One further ambiguity that IMO would be worth resolving if you ever come to edit this is between ‘unrecoverable collapse’ and ‘collapse that in practice we don’t recover from’. The former sounds much more specific (eg a Mad Maxy scenario where we render so much surface area permanently uninhabitable by humans, such that we’d never again be able to develop a global economy) and so much lower probability.
I’m honestly wondering if we should deliberately reject all the existing terminology and try to start again, since a) as you say, many organisations use these terms inconsistently with each other, and b) the terms aren’t etymologically intuitive. That is, ‘existential catastrophes’ needn’t either threaten existence or seem catastrophic, and ‘global’ catastrophes needn’t affect the whole globe, or only the one globe.
Also it would be useful to have a term that covered the union of any two of the three circles, esp ‘global catastrophe’ + ‘existential catastrophe’, but you might need multiple terms to account for the amibigity/uncertainty.
One further ambiguity that IMO would be worth resolving if you ever come to edit this is between ‘unrecoverable collapse’ and ‘collapse that in practice we don’t recover from’. The former sounds much more specific (eg a Mad Maxy scenario where we render so much surface area permanently uninhabitable by humans, such that we’d never again be able to develop a global economy) and so much lower probability.
I’m honestly wondering if we should deliberately reject all the existing terminology and try to start again, since a) as you say, many organisations use these terms inconsistently with each other, and b) the terms aren’t etymologically intuitive. That is, ‘existential catastrophes’ needn’t either threaten existence or seem catastrophic, and ‘global’ catastrophes needn’t affect the whole globe, or only the one globe.
Also it would be useful to have a term that covered the union of any two of the three circles, esp ‘global catastrophe’ + ‘existential catastrophe’, but you might need multiple terms to account for the amibigity/uncertainty.