I agree overall. The best case I’ve heard for Climate Change as an indirect GCR, which seems unlikely but not at all implausible, is not about direct food shortages, but rather the following scenario:
Assume state use of geoengineering to provide cloud cover, reduce heat locally, or create rain. Once this is started, they will quickly depend on it as a way to mitigate climate change, and the population will near-universally demand that it continue. Given the complexity and global nature of weather, however, this is almost certain to create non-trivial effects on other countries. If this starts causing crop failures or deadly heat waves in the affected countries, they would feel justified escalating this to war, regardless of who would be involved—such conflicts could easily involve many parties. In such a case, in a war between nuclear powers, there is little reason to think they would be willing to stop a non-nuclear options.
Something I find missing from the discussion of CC as an indirect existential risk is what this means for prioritisation. It’s often used implicitly to support CC-mitigation as a high-priority intervention. But in the case of geoengineering, funding for governance/safety is probably on the order of millions (at most), making it many orders of magnitude more neglected than CC-mitigation, and this is similar for targeted nuclear risk mitigation, reducing risk of great power war, etc.
This suggests that donors who believe there is substantial indirect existential risk from CC are (all else equal) much better off funding the terminal risks, insofar as there are promising interventions that are substantially more underfunded.
Current investment in solar geoengineering is roughly 10 million annually (this may have increased in the last few years), so by most metrics it’s really neglected. The main project working on this is the Harvard solar geoengineering research program, which OPP has funded about 2.5 million dollars for a few years in 2016. They’ve also funded a solar governance program in 2017 for about 2 million dollars. Grants here. Recently, they don’t appear to have made any climate-related grants in this space, and its unclear to me what the funding situation looks like.
Regarding states that have committed to doing things: I didn’t find anything on doing a shallow dive. However, there is work being done on it in a number of countries. In particular, scientists in India have raised concerns that current models show potential for drought and famine because of reduced water flow in tropical regions like India. (This is in addition to technical and general governance concerns)
From what I understand, Geoengineering is mostly avoided because people claim (incorrectly, in my view) it is a signal that the country thinks there is no chance to fix the problem by limiting emissions. In addition, people worry that it has lots of complex impacts we don’t understand. As we understand the impacts better, it becomes more viable—and more worrisome. And as it becomes clearer over the next 20-30 years that a lot of the impacts are severe, it becomes more likely to be tried.
Yeah that seems plausible, though one thing I’d flag is that while I could sort of see why local use of geoengineering is more valuable in worlds with more climate change than less, the difference doesn’t intuitively seem that big to me.
(It does however suggest that maybe EAs should be careful about recommending geo-engineering as a solution to climate change? Not sure.)
Given the complexity and global nature of weather, however, this is almost certain to create non-trivial effects on other countries.
...And even if it could miraculously be prevented from actually causing any local negative weather events in other countries, it would certainly be perceived to do so, because terrible freak droughts/floods/etc. will continue to happen as always, and people will go looking for someone to blame, and the geoengineering project next door will be an obvious scapegoat.
Like how the US government once tried to use cloud-seeding (silver iodide) to weaken hurricanes, and then one time a hurricane seemed to turn sharply and hit Georgia right after being seeded, and everyone blamed the cloud-seeding, and sued, and shut the program down, …even though it was actually a coincidence! (details) (NB: I only skimmed the wikipedia article, I haven’t checked anything)
I agree overall. The best case I’ve heard for Climate Change as an indirect GCR, which seems unlikely but not at all implausible, is not about direct food shortages, but rather the following scenario:
Assume state use of geoengineering to provide cloud cover, reduce heat locally, or create rain. Once this is started, they will quickly depend on it as a way to mitigate climate change, and the population will near-universally demand that it continue. Given the complexity and global nature of weather, however, this is almost certain to create non-trivial effects on other countries. If this starts causing crop failures or deadly heat waves in the affected countries, they would feel justified escalating this to war, regardless of who would be involved—such conflicts could easily involve many parties. In such a case, in a war between nuclear powers, there is little reason to think they would be willing to stop a non-nuclear options.
[I broadly agree with above comment and OP]
Something I find missing from the discussion of CC as an indirect existential risk is what this means for prioritisation. It’s often used implicitly to support CC-mitigation as a high-priority intervention. But in the case of geoengineering, funding for governance/safety is probably on the order of millions (at most), making it many orders of magnitude more neglected than CC-mitigation, and this is similar for targeted nuclear risk mitigation, reducing risk of great power war, etc.
This suggests that donors who believe there is substantial indirect existential risk from CC are (all else equal) much better off funding the terminal risks, insofar as there are promising interventions that are substantially more underfunded.
Are there any states that have committed to doing geoengineering, or even experimenting with geoengineering, if mitigation fails?
Having some publicly stated sufficient strategy would convince me that this was not a neglected area.
Current investment in solar geoengineering is roughly 10 million annually (this may have increased in the last few years), so by most metrics it’s really neglected. The main project working on this is the Harvard solar geoengineering research program, which OPP has funded about 2.5 million dollars for a few years in 2016. They’ve also funded a solar governance program in 2017 for about 2 million dollars. Grants here. Recently, they don’t appear to have made any climate-related grants in this space, and its unclear to me what the funding situation looks like.
Regarding states that have committed to doing things: I didn’t find anything on doing a shallow dive. However, there is work being done on it in a number of countries. In particular, scientists in India have raised concerns that current models show potential for drought and famine because of reduced water flow in tropical regions like India. (This is in addition to technical and general governance concerns)
From what I understand, Geoengineering is mostly avoided because people claim (incorrectly, in my view) it is a signal that the country thinks there is no chance to fix the problem by limiting emissions. In addition, people worry that it has lots of complex impacts we don’t understand. As we understand the impacts better, it becomes more viable—and more worrisome. And as it becomes clearer over the next 20-30 years that a lot of the impacts are severe, it becomes more likely to be tried.
Yeah that seems plausible, though one thing I’d flag is that while I could sort of see why local use of geoengineering is more valuable in worlds with more climate change than less, the difference doesn’t intuitively seem that big to me.
(It does however suggest that maybe EAs should be careful about recommending geo-engineering as a solution to climate change? Not sure.)
...And even if it could miraculously be prevented from actually causing any local negative weather events in other countries, it would certainly be perceived to do so, because terrible freak droughts/floods/etc. will continue to happen as always, and people will go looking for someone to blame, and the geoengineering project next door will be an obvious scapegoat.
Like how the US government once tried to use cloud-seeding (silver iodide) to weaken hurricanes, and then one time a hurricane seemed to turn sharply and hit Georgia right after being seeded, and everyone blamed the cloud-seeding, and sued, and shut the program down, …even though it was actually a coincidence! (details) (NB: I only skimmed the wikipedia article, I haven’t checked anything)