you're coming from here but I don't think the specifics really apply in this case.
There are many questions to raise about this google doc, and it seems fair to the reader to ask them all in one place rather than drip-feeding throughout a tree of replies and reply-replies. If responding to them all would take up too much of Halstead's time, he can say so, no?
There's not usually very much to elaborate when it comes to questions of omission: x is an important aspect of climate risk, Halstead has not mentioned x.
I suppose you could add the implicit points (studies of topics should include or at least mention the important aspects of those topics, space wasn't a constraint, Halstead knows what the terms mean, etc.) but that's unnecessary in 99% of conversations and not a standard we expect anywhere else.
Thanks for posting this Gideon, I shared similar issues to you but didn't make a reply because I feared the it would would be dismissed or ignored. It is gratifying to see that John has replied, but epistemically concerning that your entirely reasonable criticisms are being so heavily downvoted: at present you average 1 point from 13 votes.
These are critiques you would expect anyone with a background in climate risk to make and I don't see any good reason for them to have been dismissed by so many fellow EAs. Could any of the downvoters explain their decision?
Great to see such a detailed, focused, and well-researched analysis of this topic, thank you. I haven't yet read beyond the executive summary yet other than a skim of the longer report, but I'm looking forward to doing so.
Given the degree to which you have highlighted how experts have commented and reviewed the piece, will you, for the sake of intellectual transparency, commit to publishing all this expert feedback like the IPCC does. I think this may really help.
I said this in a subcomment, and it (worryingly) got significantly downvoted. It is a worrying sign for a community if a call for intellectual transparency (which is a key norm in EA) is downvoted just because the writer (ie me) has been critical of the piece.
I have great respect for you as an academic and an EA, and I trust that you will agree that such intellectual transparency is a useful norm, and if possible commit to publishing the commentsand reviews that those who reviewed the publication sent! The worry in the above paragraph is certainly not directed at you, and I have all the confidence that you are and will remain committed to maintaining EA as an as transparent space as possible
I will ask the experts if I can share their feedback. I did ask a couple of them to do this but after a long review process they didn't respond so I decided not to ask the other experts if I could share theirs as I thought it would be weird to have comments on some parts but not others. Maintaining interest in the process from experts can be difficult because they sank a lot of time into reviewing the report and have other things to do so there is a risk of over-asking and them not wanting to engage any more.
The reviewers for each section were as follows. Josh Horton reviewed a section on solar geoengineering which I am still in the process of revising for a later version.
Peter Watson, Goodwin and James Ozden provided comments on various sections in the report.
Without wanting to pre-empt the reviewer comments if I am allowed to provide them, there was agreement with what I had written and I accepted the vast majority of proposed revisions. I think the main disagreement was that Keith Wiebe disagreed with some of my claims about extreme warming and agriculture. I think maybe Danny Bressler moderately disagreed with my assessment of Burke et al (2015), but not completely sure.
Thanks so much for this. Did any of the reviewers (Peter Watson, Goodwin Gibbins, James Ozden perhaps?) make comments on the overall report ie your methodology, your choices of areas of inquiry etc. As this is my major criticism of your work I would really love to see the reviewers comments on your overall methodology, structure of the report etc
No I didn't get any of that. I don't want to put words in their mouths, but Peter overall seemed very positive. I'm less sure what Goodwin and James thought, but they didn't say anything massively negative, though perhaps they thought it
"I don't want to put words in their mouths, but Peter overall seemed very positive"
As Peter, just in case this should come back to bite me if misinterpreted, I just thought I'd say I could give an informed review of certain physical climate science aspects and the report seems to capture those well. I am positive about the rest as being an interesting and in depth piece of scholarship into interesting questions, but I can't vouch for it as an expert :-)
Would you suggest the depth of your feedback was the depth of peer review? And I'm correct in saying therefore that you didn't really review the overall methodology used etc?
I'd say the depth of review was similar to peer review yes, though it is true to say that publication was not conditional on the peer reviewers okaying what I had written. As mentioned, the methodology was reviewed, yes. So, this is my view, having taken on significant expert input.
A natural question is whether my report should be given less weight eg than a peer reviewed paper in a prominent journal. I think as a rule, a good approach is to try start by getting a sense of what the weight of the literature says, and then exploring the substantive arguments made. For the usual reasons, we should expect any randomly selected paper to be false. Papers that make claims far outside the consensus position that get published in prominent journals are especially likely to be false. There is also scope for certain groups of scientists to review one another's papers such that bad literatures can snowball.
This isn't to say that any random person writing about climate change will be better than a random peer reviewed paper. But I think there are reasons to put more weight on the views of someone who has good epistemics (not saying this is true of me, but one might think it is true of some EA researchers) and also be actually talking about the thing we are interested in - i.e. the longtermist import of climate change. Most papers just aren't focusing on that, but will use similar terminology. e.g. there is a paper by Xu and Ramanathan which says that climate change is an existential risk but uses that term in a completely different way to EAs.
I will give some examples of the flaws of the traditional peer review process as applied to some papers on the catastrophic side of things.
A paper that is often brought up in climate catastrophe discussions is Steffen et al (2018) - the 'Hothouse Earth' paper. That paper has now been cited more than 2,000 times. For reasons I discuss in the report, I think it is both surprising that the paper was published. The IPCC also disagrees with it.
2. The Kemp et al 2022 PNAS paper (also written by many planetary boundaries people) was peer reviewed, but also contains several errors.
For instance, it says "Yet, there remain reasons for caution. For instance, there is significant uncertainty over key variables such as energy demand and economic growth. Plausibly higher economic growth rates could make RCP8.5 35% more likely (27)."
The cite here in note (27) is to Christensen et al (2018), which actually says "Our results indicate that there is a greater than 35% probability that emissions concentrations will exceed those assumed in RCP8.5." i.e. their finding is about the percentage point chance of RCP8.5, not about an increase in the relative risk of RCP8.5.
Another example: "While an ECS below 1.5 °C was essentially ruled out, there remains an 18% probability that ECS could be greater than 4.5 °C (14)."
The cite here is to the entire WG1 IPCC report (not that useful for checking but that aside...) The latest IPCC report says "a best estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C, with a very likely range of 2°C to 5°C. The likely range [is] 2.5°C to 4°C" The IPCC says "Throughout the WGI report and unless stated otherwise, uncertainty is quantified using 90% uncertainty intervals. The 90% uncertainty interval, reported in square brackets [x to y], is estimated to have a 90% likelihood of covering the value that is being estimated. The range encompasses the median value, and there is an estimated 10% combined likelihood of the value being below the lower end of the range (x) and above its upper end (y). Often, the distribution will be considered symmetric about the corresponding best estimate, but this is not always the case. In this Report, an assessed 90% uncertainty interval is referred to as a ‘very likely range’. Similarly, an assessed 66% uncertainty interval is referred to as a ‘likely range’.
So, the 66% CI is 2.5ºC to 4ºC and the 90% CI is 2ºC-5ºC. If this is symmetric, then this means there is a 17% chance of >4ºC, and a 5% chance of >5ºC. It's unclear whether the distribution is symmetric or not - the IPCC does not say - but if it is then the '18% chance of >4.5ºC' claim in climate endgame is wrong. So, a key claim in that paper - about the main variable of interest in climate science - cannot be inferred from the given reference.
3. Jehn et al have published twopapers cited in Kemp et al (2022), one of which says that "More likely higher end warming scenarios of 3 °C and above, despite potential catastrophic impacts, are severely neglected." This is just not true, but nevertheless made it through peer review. Almost every single climate impact study reports the impact of 4.4ºC. There is barely a single chart in the entire IPCC impacts report that does not report that. We can perhaps quibble over what 'severely neglected' means, but it doesn't mean 'shown in every single chart in the IPCC climate impacts book'. It is surprising that this got through peer review.
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As I have said, these are just single studies. I am consistently impressed by how good the IPCC is at reporting the median view in the literature, given how politicised the whole process must be.
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I also do not think there is any tendency to downplay risks in the climate science literature. If you look at studies on publication bias in climate science, they find that effect sizes in abstracts in climate change papers have a tendency to be significantly inflated relative to the main text. This is especially pronounced in high impact journals. I have also found this from personal experience. Overall, I think in some cases the risks are overstated, in some they are understated, but there is no systematic pattern.
Probably the best way to examine whether my substantive conclusions are wrong would be to raise some substantive criticisms/carry out a redteam - I would welcome this. I emphasise that if my arguments are correct, then the scale of biorisk is numerous orders of magnitude larger than climate change.
Peer review is very variable so it's hard to say what "the depth of peer review" is. I checked the bits I was asked to check in a similar way as I would a journal article. No I didn't myself really review the methodology. The process was also quite different from normal review in involving quite a few back-and-forth discussions - I felt more like I was helping make the work better rather than simply commenting on its quality. It also differed in that the decision about "publishing" was taken by John rather than a separate editor (as far as I know).
I would say that for all of the 'non-EA' reviewers, the review was very extensive, and this was also true of some of the EA reviewers (because they were more pushed for time). The non-EA expert reviewers were also compensated for their review in order to incentivise them to review in depth.
It is true that I ultimately decided whether or not to publish, so this makes it different to peer review. Someone mentioned to me that some people mean by 'peer review' that the reviewers have to agree for publication to be ok, but this wasn't the case for this report. Though it was reviewed experts, ultimately I decided whether or not to publish in its final state.
So you didn't get anyone reviewing your overall approach or methodology? Don't you perhaps think this is a bit of an oversight given how influential this report is likely to be?
Oh sorry, I thought you meant 'did they leave negative comments about these things'. Lots of people looked at the overall report and were free to point out things I missed.
I still don't really understand why you have such an issue with the methodology. I took my methodology to be - pick out all of the things in the climate literature that are relevant to the longtermist import of climate change, review the scientific literature on those things, and then arrive at my own view, send it to reviewers, make some revisions, iterate.
Can you make your model of indirect risks accessable to the public? Its asking for access. Thanks a lot.
Also, why do you assume that "most of the risk of existential catastrophe stems from AI, biorisk and currently unforeseen technological risks."? My impression from earlier in the chapter is that you are essentially drawing the idea you can essentially ignore other potential causes from the Precipice. Is this correct?
Moreover, this assumption only seems true if you assume an X-Risk will come as a single hazard. If it is, say, a cascading risk, cascading to civilisational collapse then extinction, then the idea these are the biggest risks should be questioned. Simultanously, if you view it as a multi-pulsed thing, say civilisational collapse from one hazard or a series of hazards or cascades, and then followed by whatever may (slowly) make us extinct- once civilisation is collapsed its easier for smaller hazards to kill us all, then once again the primacy of these hazards reduces. Only if you take a reductive view that sees extinction as primarily due to direct, single or near single, hazards that kill everyone or basically everyone, can this model be valid.
Of course, you do talk a little about multipulsed, subextinction risks followed by recovery being harder, but not in much detail. In particular, you claim that extreme climate change may make civilisational recovery from collapse much harder, but then don't seem to deal in detail with this question, which may be considered to be highly important, particularly if we think civilisational collapse is considerably more likely than extinction. Moreover, you suggest that "there is some chance of civilisational collapse due to nuclear war or engineered pandemics," essentially suggesting other causes of civilisational collapse that are less direct, and therefore could be made more likely due to climate change, are negligable. This assumption should be stated and evidenced, and yet you seem to include no sources on this.
Moreover, you state (uncited) that "the main indirect effect is Great power Conflict." Whats your source for this claim, and why are you so certain of this that you are confident that you can discount other indirect effects? This feels like the assumptions once again should be supported;
If this is the case, then I might say that relying on the (in my opinion) rather reductive, hazard-centric, simple risk assessment model of Ord etc. is our crux of disagreement. This is why I would say from my (still moderately limited unfortunatly) reading of the report, it appears that most of your facts are in order, however a lot of what I think that it is very bad that you fail to mention (systemic risk, cascading risk, vulnerabilities, exposures, complex risk assessments (I don't use this to suggest my way is inherently intellectually superior than yours, as indeed it is a plausible position to hold that X-Risks may emerge out of epistemically simplier more direct more "simple" risks) etc) originates out of this hazard-centric approach. I won't overthrow a paradigm in a single comment, and I won't even try, but do please tell me if you agree with me that this is the crux of our disagreement. Moreover, whilst in a previous comment to me you have said you have argued for this methodology of viewing X-Risks at length in the piece, I am yet to find such an argument. If you could point me to where you think you make this argument in the piece, I will reread that section, or I may have missed it (apologies if I have). If not, it feels this approach needs considerably greater justification.
I have more comments/criticisms which I will post in other comments, but certainly on this indirect risk things, these are my questions.
Yes that is correct re my assessment of the other existential risks. I'm taking a view similar to Toby Ord and I suppose the rest of the EA community about where the main risks are. Of course, my main goal in the report is not to make this substantive case; I largely take it as given.
I don't really see how viewing climate change as a cascading risk would change the overall risk assessment. If you argue that climate change is a large cascading risk then you would have to think that climate would play an important role in starting the cascade from collapse to extinction. I don't see how it could do that and explain why at length in the report. Can you lay out a concrete scenario that sketches this cascading risk worry that isn't already discussed in the report?
The report does suggest that climate change would make civilisational recovery harder but for plausible levels of warming, it would not be a large barrier to recovery and this should be clear from the substantive discussion in the report
Moreover, you suggest that "there is some chance of civilisational collapse due to nuclear war or engineered pandemics," essentially suggesting other causes of civilisational collapse that are less direct, and therefore could be made more likely due to climate change, are negligable. This assumption should be stated and evidenced, and yet you seem to include no sources on this.
The whole report is about whether climate change could lead to civilisational collapse or something close to it. What other mechanisms do you have in mind that are not already discussed in the report?
The influence of climate change on great power war or war more generally seems like the most obvious indirect risk of climate change that could make a substantial difference to the scale of climate change. It is often argued that climate change is a threat multiplier for conflict risk. I discuss the literature on this at length. What other indirect risks do you think might be comparably important?
It does seem that you think that viewing climate change as a cascading risk would make a large difference to my conclusion. I don't understand what you think this cascading risk actually is that is not already discussed in the report.
I'm not sure which comment you are referring to? I argued that the direct/indirect approach is conceptually exhaustive, which is trivially true.
"I don't really see how viewing climate change as a cascading risk would change the overall risk assessment. If you argue that climate change is a large cascading risk then you would have to think that climate would play an important role in starting the cascade from collapse to extinction. I don't see how it could do that and explain why at length in the report. Can you lay out a concrete scenario that sketches this cascading risk worry that isn't already discussed in the report?"
Having read the report, I am still unclear where in the report you lay out this substantive case. Could you please point this out to me, and I will be happy to reread it as I must have missed it. Also note I don't just refer to cascading risks, but to systemic risks, existential vulnerabilities and exposures etc. Please show me where in your report you make a substantive case against these ideas as well. Thanks!
Moreover, cascading risks may only be to civilisational collapse, and may not even get you to extinction. If, as you suggest, climate change makes recovery harder, this may be a major problem from an X-Risk perspective. I agree, its unlikely a cascade would directly lead to extinction, but if it leads to major societal collapse (which your piece also doesn't seem to define), and recovery is harder, this may be enough to pose an X-Risk.
"The report does suggest that climate change would make civilisational recovery harder but for plausible levels of warming, it would not be a large barrier to recovery and this should be clear from the substantive discussion in the report"
The report suggests this but doesn't, as far as I can tell from having read the report, make this case particularly substantively. Also, in the section where this seems to be discussed most at length "subsequent collapse", there doesn't seem to be any citations If you could point me to what sources you have used to show that it shouldn't pose a large barrier to recovery, this would be nice. You suggest it should be clear from the report, so if you can point me to where in the report this should be clear from, that would be great. Apologies if I am being stupid and have just missed something obvious in the report.
"The whole report is about whether climate change could lead to civilisational collapse or something close to it. What other mechanisms do you have in mind that are not already discussed in the report?"
How about a scenario where a multitude of factors eg climate related damages, civil conflict, interstate conflict, bioweaponary, natural disasters and economic collapse all work in concert with each other? What I am trying to suggest is that by shutting down the possibilities to bio and nuclear war, you reduce the role that climate change could play in bringing about collapse.
"The influence of climate change on great power war or war more generally seems like the most obvious indirect risk of climate change that could make a substantial difference to the scale of climate change."
Saying something is the most obvious isn't evidence or a justification. Your report is 400 pages long, I am pretty sure you have space to justify this core part of your methodological approach. Also, just because one thing is the "most" obvious doesn't mean others aren't worthy of consideration. Also, I am often very unclear what an indirect risk means, which again you don't seem to define in your report. If you could define this for me, I would be happy to answer your question.
Sorry if some of this is unclear. However, I really think a lot of your key ideas could so with better citation/definition. I also think that ignoring a lot of these concepts which are common in the literature, and then putting the burden on me to hash out the arguments in a comment on my weekend, rather than actually addressing these concepts, even if you were to reject them, in your 400 page report, is a little odd. Nonetheless, thanks for taking the time to respond to my comments thus far, and apologies if I have missed anything in the report- it is very long and I read it late at night
I think it might help to make this discussion more concrete if you gave an example of what you mean by a cascading risk. It's hard to defend the arguments in the report when I'm not sure what you are saying I have missed in my analysis. I talk about risks to the food system, and the spillover effects that might come from that (eg conflict), I talk about purported effects on crime, I talk about drought, I talk about tipping points etc. What is the casual story you have in mind?
The substantive discussion is the outline all of the various impacts that I have discussed and summarising the literature on economic costs, which tends to find costs of 4ºC are on the order of 5% of GDP. Unless something is radically missing from these analyses, I'm not sure how climate change could make a large difference to the chance of recovery from collapse.
How about a scenario where a multitude of factors eg climate related damages, civil conflict, interstate conflict, bioweaponary, natural disasters and economic collapse all work in concert with each other?
I discuss the potential impacts of climate damages, civil conflict, interstate conflict and the economic impact of climate change at considerable length. Even if these all work in concert with each other, my substantive conclusion is unaffected. I also explicitly discuss the possibility that climate change will cause the use of bioweapons in the report.
What I am trying to suggest is that by shutting down the possibilities to bio and nuclear war, you reduce the role that climate change could play in bringing about collapse.
I don't shut down the possibility, I argue against it at considerable length.
However, I really think a lot of your key ideas could so with better citation/definition. I also think that ignoring a lot of these concepts which are common in the literature, and then putting the burden on me to hash out the arguments in a comment on my weekend, rather than actually addressing these concepts, even if you were to reject them, in your 400 page report, is a little odd.
You have made a series of conceptual criticisms of the report. I have said that my conceptual approach is exhaustive, which is true, but you seem to think this is unsatisfactory. I don't think it is unreasonable for you to explain to me what you think I have missed.
A direct climate impact is an impact of climate change for which the proximal cause of the damage is not human-on-human interaction. An example would be something like heat stress deaths or crop failures from drought. An indirect climate impact is an impact for which the proximate cause is human-on-human damage, but for which the ultimate cause is climate change. An example would be crime, conflict or undermines institutions.
Saying something is the most obvious isn't evidence or a justification. Your report is 400 pages long, I am pretty sure you have space to justify this core part of your methodological approach. Also, just because one thing is the "most" obvious doesn't mean others aren't worthy of consideration.
I think appeals to common sense and what is obvious are often permissible in arguments. Which indirect effect do you think is more important?
I was expecting the discussion to be more like 'hear is why you are wrong about emissions/climate sensitivity/runaway greenhouse/impacts on the food system/impacts on conflict/...'
So sorry for the lateness of this reply, I have been super busy, and this reply will also only be short as I ma very busy. It would be good to organise a meeting to chat about this at some point if your interested.
On cascading risks, I tink a good recent discussion of cascading risk is found in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25021-8 . A plausible causal story for how climate change leads to a cascade may be as follows. This is obviously flawed and incomplete and clearly needs more study:
To respond to growing threats from climate change, adaptation measures (often technological) will be put in place. However, these adaptation measures, such as physical defences, are often very fragile. Whilst it is possible agricultural production increases, this would also likely be due to adaptation measures, with new things introduced likely to be less resilient due to lack of experience. Moreover, as certain regions get agriculture more badly hit, it is possible you see a few increasing agricultural hubs as those places less effected by climate change/could adapt quicker. This further increases vulnerability
One or a number of critical nodes in this system are hit by a hazard, either one made more likely by climate change, or by another hazard. Sychrnonous failure causes diversion of resources to these areas, and the economic shock makes it harder to sustain adaptation infrastructure, which may then start to fail
Climate impacts cause increased civil unrest. This causes greater economic and political insecurity, making greater diversion of resources away from climate adaptation and towards combating the symptomns of this. The resources exerted can't match with the pressures on them, both environmental, climatic, social, political, economic. A near complete collapse of a mid-sized economy ensues, with global reprucussions
Meanwhile, climate change has made an engineered pandemic more likely by increasing the number of omnicidal actors. One of these engineered pandemics occur killing 1% of the worlds population, sychronous with a major drought, causing global economic collapse. In response to the drought, a water war between mid-sized powers ensues, leading to the involvement of major powers. Sanctions and embargoes between the powers lead to further economic damage. This is combined by significant food shortages from the drought, and socio-economic damage from the pandemic.
Political tensions rise in India, leading to mass protests. The failure of the Indian government to relieve a Muslim majority region of the famine causes tensions, a police massacre causes this to go into outright rebellion. The Indian government collapses, with major global economic consequences.
Climate impacts continue to scale across the world, with the economic damage from the famine, pandemic and collapse of the Indian government spreading. In the subsequent economic collapse, a major economy defaults on its debts, leading to further ewconomic turmoil. Civil unrest breaks out in another major economy (say Germany), once again causing economic collapse. The new Indian government, crippled and weakened and still under pressure from the civil war, promises to defend its water resources at all costs, however China, also suffering from a drought, cuts off the source of Brahmaputra. A tactical nuclear weapon is set off. Whilst this doesn't lead to global nuclear war, in the aftermath of this, markets collapse
With a collapsing global economy and mounting climate damages, adaptation measures cannot be meaningfully carried out, as maintences can't be afforded. This causes more and more damage.
This is the example of a cascade. I didn't take it all the way to collapse/ extinction, but I think you could probably carry it on yourself. This is just A scenario I just came up with. Its probably not the most plausible. But there are thousands of such scenarios, each which climate change is a key factor in causing, interacting in different ways. this is what I mean by cascade.
On the seperate point of your indirect vs direct framing, it seems like my issues with it are two fold. I tend to think indirect risk is just so much larger a subset of things than direct risk (involves many of the causes of hazards, as well as I assume all exposures and vulnerabilities?), and yet I don't think your treatment of it gives it this necessary depth. So maybe in theory your framework is well defined, but in practice the category of indirect risk is like "the rest" and so doesn't seem to give a useful structure for defining what these key impacts are. I think, even if unintentional, the rhetoric of employing such a device privelages direct risks hugely, which I tend to think leads nearly inevitably to your conclusion due to this privelaging.
When you say you expected other criticisms, I can understand why you may be frustrated with my focus on the meta-issues. But I broadly don't have much of a problem with what you say, and certainly don't on any areas outside my area of expertise. Its what you don't say, and the methodology you have used that lets you get there, that worries me. Thats why I have focused on these meta-issues, because in terms of where I think this piece goes substantially wrong, I think its that.
As I have said previously, I think what you miss out is important as you are in a really unique place in the community by no fault of your own. There are probably few people deferred to in EA more than you are, so the worry if you miss things out, or if your methodology is wrong (and as I am sure you will admit no one is perfect) is this will get propograted as orthodoxy through the community. I know you tend to not think of yourself as this sort of person, and I don't think these epistemically deeply unhealthy dynamics are your fault.
Anyway, sorry I couldn't do a more substantive reply, I am super busy, and it certainly doesn't seem like forum comments are the most constructive to this discussion. Would you like to have a chat about this at some point so we can really hear each others persepctives?
Thanks for the comment, it was interesting to have examples.
By chance, do you have some documentation on cascading risks caused by shortfalls on energy production? Or more data on what would cause the economy to collapse? I'm looking for this since I have made some posts on energy depletion and trying to keep updating.
By the way, I find the lack of answer by John rather worrying, especially as this seems to be a crucial point you're making, especially in our interconnected world. Did you manage to chat with him?
I have an issue with Takakura and other models. All models I've seen measure climate impacts in a) a social cost of carbon, whose value is based on a pure time preference discount factor, or b) impacts by the end of the 21st century, which ignores impacts into future centuries. Both of these methods are incompatible with a longtermist ethical view.
If we wanted to get a longtermist-compatible estimate of climate damages, we would have to either calculate a social cost of carbon with a zero discount factor (except for growth-adjustments), or calculate total climate damages over hundreds of years. None of the studies I've seen do this. Even worse, we know that climate models are highly sensitive to the choice of discount factor, which is only possible if a large proportion of damages occur in the future, so we could be underestimating this future damage by a lot. How do you deal with this issue when studying climate change from a longtermist perspective?
On your first comment, the Takakura et al (2019) study I mention and other models estimate a climate damage function, which is independent of a discounting module. The social cost of carbon is a function of a socioeconomic module, a climate module, a damages module and a discounting module as shown in the schematic below
Source: Resources for the Future, The Social Cost of Carbon: Advances in Long-TermProbabilistic Projections of Population, GDP, Emissions, and Discount Rates, October 2021
It is true that some models discount future costs in part with pure time preference. But I am here talking about the damage module which is the undiscounted aggregate damages, not the social cost of carbon.
Also, it is not true that all studies have a positive rate of pure time preference. The Stern review is one prominent counterexample, for instance.
I agree that some (though not all) models typically only consider impacts up to 2100. However, impacts up to 2100 are long-term relevant. If climate-economy models suggested that climate change would cause extinction or civilisational collapse or stagnation before 2100 (as some people seem to think is plausible), this would be long-term relevant. I agree that to get a complete picture, we would need to consider impacts past 2100, but we can still learn a lot from models that only go to 2100. Moreover, it would be practically impossible to build a useful complete climate-economy model running eg 1 million years into the future. It is more informative to explore how climate change might affect proxies of things that might have long-term import such as the risk of civilisational collapse or extinction. If you think we are in the hingiest or most important century, then the impacts of climate change this century are in fact the main thing that determine its long-term effects
If you think we are in the hingiest or most important century, then the impacts of climate change this century are in fact the main thing that determine its long-term effects
This is untrue if the things that make this century hingey are orthogonal to climate change. If this century is particularly hingey only because of AI development and the risk of engineered pandemics, and climate change will not affect either of those things, then the impacts of climate change this century are not especially important relative to future centuries, even if this century is important relative to future centuries.
All the indirect effects of climate that you consider are great-power conflict, resource conflict, etc. I have not seen arguments that claim this century is especially hingey for any of those factors. Indeed, resource conflict and great power conflict are the norm throughout history. So it seems that the indirect effects of climate on these risk factors is not only relevant for the 21st century but all centuries afterwards.
Takakura does not have a discounting module but considering impacts only up to 2100 is functionally the same as discounting all impacts after 2100. Obviously impacts up to 2100 are relevant to longtermists - my point is that they could be a substantial underestimate of its long-term effects. And you can improve on that substantially with a model that considers 500 years or something similar. It's a baffling dichotomy to say that you can either consider impacts up to 2100 or millions of years.
This is untrue if the things that make this century hingey are orthogonal to climate change.
I do not think this is true. If we are at a hingey time due to AI and bio, and climate does not affect the hingeyness of this century, then it does not have much impact on the long-term.
Takakura does not have a discounting module but considering impacts only up to 2100 is functionally the same as discounting all impacts after 2100.
You initially said that Takakura et al has a discounting module because it endorses pure time preference. I pointed out that this is not true. So, this seems like changing the subject
I did not say Takakura has a discounting module and this is not changing the subject. What I said was:
I have an issue with Takakura and other models. All models I've seen measure climate impacts in a) a social cost of carbon, whose value is based on a pure time preference discount factor, or b) impacts by the end of the 21st century, which ignores impacts into future centuries.
Takakura has the latter problem, which is my issue with it as you use it.
If we are at a hingey time due to AI and bio, and climate does not affect the hingeyness of this century, then it does not have much impact on the long-term.
This doesn't seem right as a criterion and is also counter to some examples of longtermist success. For example, the campaign to reduce slavery improved the long term by eliminating a factor that would have caused recurring damage over the long term. Climate mitigation reduces a recurring damage over the long term: if that recurring damage each year is large enough, it can be an important longtermist area. My point is that the impacts of climate in the 21st century are probably a substantial underestimate of their total long-term impact. It's totally possible that when you account for the total impact it is still not important, but that doesn't follow automatically from climates effect on hingeyness.
I'm not sure I understand your second comment. 'hingey' means that we are living at the most influential time ever. This includes things like value change around slavery.
My thought here would be that if climate effects (or other factors) don't substantially reduce the rate of technological and economic progress over the 21st century, then effects after the 21st century might be likely to be pretty small because our capacity to mitigate them would be enormous. If world real GDP keeps growing at a 3% annual rate, then GDP would be at about a quadrillion dollars/year in 2100 if I'm doing my math right (of course, one might argue it's likely to be much higher due to AGI, much lower due to slowing technological progress etc.). But that kind of enormous world output would make solutions like scaling up direct air capture to get massively negative carbon emissions feasible. In light of that, it makes a lot more sense to worry about how climate change impacts humanity's trajectory over the next 80 years than it does to worry about what the impacts will be after 2100.
Climate-economy models factor in technological and economic progress, and yet their SCC estimates are hugely sensitive to the discount rate. The only way I can see this happening is if climate damages in the future are very large.
That assumes a relatively happy path. If there's some other major one-off catastrophe (eg a major pandemic), the long-term effects of climate change will end up being far harder to deal with.
Imagine that only a few hundred people in the world thought that climate change is an important problem (rather than at least tens of millions), that philanthropists worldwide spent a few million dollars a year on climate (rather than $10 billion), that society as a whole spent a million dollars on the problem (rather than $1 trillion), and that the international institutions trying to tackle the problem either don’t exist or have a similar budget to a McDonald’s restaurant. How bad would climate change be? This is how bad things are for the other global catastrophic risks, and then some.
Thank you for writing this - looking forward to diving into the full report this weekend. Congratulations on finishing what must have been a major undertaking!
Does anyone have the quantitative models from this report? x-risk model is here and fossil fuel consumption model is here but these links both say the sheets have been deleted.
I reached out to John Halstead but he is out of office for the next two weeks so I'm posting here on the off chance that one of the commenters has these models.
"AI: Forecasters on the community forecasting platform Metaculus think that artificial intelligent systems that are better than humans at all relevant tasks will be created in 2042."
How do you get this from the questions' operationalization?
I thought that was what was meant by AGI? I agree that the operationalisation doesn't state that explicitly, but I thought it was implied. Do you think I should change in the report?
I think this strongly depends on how much weight you expect forcasters on metaculus to put onto the actual operationalization rather than the question's "vibe". I personally expect quite a bit of weight on the exact operationalization, so I am generally not very happy with how people have been talking about this specific forecast (the term "AGI" often seems to invoke associations that are not backed by the forecast's operationalization), and would prefer a more nuanced statement in the report.
(Note, that you might believe that the gap between the resolution criteria of the question and more colloqiual interpretations of "AGI" is very small, but this would seem to require an additional argument on top of the metaculus forecast).
I would appreciate your thoughts on the shape of the relationship between existential risk due to climate change and global warming. For example, would it be reasonable to assume it is linear, i.e. that the x-risk linked to an increase of 2 ºC relative to today's temperature is 2 times as large as the x-risk linked to an increase of 1 ºC?
I have different understanding of moisture greenhouse based on what I've read. You said (oversimplifing) that the threshold for moisture greenhouse is 67C and the main risk from it is ocean evaporation.
But in my understanding 67 C is the level of moisture greenhouse climate. The climate according to some models will be stable on this level. 67 C mean temperature seems to almost lethal to humans but some people could survive on high mountains.
However, the threshold to moisture greenhouse, that is the tipping point after which the transition to the next meta-stable condition is inevitable, could be much less than at 67C and could be after just 10 C warming - you discussed this and different authors who wrote about that, but it contradicts the word "threshold" you used about moisture greenhouse.
Transition to next meta-stable climate takes according to the article about water worlds like 4-40 years.
As a result the whole catastrophic scenario of moisture greenhouse moved away from now, but it could happen in next 100 years and Ord's estimation is justified.
Thanks for this. Someone else raised some issues with the moist greenhouse bit, and I need to revise. I still think the Ord estimate is too high, but I think the discussion in the report could be crisper. I'll revert back once I've made changes
Is there much/any concern here that global warming could increase the risk of a far more deadly pandemic stemming from natural sources?
Where I am located, as the coolest months warm known viruses in animals are occurring in these cooler months for the first time. Anecdotally, on top of becoming more frequent they also appear to be increasing in severity.
Further, could this increased pandemic risk due to global warming (if true) help bring attention and resources to biosecurity in general which could also help prevent engineered viruses?
"Climate change will result in thousands of new viruses spread among animal species by 2070 — and that’s likely to increase the risk of emerging infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans, according to a new study." Source
Action on climate change is in its infancy and forecasts cannot be relied as they cannot include unforeseen events. Given human nature ie people do what is the least inconvenient to them (ie act in their own self interest) rather than what is morally right, I'm expecting a backlash to CO2 reducing policies which I doubt the IPCC forecasts include. Will the majority of people pay for new green infrastructure and a more expensive hydrogen economy? People are already up in arms about the current energy cost rises. Will Governments stand up to the majority who want cheap energy and convenience, as they have had for the past few decades?
The only hope to counter this self interested behaviour that I can see, is to portray the fossil fuel industries as being as bad as the slave trade of the 19th 18th centuries. Both are/ were cheap sources of energy but both have or will cause great harm to humanity. (Predictions of 4 Billion people living in a tropical hot house by 2050 was reported in New Scientist a few weeks ago).
See "What else is there to say about climate change?" on trevorprew.blogspot.com
As for AI, can't you just pull the plug out if it starts running amuck!
From a longtermist point of view, it is especially important to avoid outcomes that could have persistent and significant effects. These include events like human extinction, societal collapse, a permanent negative change in human values, or prolonged economic stagnation.
Over the long term, it seems reasonable to think in terms of cycles. You know, the pattern over the long term is that civilizations live, and then they fall, and then something else rises to take their place.
The Roman Empire must have seemed permanent to those living at that time, but the empire fell, a period of darkness (in Europe) followed, and then a new even more impressive civilization rose from the ashes.
Over the long term, it seems likely that eventually this life/death cycle of human civilizations will cease, for everything in nature that has a beginning also has an end.
This is maybe getting too philosophically off topic, but it is perhaps interesting to question whether our personal mortality, civilization mortality, or species mortality is automatically a bad thing. These events are all inevitable, so there's a logic in making peace with them by whatever means one can find.
Maturity may involve the ability to hold conflicting inclinations together within one's mind. On the one hand it is our job as individuals and a species to struggle mightily to survive, while at the same time joyfully embracing the reality that we won't.
Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Here are my high-level thoughts around the comments so far of this report:
I think this is mainly because of the length of the report which makes it hard to make meaningful critiques without investing a bunch of time
Yes, and I note that as/after I wrote my comment, there are more thoughtful object-level comments. So perhaps I commented too early and should've just waited for people to have time to read the report first and then provide object-level comments!
Not sure why this was downvoted. I really appreciate comments where people publicly acknowledge they may have made an error and update their views.
I think this is a good place to have discussions about claims in specific sections (rather than the whole report) if people would like