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
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