I think it’s important to see the nuance of the disagreement here.
1. My critique is of what strikes me as overconfident and overconfidently stated reasoning on what seems a critical point in the overall prioritization of climate—as Haydn writes, few sophisticated people buy the “climate is a direct extinction risk”, so while this is a good hook it is not where the steelmanned case for climate concern is and, whatever one assumes the exact amount of risk to be, indirect existential risk plausibly is the majority of badness from climate from a longtermist lens.
2. My critique does not imply and I have never said that we should work on climate change to address biorisk. The reasoning of the article can be poor and this can be critiqued while the conclusion might still be roughly right.
3. That said, work on existential risk factor is quite under-developed methodologically so I would not update much from what has been said on that so far, I think this is what footnote 25 also shows, the mental model on indirect risks is not very useful / imposes a particular simplified problem structure which might be importantly wrong.
4. As you know, I broadly agree with you that a lot of the climate impacts literature is overly alarmist, but I still think you seem too confident on indirect risks, there are many ways in which climate could be quite bad as a risk factor, e.g. perceived climate injustice could matter for bio-terrorism, or there could be geopolitical destabilization and knock-on effects in relevant regions such as South Asia.
I agree it is not where the action is but given that large sections of the public think we are going to die in the next few decades from climate change, it makes lots of sense to discuss it. And, the piece makes a novel contribution on that question, which is an update from previous EA wisdom.
I took it that the claim in the discussed footnote is that working on climate is not the best way to tackled pandemics, which I think we agree is true.
I agree that it is a risk factor in the sense that it is socially costly. But so are many things. Inadequate pricing of water is a risk factor. Sri Lanka’s decision to ban chemical fertiliser is a risk factor. Indian nationalism is a risk factor. etc. In general, bad economic policies are risk factors. The question is: is the risk factor big enough to change the priority cause ranking for EAs? I really struggle to see how it is. Like, it is true that perceived climate injustice in South Asia could matter for bioterrorism but this is very very far down the list of levers on biorisk.
I think it’s important to see the nuance of the disagreement here.
1. My critique is of what strikes me as overconfident and overconfidently stated reasoning on what seems a critical point in the overall prioritization of climate—as Haydn writes, few sophisticated people buy the “climate is a direct extinction risk”, so while this is a good hook it is not where the steelmanned case for climate concern is and, whatever one assumes the exact amount of risk to be, indirect existential risk plausibly is the majority of badness from climate from a longtermist lens.
2. My critique does not imply and I have never said that we should work on climate change to address biorisk. The reasoning of the article can be poor and this can be critiqued while the conclusion might still be roughly right.
3. That said, work on existential risk factor is quite under-developed methodologically so I would not update much from what has been said on that so far, I think this is what footnote 25 also shows, the mental model on indirect risks is not very useful / imposes a particular simplified problem structure which might be importantly wrong.
4. As you know, I broadly agree with you that a lot of the climate impacts literature is overly alarmist, but I still think you seem too confident on indirect risks, there are many ways in which climate could be quite bad as a risk factor, e.g. perceived climate injustice could matter for bio-terrorism, or there could be geopolitical destabilization and knock-on effects in relevant regions such as South Asia.
I agree it is not where the action is but given that large sections of the public think we are going to die in the next few decades from climate change, it makes lots of sense to discuss it. And, the piece makes a novel contribution on that question, which is an update from previous EA wisdom.
I took it that the claim in the discussed footnote is that working on climate is not the best way to tackled pandemics, which I think we agree is true.
I agree that it is a risk factor in the sense that it is socially costly. But so are many things. Inadequate pricing of water is a risk factor. Sri Lanka’s decision to ban chemical fertiliser is a risk factor. Indian nationalism is a risk factor. etc. In general, bad economic policies are risk factors. The question is: is the risk factor big enough to change the priority cause ranking for EAs? I really struggle to see how it is. Like, it is true that perceived climate injustice in South Asia could matter for bioterrorism but this is very very far down the list of levers on biorisk.