This isn’t an answer to your question, but I think the underlying assumption is way too strong given available evidence.
Taking for granted that bad experiences outweigh good ones in the wild (something I’m sympathetic to also, but which definitely has not clearly been demonstrated), I think having any kind of position on whether or not climate change increases or decreases wild animal welfare is pretty much impossible to say.
Why do you think insects will end up dominating in the calculus of animals impacted by climate change? What if most animals impacted by climate change are aquatic, and not terrestrial? This seems entirely plausible. I don’t think we have any idea how climate change will impact aquatic animal populations in the very long run.
It might be in principle true that warmer climates = more insects, but what actually will end up impacting insect populations is going to be a lot more complicated: pace and nature of human development (e.g. changes in habitat destruction), weather variance over the year and across years, etc. Maybe species that are especially good at navigating high weather variance will do especially well for the next few centuries, and that causes local maxima that look very different than the theoretical effects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if total land area by biome type is way more relevant to insect population than overall temperature. This again seems like a question where we know basically nothing about what the longterm impacts of climate change will be.
I guess my overall view is that having any kind of reasonable opinion on the impact of climate change on insect or other animal populations in the longrun, besides extremely weak priors, is basically impossible right now, and most assumptions we can make will end up being wrong in various ways.
I also think it doesn’t follow that if we think suffering in nature outweighs positive experience, we should try to minimize the number of animals. What if it is more cost-effective to improve the lives of those animals? Especially given that we are at best incredibly uncertain if suffering outweighs positive experience, it seems clearly better to explore cost-effective ways to improve welfare over reducing populations, as those interventions will be more robust no matter the overall dominance of negative vs positive experiences in the wild.
I agree there’s a very high degree of uncertainty. But I’d guess at maybe 58% odds that climate change will be bad in the long run. I’d imagine the aquatic impacts will largely rebound long term while the terrestrial ones will be long lasting. I agree there’s high uncertianty, but sometimes it’s worth acting on +ev actions even given loads of uncertainty.
Thanks for the interesting discussion, Abraham and Matthew! I have coincidentally been thinking about this over the past few days.
I agree there’s high uncertianty, but sometimes it’s worth acting on +ev actions even given loads of uncertainty.
I agree. Uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives should directionally update one towards supporting interventions which improve their lives, and away from ones which increase/decrease positive/negative animal-years. However, it could still be the case that one’s best guess for the welfare per animal-year is sufficiently away from 0 for the latter interventions to be more cost-effective. I am not aware of any quantitative analysis arguing one way or the other.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but I think the underlying assumption is way too strong given available evidence.
Taking for granted that bad experiences outweigh good ones in the wild (something I’m sympathetic to also, but which definitely has not clearly been demonstrated), I think having any kind of position on whether or not climate change increases or decreases wild animal welfare is pretty much impossible to say.
Why do you think insects will end up dominating in the calculus of animals impacted by climate change? What if most animals impacted by climate change are aquatic, and not terrestrial? This seems entirely plausible. I don’t think we have any idea how climate change will impact aquatic animal populations in the very long run.
It might be in principle true that warmer climates = more insects, but what actually will end up impacting insect populations is going to be a lot more complicated: pace and nature of human development (e.g. changes in habitat destruction), weather variance over the year and across years, etc. Maybe species that are especially good at navigating high weather variance will do especially well for the next few centuries, and that causes local maxima that look very different than the theoretical effects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if total land area by biome type is way more relevant to insect population than overall temperature. This again seems like a question where we know basically nothing about what the longterm impacts of climate change will be.
I guess my overall view is that having any kind of reasonable opinion on the impact of climate change on insect or other animal populations in the longrun, besides extremely weak priors, is basically impossible right now, and most assumptions we can make will end up being wrong in various ways.
I also think it doesn’t follow that if we think suffering in nature outweighs positive experience, we should try to minimize the number of animals. What if it is more cost-effective to improve the lives of those animals? Especially given that we are at best incredibly uncertain if suffering outweighs positive experience, it seems clearly better to explore cost-effective ways to improve welfare over reducing populations, as those interventions will be more robust no matter the overall dominance of negative vs positive experiences in the wild.
I agree there’s a very high degree of uncertainty. But I’d guess at maybe 58% odds that climate change will be bad in the long run. I’d imagine the aquatic impacts will largely rebound long term while the terrestrial ones will be long lasting. I agree there’s high uncertianty, but sometimes it’s worth acting on +ev actions even given loads of uncertainty.
How did you get to 58%? That seems pretty precise so interested in the reasoning there.
Vibes! 60 felt too high, 55 too low!
Thanks for the interesting discussion, Abraham and Matthew! I have coincidentally been thinking about this over the past few days.
I agree. Uncertainty about whether wild animals have positive or negative lives should directionally update one towards supporting interventions which improve their lives, and away from ones which increase/decrease positive/negative animal-years. However, it could still be the case that one’s best guess for the welfare per animal-year is sufficiently away from 0 for the latter interventions to be more cost-effective. I am not aware of any quantitative analysis arguing one way or the other.