This is my first time seeing the “climate change and longtermism” report at that last link. Before having read it, I imagined the point of having a non-expert “value-aligned” longtermist applying their framework to climate change would be things like
a focus on the long-run effects of climate change
a focus on catastrophic scenarios that may be very unlikely but difficult to model or quantify
Instead, the report spends a lot of time on
recapitulation of consensus modeling (to be clear, this is a good thing that’s surprisingly hard to come by), which mainly goes out to 2100
plausible reasons models may be biased towards negative outcomes, particularly in the most likely scenarios
The two are interwoven, which weakens the report even as a critical literature review. When it comes to particular avenues for catastrophe, the analysis is often perfunctory and dismissive. It comes off less as a longtermist perspective on climate change than as having an insider evaluate the literature because only “we” can be trusted to reason well.
I don’t know how canonical that report has become. The reception in the thread where it was posted looks pretty critical, and I don’t mean to pile on. I’m commenting because this post links the report in a way that looks like a backhanded swipe, so once I read it myself I felt it was worth sketching out my reaction a bit further.
This is my first time seeing the “climate change and longtermism” report at that last link. Before having read it, I imagined the point of having a non-expert “value-aligned” longtermist applying their framework to climate change would be things like
a focus on the long-run effects of climate change
a focus on catastrophic scenarios that may be very unlikely but difficult to model or quantify
Instead, the report spends a lot of time on
recapitulation of consensus modeling (to be clear, this is a good thing that’s surprisingly hard to come by), which mainly goes out to 2100
plausible reasons models may be biased towards negative outcomes, particularly in the most likely scenarios
The two are interwoven, which weakens the report even as a critical literature review. When it comes to particular avenues for catastrophe, the analysis is often perfunctory and dismissive. It comes off less as a longtermist perspective on climate change than as having an insider evaluate the literature because only “we” can be trusted to reason well.
I don’t know how canonical that report has become. The reception in the thread where it was posted looks pretty critical, and I don’t mean to pile on. I’m commenting because this post links the report in a way that looks like a backhanded swipe, so once I read it myself I felt it was worth sketching out my reaction a bit further.