Climate change by itself should not be considered a global catastrophic risk (>10% chance of causing >10% of human mortality)
I’m not sure if any natural class of events could be considered global catastrophic risks under this definition, except possibly all kinds of wars and AI. It seems pretty weird to not classify e.g. asteroids or nuclear war as global catastrophic risks, just because they’re relatively unlikely. Or is the 10% supposed to mean that there’s a 10% probability of >10% of humans dying conditioned on some event in the event class happening? If so, this seems unfair to climate change, since it’s so much more likely than the other risks (indeed, it’s already happening). Under this definition, I think we could call extreme climate change a global catastrophic risk, for some non-ridiculous definition of extreme.
The other fairly plausible GCR that is discussed is biological. Black death likely killed 20% of the population (excluding the Americas, but not China or Africa, which we affected) in the middle ages. Many think that bioengineered pathogens or other threats could plausibly have similar effects now. Supervolcanos and asteroids are also on the list of potential GCRs, but we have better ideas about their frequency / probability.
I’m not sure if any natural class of events could be considered global catastrophic risks under this definition, except possibly all kinds of wars and AI. It seems pretty weird to not classify e.g. asteroids or nuclear war as global catastrophic risks, just because they’re relatively unlikely. Or is the 10% supposed to mean that there’s a 10% probability of >10% of humans dying conditioned on some event in the event class happening? If so, this seems unfair to climate change, since it’s so much more likely than the other risks (indeed, it’s already happening). Under this definition, I think we could call extreme climate change a global catastrophic risk, for some non-ridiculous definition of extreme.
The other fairly plausible GCR that is discussed is biological. Black death likely killed 20% of the population (excluding the Americas, but not China or Africa, which we affected) in the middle ages. Many think that bioengineered pathogens or other threats could plausibly have similar effects now. Supervolcanos and asteroids are also on the list of potential GCRs, but we have better ideas about their frequency / probability.
Of course, Toby’s book will discuss all of this—and it’s coming out soon!