I have talked to IPCC people. I think there are some double standards required to believe existential risk (as typically defined in the longtermist literature as permanently preventing humanity from reaching future technological maturity) from climate change is considered considerably less likely by climate experts as existential risk from unfriendly artificial general intelligence is considered by AI experts.
What @Manuel Del RĆo RodrĆguez š¹ call ācollapse-focusedā views. Most minimally stated, that medium-term involuntary global degrowth is likely if CO2 emissions arenāt strongly curbed in the short term.
Is there actually an official IPCC position on how likely degrowth from climate impacts is? I had a vague sense that they were projecting a higher world gdp in 2100 than now, but when I tried to find evidence of this for 15 minutes or so, I couldnāt actually find any. (Iām aware that even if that is the official IPCC best-guess position that does not necessarily mean that climate experts are less worried about X-risk from climate than AI experts are about X-risk from AI.)
Yeah, I think the problem is surveying experts for their p(doom) isnāt something that has been done with climate experts AFAICT. (Iāll let you decide over whether this should be done or whether Mitchell is right and this methodology is bad to begin with.) But he stated the IPCC is planning to more extensively discuss degrowth in future reports.
That may be true, but it isnāt the argument Becker is making; it would still mean that the book author is at best dissembling when he says that expert consensus on x-risks from global warming is very different from what Ord and MacAskill state.
Two direct quotes: āThere are two issues here. The first is that Ord and MacAskill are out of step with the scientific mainstream opinion on the civilizational impacts of extreme climate change. In part, this seems to stem from a failure to imagine how global warming can interact with other risks (itself a wider issue with their program), but itās also a failure to listen to experts on the subject, even ones they contact themselvesā.
āOrd and MacAskillās confidence that climate change probably doesnāt pose the kind of existential threat theyāre worried about is unwarranted. And the fact that theyāre primarily worried about existential threats in the first place is the other problem: once a threat has been deemed existential, itās impossible to outweigh it with any less- than-existential threat in the present dayā.
The first one is the clearest pointing in the direction that Ordās and MacAskilās estimation arenāt within the pale of scientific mainstream opinion. It connects to a footnote (16) that links to https://āādigressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/āādigressionsimpressions/āā2022/āā11/āāon-what-we-owe-the-future-no-not-on-sbfftx.html which is definitely not some summary or compilation of mainstream views on global warming effects, but to a philosopherās review of What We Owe the Future. Perhaps this is a mistake. Note 14 does link to an article by none other than E. Torres on āWhat ālongtermismā gets wrong about climate changeā which seems to be the authority produced for the thesis that Ord and MacAskillās views are far from the scientific mainstream on this. Torres states having contacted with āa number of leading researchersā he cherrypicksāselective expert sourcing via Torres, not by systematic IPCC consensus.
I have talked to IPCC people. I think there are some double standards required to believe existential risk (as typically defined in the longtermist literature as permanently preventing humanity from reaching future technological maturity) from climate change is considered considerably less likely by climate experts as existential risk from unfriendly artificial general intelligence is considered by AI experts.
What did the IPCC people say exactly?
What @Manuel Del RĆo RodrĆguez š¹ call ācollapse-focusedā views. Most minimally stated, that medium-term involuntary global degrowth is likely if CO2 emissions arenāt strongly curbed in the short term.
Is there actually an official IPCC position on how likely degrowth from climate impacts is? I had a vague sense that they were projecting a higher world gdp in 2100 than now, but when I tried to find evidence of this for 15 minutes or so, I couldnāt actually find any. (Iām aware that even if that is the official IPCC best-guess position that does not necessarily mean that climate experts are less worried about X-risk from climate than AI experts are about X-risk from AI.)
Yeah, I think the problem is surveying experts for their p(doom) isnāt something that has been done with climate experts AFAICT. (Iāll let you decide over whether this should be done or whether Mitchell is right and this methodology is bad to begin with.) But he stated the IPCC is planning to more extensively discuss degrowth in future reports.
That may be true, but it isnāt the argument Becker is making; it would still mean that the book author is at best dissembling when he says that expert consensus on x-risks from global warming is very different from what Ord and MacAskill state.
ādissemblingā?
Two direct quotes: āThere are two issues here. The first is that Ord and MacAskill are out of step with the scientific mainstream opinion on the civilizational impacts of extreme climate change. In part, this seems to stem from a failure to imagine how global warming can interact with other risks (itself a wider issue with their program), but itās also a failure to listen to experts on the subject, even ones they contact themselvesā.
āOrd and MacAskillās confidence that climate change probably doesnāt pose the kind of existential threat theyāre worried about is unwarranted. And the fact that theyāre primarily worried about existential threats in the first place is the other problem: once a threat has been deemed existential, itās impossible to outweigh it with any less- than-existential threat in the present dayā.
The first one is the clearest pointing in the direction that Ordās and MacAskilās estimation arenāt within the pale of scientific mainstream opinion. It connects to a footnote (16) that links to https://āādigressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/āādigressionsimpressions/āā2022/āā11/āāon-what-we-owe-the-future-no-not-on-sbfftx.html which is definitely not some summary or compilation of mainstream views on global warming effects, but to a philosopherās review of What We Owe the Future. Perhaps this is a mistake. Note 14 does link to an article by none other than E. Torres on āWhat ālongtermismā gets wrong about climate changeā which seems to be the authority produced for the thesis that Ord and MacAskillās views are far from the scientific mainstream on this. Torres states having contacted with āa number of leading researchersā he cherrypicksāselective expert sourcing via Torres, not by systematic IPCC consensus.