I don’t climate research as very valuable. The value of information would only be high if this research would change how people act. Climate inaction seems to be mainly political inertia, not lack of information about potential catastrophe.
Do you mean just the fourth bullet, or do you think this about all four?
The 1980s nuclear winter and asteroid papers (I’m thinking especially Sagan et al, and Alvarez et al) were very influential in changing political behaviour—Gorbachev and Reagan explicitly acknowledged that on nuclear, the asteroid evidence contributed to the 90s asteroid films and the (hugely successful!) NASA effort to track all ‘dino-killers’. On the margin now, I think more scary stuff would be motivating. There’s also VOI in resolving how big a concern nuclear winter is (eg some recent papers are skeptical) - if it turned out to not be as existential as we thought, that would change cause prioritisation for GCRs.
On geoengineering (sorry ‘climate interventions’(!)), note ‘getting more climate modelling’ is a key aim for e.g. Silver Lining.
i was just referring to the last bullet re climate change. eg in the last IPCC report, it would have been reasonable for govts to believe that there was a >10% chance of >6C of warming and that has been true since the 1970s, without having any impact. The political response to climate change seems to be influenced by most mainstream media coverage and public opinion in some circles which it would be fair to characterise as ‘very concerned’ about climate change. An opinion poll suggests that 54% of British people think that climate change threatens human extinction (depending on question framing). I agree that in a rational world we want to know how bad climate change could be, but the world isn’t rational.
If you’re just talking about EA cause prioritisation, the cost-benefit ratio looks pretty poor to me. Wrt reducing uncertainty about climate sensitivity, you’re talking costs of $100m per year to have a slim chance of pushing climate change up above AI, bio, great power war for major EA funders. Or we might find out that climate change is less pressing than we thought in which case this wouldn’t make any difference to the current priorities of EA funders.
I also don’t see how research on solar geoengineering could be a top pick—stratospheric aerosol injection just doesn’t seem like it will get used for decades because it requires unrealistic levels of international coordination. Also, I don’t think extra modelling studies on solar geo would shed much light unless we spent hundreds of millions. Climate models are very inaccurate and would provide much insight into the impacts of solar geo in the real world. There might be a case for regional solar geo research, though.
(fwiw, i really don’t rate that Xu and Ramanathan paper. they’re not using existential in the sense we are concerned about. They define it as “posing an existential threat to the majority of the population”. The evidence they use to support their conclusions is very weak. For example, they note following the Mora et al study that currently 30% of the population is exposed to deadly heat, which would increase to 74% at 4C warming. But obviously, it is not the case that all of these people will die, just as it is not the case that 30% of the world population today is dying due to heat waves. Moreover, 4C will take until the end of the century when most people will probably be a lot richer and so will have greater access to air conditioning. Climate change of that magnitude only makes the tropics uninhabitable in the sense that the Persian Gulf is uninhabitable today. There would be great humanitarian costs in low growth agrarian economies but that is a separate question to whether climate change poses an existential risk)
Interesting first point, but I disagree. To me, the increased salience of climate change in recent years can be traced back to the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), and in particular the meme ’12 years to save the world’. Seems to have contributed to the start of School Strike for Climate, Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal. Another big new scary IPCC report on catastrophic climate change would further raise the salience of this issue-area.
I was thinking that $100m would be for all four of these topics, and that we’d get cause-prioritisation VOI across all four of these areas. $100m for impact and VOI across all four seems pretty good to me (however I’m a researcher not a funder!)
On solar geo, I’m not an expert on it and am not arguing for it myself, merely reporting that its top of the ‘asks’ list for orgs like Silver Lining.
I actually rather like the framing in Xu & Ram—I don’t think we know enough about >5 °C scenarios, so describing them as “unknown, implying beyond catastrophic, including existential threats” seems pretty reasonable to me. In any case, I cited that more to demonstrate the lack of research thats been done on these scenarios.
On the last point, during the early Pliocene, early hominids with much worse technology than us lived in a world in which temperatures were 4.5C warmer than pre-industrial. It would be a surprise to me if this level of warming would kill off everyone, including people in temperate regions. There’s more to come from me on this topic, but I will leave it at that for now
Developing new climate models has costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Useful longtermist climate modelling could include:
nuclear winter modelling
volcanic/asteroid impact modelling
solar geoengineering modelling
catastrophic (<5C) climate change modelling (note higher end warming is hugely underrepresented in the literature—as argued here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HaXxEtx4QdykBjJi7/betting-on-the-best-case-higher-end-warming-is )
I don’t climate research as very valuable. The value of information would only be high if this research would change how people act. Climate inaction seems to be mainly political inertia, not lack of information about potential catastrophe.
Do you mean just the fourth bullet, or do you think this about all four?
The 1980s nuclear winter and asteroid papers (I’m thinking especially Sagan et al, and Alvarez et al) were very influential in changing political behaviour—Gorbachev and Reagan explicitly acknowledged that on nuclear, the asteroid evidence contributed to the 90s asteroid films and the (hugely successful!) NASA effort to track all ‘dino-killers’. On the margin now, I think more scary stuff would be motivating. There’s also VOI in resolving how big a concern nuclear winter is (eg some recent papers are skeptical) - if it turned out to not be as existential as we thought, that would change cause prioritisation for GCRs.
On geoengineering (sorry ‘climate interventions’(!)), note ‘getting more climate modelling’ is a key aim for e.g. Silver Lining.
On the fourth one, on the margin, I think more research—especially if it were the basis for an IPCC special report—would be influential. There’s also VOI for our cause priotisation. It just is really remarkable how understudied it is!
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HaXxEtx4QdykBjJi7/betting-on-the-best-case-higher-end-warming-is
i was just referring to the last bullet re climate change. eg in the last IPCC report, it would have been reasonable for govts to believe that there was a >10% chance of >6C of warming and that has been true since the 1970s, without having any impact. The political response to climate change seems to be influenced by most mainstream media coverage and public opinion in some circles which it would be fair to characterise as ‘very concerned’ about climate change. An opinion poll suggests that 54% of British people think that climate change threatens human extinction (depending on question framing). I agree that in a rational world we want to know how bad climate change could be, but the world isn’t rational.
If you’re just talking about EA cause prioritisation, the cost-benefit ratio looks pretty poor to me. Wrt reducing uncertainty about climate sensitivity, you’re talking costs of $100m per year to have a slim chance of pushing climate change up above AI, bio, great power war for major EA funders. Or we might find out that climate change is less pressing than we thought in which case this wouldn’t make any difference to the current priorities of EA funders.
I also don’t see how research on solar geoengineering could be a top pick—stratospheric aerosol injection just doesn’t seem like it will get used for decades because it requires unrealistic levels of international coordination. Also, I don’t think extra modelling studies on solar geo would shed much light unless we spent hundreds of millions. Climate models are very inaccurate and would provide much insight into the impacts of solar geo in the real world. There might be a case for regional solar geo research, though.
(fwiw, i really don’t rate that Xu and Ramanathan paper. they’re not using existential in the sense we are concerned about. They define it as “posing an existential threat to the majority of the population”. The evidence they use to support their conclusions is very weak. For example, they note following the Mora et al study that currently 30% of the population is exposed to deadly heat, which would increase to 74% at 4C warming. But obviously, it is not the case that all of these people will die, just as it is not the case that 30% of the world population today is dying due to heat waves. Moreover, 4C will take until the end of the century when most people will probably be a lot richer and so will have greater access to air conditioning. Climate change of that magnitude only makes the tropics uninhabitable in the sense that the Persian Gulf is uninhabitable today. There would be great humanitarian costs in low growth agrarian economies but that is a separate question to whether climate change poses an existential risk)
Interesting first point, but I disagree. To me, the increased salience of climate change in recent years can be traced back to the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), and in particular the meme ’12 years to save the world’. Seems to have contributed to the start of School Strike for Climate, Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal. Another big new scary IPCC report on catastrophic climate change would further raise the salience of this issue-area.
I was thinking that $100m would be for all four of these topics, and that we’d get cause-prioritisation VOI across all four of these areas. $100m for impact and VOI across all four seems pretty good to me (however I’m a researcher not a funder!)
On solar geo, I’m not an expert on it and am not arguing for it myself, merely reporting that its top of the ‘asks’ list for orgs like Silver Lining.
I actually rather like the framing in Xu & Ram—I don’t think we know enough about >5 °C scenarios, so describing them as “unknown, implying beyond catastrophic, including existential threats” seems pretty reasonable to me. In any case, I cited that more to demonstrate the lack of research thats been done on these scenarios.
On the last point, during the early Pliocene, early hominids with much worse technology than us lived in a world in which temperatures were 4.5C warmer than pre-industrial. It would be a surprise to me if this level of warming would kill off everyone, including people in temperate regions. There’s more to come from me on this topic, but I will leave it at that for now
I definitely want to see more modeling of supervolcano and comet disasters.