Hey Johannes! I really appreciate the feedback, and I love the work you guys are doing through Founder’s Pledge. I appreciate that you also believe sociopolitical existential risk factors are an important element worth consideration.
I wish there was a lot more quantitative evidence on sociopolitical climate risk — I had to lean to a lot of qualitative expert sociopolitical analyses for this forum post. I acknowledge a lot of the scenarios I talk about here lean on the pessimistic side. In scenarios where there is high(er) governmental competence and societal resilience (than I predicted), it could be that very few of these x-risk multiplying impacts manifest. It could also be that they manifest in ways I don’t predict initially in this forum post.
I therefore agree with the critique about the overly confident statements. I ended up changing quite a bit of the phrasing in my forum post as a result of your feedback — I absolutely agree that some of the phrasing was a little too certain and bold. The focus should have been more on laying out possibilities rather than statements of what would happen. Thank you for that feedback.
To address your criticism/feedback on IPCC climate reports:
I think it is known that the IPCC’s climate reports, being consensus-driven, will not err in favor of extreme effects but rather include climate effects agreed upon by the broader research community. There was a recent Washington Post article I was considering including as well, where many notable climate scientists comment on the conservative, consensus nature of the IPCC and how this may impact their climate reports.
I cited the Scientific American article initially because it showed evidence of how a conservative consensus-driven organization has historically underestimated climate impacts. The article highlights specific examples of when IPCC predictions have been conservative from 1990 to 2012 — for instance, a 2007 report in which the IPCC dramatically underestimated Arctic summer ice , or a 2001 report where the IPCC predicts of sea level were 40% lower than actual sea level rise.
However, I absolutely acknowledge the accuracy of IPCC reports may have changed since 2012. I agree this evidence is not sufficient to warrant a statement that IPCC climate reports may lean conservative currently — so I’ve modified my statement to emphasize that certain past IPCC reports have leaned conservative. Thank you for the catch.
Overall, I appreciate your feedback — and I hope to speak to you sometime! I’d love to contribute to the research in the future quantifying the sociopolitical impacts of climate change, and I’m particularly interested in the work you do at Founder’s Pledge.
(Note for transparency: This comment has been edited.)
I agree that there should be more focus on resilience (thanks for mentioning ALLFED), and I also agree that we need to consider scenarios where leaders do not respond rationally. You may be aware of Toby Ord’s discussion of existential risk factors in the Precipice, where he roughly estimates a great power war might increase the total existential risk by 10% (page 176). You say:
What is the multiplying impact factor of climate change on x-risks – compared to a world without climate change?
If forced to guess, considering the effects of climate change, I believe a multiplying factor of at least an order of magnitude is conservative. However, further calculations and estimates are absolutely required to verify this.
So you’re saying the impact of climate change is ~90 times as much as his estimate of the impact of great power war (900% increase versus 10% increase in X risk). I think part of the issue is that you believe the world with climate change is significantly worse than the world is now. We agree that the world with climate change is worse than the business as usual, but to claim it is worse than now means that climate change would overwhelm all the economic growth that would have occurred in the next century or so. I think this is hard to defend for expected climate change. But this could be the case for the versions of climate change that ALLFED focuses on, such as the abrupt regional climate change, extreme weather including floods and droughts on multiple continents at the same time causing around a 10% abrupt food production shortfall, or the extreme global climate change of around 6°C or more. Still, I don’t think it is plausible to multiply existential risks such as unaligned AGI or engineered pandemic by 10 because of these climate catastrophes.
For some reason, when writing order of magnitude, I was thinking about existential risks that may have a 0.1% or 1% chance of happening being multiplied into the 1-10% range (e.g. nuclear war). However, I wasn’t considering many of the existential risks I was actually talking about (like biosafety, AI safety, etc) - it’d be ridiculous for AI safety risk to be multiplied from 10% to 100%.
I think the estimate of a great power war increasing the total existential risk by 10% is much more fair than my estimate; because of this, in response to your feedback, I’ve modified my EA forum post to state that a total existential risk increase of 10% is a fair estimate given expected climate politics scenarios, citing Toby Ord’s estimates of existential risk increase under global power conflict.
Thanks a ton for the thoughtful feedback! It is greatly appreciated.
Hey Johannes! I really appreciate the feedback, and I love the work you guys are doing through Founder’s Pledge. I appreciate that you also believe sociopolitical existential risk factors are an important element worth consideration.
I wish there was a lot more quantitative evidence on sociopolitical climate risk — I had to lean to a lot of qualitative expert sociopolitical analyses for this forum post. I acknowledge a lot of the scenarios I talk about here lean on the pessimistic side. In scenarios where there is high(er) governmental competence and societal resilience (than I predicted), it could be that very few of these x-risk multiplying impacts manifest. It could also be that they manifest in ways I don’t predict initially in this forum post.
I therefore agree with the critique about the overly confident statements. I ended up changing quite a bit of the phrasing in my forum post as a result of your feedback — I absolutely agree that some of the phrasing was a little too certain and bold. The focus should have been more on laying out possibilities rather than statements of what would happen. Thank you for that feedback.
To address your criticism/feedback on IPCC climate reports:
I think it is known that the IPCC’s climate reports, being consensus-driven, will not err in favor of extreme effects but rather include climate effects agreed upon by the broader research community. There was a recent Washington Post article I was considering including as well, where many notable climate scientists comment on the conservative, consensus nature of the IPCC and how this may impact their climate reports.
I cited the Scientific American article initially because it showed evidence of how a conservative consensus-driven organization has historically underestimated climate impacts. The article highlights specific examples of when IPCC predictions have been conservative from 1990 to 2012 — for instance, a 2007 report in which the IPCC dramatically underestimated Arctic summer ice , or a 2001 report where the IPCC predicts of sea level were 40% lower than actual sea level rise.
However, I absolutely acknowledge the accuracy of IPCC reports may have changed since 2012. I agree this evidence is not sufficient to warrant a statement that IPCC climate reports may lean conservative currently — so I’ve modified my statement to emphasize that certain past IPCC reports have leaned conservative. Thank you for the catch.
Overall, I appreciate your feedback — and I hope to speak to you sometime! I’d love to contribute to the research in the future quantifying the sociopolitical impacts of climate change, and I’m particularly interested in the work you do at Founder’s Pledge.
(Note for transparency: This comment has been edited.)
I agree that there should be more focus on resilience (thanks for mentioning ALLFED), and I also agree that we need to consider scenarios where leaders do not respond rationally. You may be aware of Toby Ord’s discussion of existential risk factors in the Precipice, where he roughly estimates a great power war might increase the total existential risk by 10% (page 176). You say:
So you’re saying the impact of climate change is ~90 times as much as his estimate of the impact of great power war (900% increase versus 10% increase in X risk). I think part of the issue is that you believe the world with climate change is significantly worse than the world is now. We agree that the world with climate change is worse than the business as usual, but to claim it is worse than now means that climate change would overwhelm all the economic growth that would have occurred in the next century or so. I think this is hard to defend for expected climate change. But this could be the case for the versions of climate change that ALLFED focuses on, such as the abrupt regional climate change, extreme weather including floods and droughts on multiple continents at the same time causing around a 10% abrupt food production shortfall, or the extreme global climate change of around 6°C or more. Still, I don’t think it is plausible to multiply existential risks such as unaligned AGI or engineered pandemic by 10 because of these climate catastrophes.
This is very fair criticism and I agree.
For some reason, when writing order of magnitude, I was thinking about existential risks that may have a 0.1% or 1% chance of happening being multiplied into the 1-10% range (e.g. nuclear war). However, I wasn’t considering many of the existential risks I was actually talking about (like biosafety, AI safety, etc) - it’d be ridiculous for AI safety risk to be multiplied from 10% to 100%.
I think the estimate of a great power war increasing the total existential risk by 10% is much more fair than my estimate; because of this, in response to your feedback, I’ve modified my EA forum post to state that a total existential risk increase of 10% is a fair estimate given expected climate politics scenarios, citing Toby Ord’s estimates of existential risk increase under global power conflict.
Thanks a ton for the thoughtful feedback! It is greatly appreciated.