I’m not sure I understand why you don’t think the in/direct distinction is useful.
I have worked on climate risk for many years and I genuinely don’t understand how one could think it is in the same ballpark as AI, biorisk or nuclear risk. This is especially true now that the risk of >6 degrees seems to be negligible. If I read about biorisk, I can immediately see the argument for how it could kill more than 50% of the population in the next 10-20 years. With climate change, for all the literature I have read, I just don’t understand how one could think that.
You seem to think the world is extremely sensitive to what the evidence suggests will be agricultural disturbances that we live through all the time: the shocks are well within the normal range of shocks that we might expect to see in any decade, for instance. This chart shows the variation in the food price index. Between 2004 and 2011, it increased by about 200%. This is much much bigger than any posited effects of climate change that I have seen. One could also draw lots of causal arrows from this to various GCRs. Yet, I don’t see many EAs argue for working on whatever were the drivers of these changes in food prices.
I have worked on climate risk for many years and I genuinely don’t understand how one could think it is in the same ballpark as AI, biorisk or nuclear risk
Note that the OP did not include “AI” in their list of risks that they think of as the same tier as climate risk.
Many thanks to you & the others in the comments for the insightful discussion. Could you clarify a few points:
You state that 2.5 degrees warming by 2100 is widely accepted as the likely outcome of ‘business as usual’ - does this correspond to one of the IPCC scenarios?
You state that >6 degrees warming by 2100 is highly unlikely (risk seems ‘negligible’). Again, is this conclusion drawn from the IPCC report
If you have any additional resources to back these statements up I would love to read them—thanks!
I’m not sure I understand why you don’t think the in/direct distinction is useful.
I have worked on climate risk for many years and I genuinely don’t understand how one could think it is in the same ballpark as AI, biorisk or nuclear risk. This is especially true now that the risk of >6 degrees seems to be negligible. If I read about biorisk, I can immediately see the argument for how it could kill more than 50% of the population in the next 10-20 years. With climate change, for all the literature I have read, I just don’t understand how one could think that.
You seem to think the world is extremely sensitive to what the evidence suggests will be agricultural disturbances that we live through all the time: the shocks are well within the normal range of shocks that we might expect to see in any decade, for instance. This chart shows the variation in the food price index. Between 2004 and 2011, it increased by about 200%. This is much much bigger than any posited effects of climate change that I have seen. One could also draw lots of causal arrows from this to various GCRs. Yet, I don’t see many EAs argue for working on whatever were the drivers of these changes in food prices.
Note that the OP did not include “AI” in their list of risks that they think of as the same tier as climate risk.
Hi John,
Many thanks to you & the others in the comments for the insightful discussion. Could you clarify a few points:
You state that 2.5 degrees warming by 2100 is widely accepted as the likely outcome of ‘business as usual’ - does this correspond to one of the IPCC scenarios?
You state that >6 degrees warming by 2100 is highly unlikely (risk seems ‘negligible’). Again, is this conclusion drawn from the IPCC report
If you have any additional resources to back these statements up I would love to read them—thanks!
I think you’ll find answers to those questions in section 1 of John and Johannes’s recent post on climate projections. IIRC the answers are yes, and those numbers correspond to RCP4.5.