Dear colleagues.
Thanks Seth for this comprehensive effort.
This is a complex piece of highly personal work, which tries hard to do many different things for a diverse audience in one fluid package. Given this very difficult target, it understandably only partially succeeds. Nonetheless within it I am sure many will find some new information, perspectives and links. Rather than critique it any further, I would prefer to follow on just one of the many discussion topics it opens up : climate change (CC) and existential risk (XR). My argument is that this all leads to a potentially high value nich role for the EA community.
CC is an XR First point to discuss is whether climate change is an extenstional risk. In summary of my opinion, (and Seth’s I believe) it definitely is, and there is a lot of data and analysis on this topic.
From a purely academic perspective, the most authoritative work on climate change as XR comes from Johan Rockstrom, first presented to world leadership at Davos 2019 https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2018-08-06-planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-hothouse-earth-state.html. Since then the work and underlying theorems, have been critiqued, defended and tuned, but in my opinion remain valid. In contrast the wave of unprecedented climate change linked extreme events of 2019-2021 has undermined the credibility of many conservative climate models and associated viewpoints. Scientists are repeatedly finding change occurring faster and impacts arriving earlier and harder than their models predicted. So, my first and primary point of argument is that climate change IS a priority existential risk – that warrants attention from the EA community.
What is (unsurprisingly) not enunciated well by climate scientists looking at extreme CC are the geopolitical-social-destabilization aspects. This then connects to a view in some XR circles that the likelihood of human species extinction via CC is too low for it to qualify as a XR event: it is a (only?) a temporary setback for global civilization, not a human species killer. Let me challenge this by referral to our current geopolitical and social situation in Q4 2022, with global average temperatures just beyond 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/key-findings.
Noting the presence of multiple other pressures, interconnections and the exponential increase in impacts with linear temperature increases, just imagine what a 4C+ society would look like. In the worse case scenario, we are looking at small groups of inexperienced unvaccinated hunter gatherer oriented survivors in a forced migration mode heading northward into continually destabilized and badly degraded environments. To me, this looks like a credible route to human extinction – with a much higher probability of occurrence or irreversible initation within the next 100 years than many much discussed XR events (asteroids, supervolcanoes etc).
EA has a potential key niche role in the CC-XR nexus Here is the connection to the EA agenda, and the gap I think that EA oriented thinkers and large scale philanthropists may be able to partly fill.
The EA community is unique in that it looks very openly at the basic question of where to allocate efforts, starting from an intellectual and humanist base, without many organizational, cultural, political or budgetary constraints. In short, it searches honestly for the gaps and the added value niches.
Over the next decades, literally trillions will be lost on CC associated acute and chronic disasters and similar amounts spent on mitigation and adaptation. However 99%+ of those funds will be raised by and channelled through relatively well established institutions and programmes that (in order to attract mainstream funding) offer incremental solutions within what I call the Global Plan A framework.
Plan A essentially assumes the continuity and stability of the global economic order, irrespective of the increasing destabilizing factors/stressors. I suggest we look at the 2022 news and then critique this near universal assumption – at present the global order appears to be unravelling. Not everywhere and not tomorrow, but the pulled threads are becoming distressingly visible. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2022-09-20/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly As per above the catalyst is not one event or stressor – it is compound: climate change + geopolitics + environmental degradation + population + inequality + ethnic/ideological divides etc…
The <1% minority of activities occurring under what I call the Plan B or collapse anticipation mindset, are to date, generally fragmented and very small and intellectually mixed in quality. In some cases they are simply dangerous and/or antisocial ( e.g. billionaire bunkers, NZ land grabs, survivalist cults etc..). What is happening however that is commendable is a rising wave of very earnest and underfunded efforts focusing on the psychological, sociological and even spiritual elements of coping with CC. https://climatepsychologyalliance.org/
To all of this we can add the global wildcard of stratospheric geoengineering: modifying the irradiance of the atmosphere to temporarily cool the earth without lowering emissions. At present this topic is essentially taboo in multilateral circles but growing exponentially in importance and likelihood. Without going into the details, geoengineering gone wrong is also an XR.
I think that we can collectively and feasibly do better than all of this. I note two key gaps:
A. Serious in depth public domain work on the climatic, environmental, social and political implications of stratospheric geoengineering.
B. Building a 2nd and 3rd line of defence, at a low cost and without giving up on the primary fight against CC and other critical issues. Clearly, 99% of CC and related efforts and funding should remain focused on supporting Plan A . This includes focused work on psychological and sociological issues . However I argue that up to 1% should be incrementally refocused on one or more Plan Bs: the two tiered defence of a) civilization and b) the human species and other key species and genetic material, in a partial or full collapse scenario. Consider it insurance for the human race and all that we value.
These two topics, geoengineering and Plan Bs, are the sort of intellectually anchored, high risk & novelty—high gain items that the EA forum was designed to identify and support. They are niches made for the EA community.
Let me stop here and await feedback on both the original article and this follow up. If you wish to go further and faster on points A and B above, please do contact me direct.
Andrew Morton
Congratulations on a very interesting piece of work, and on the courage to set out ideas on a topic that by its speculative nature will draw significant critique.
Very positive that you decided on a definition for “civilizational collapse”, as this is broadly and loosely discussed without the associated use of common terminology and meaning.
A suggested further/side topic for work on civilizational collapse and consequences is more detailed work on the hothouse earth scenario (runaway cliamte change leading to 6C+ warming + ocean chemistry changes).
Compared to most of the scenarios discussed in this piece—the evolution of hothouse earth is a 30 − 200+ year process, rather than an event. In this context, ideas such as usable food stocks, living livestock, healthy seas etc.. are no longer valid.
In addition, the current models for warming by 2100 are in the order of 2.7 − 3.5C, without feedback effects. There is a significant body of debate that these levels are more than sufficient to trigger civilizational collapse, but only after cumulative emissions that are so high as to ensure the warming and its impacts continue, potentially also escalating to the hothouse scenario.
In any event, interested in collaboration on this topic, if this is of interest.
Andrew Morton