Mid-career climate science researcher in academia
Previously used display name “Pagw”
ClimateDoc
Karma: 456
I also think the form should exist. I would agree that attacks on individuals should be removed (with a comment left explaining why). I’m uneasy about screening the comments more than that, as then people may not trust that no bias has come in. For negative comments about organisations, perhaps people could be encouraged to briefly explain their thoughts and link to evidence. I would hope that people reading the comments would know to take criticism of organisations with no evidence given with a very big pinch of salt, since there will be people around with gripes due to rejected applications etc.
I think it would be helpful to establish a norm that people would remove themselves from investigations involving people they have a personal or professional relationship with (which to me means from being on first-name terms upwards or where there is a conflict of interest). Where that is not possible (eg because there would not be enough competent people to do the work) then it ought to be stated what personal or professional relationships exist—but I don’t think we need to know whether that relationship is going for the occasional drink or co-hosting weekly orgies...
Very interesting, thanks. I would just suggest adding to your list of caveats at the end that today’s rate of warming is much faster than in episodes like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which increases risks.
Peter here—so actually I’d say this isn’t clear now—here’s some recent work for example suggesting that estimates of future warming won’t change much compared to those from the previous set of models once recent observed warming is used as a constraint i.e. those newer models with higher sensitivity seem to warm too fast compared to observations e.g. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/12/eaaz9549 . Well, the models are only one piece of evidence going into the overall estimate anyway. I don’t follow the literature on this closely enough to be confident about what the IPCC will actually conclude.
Thanks for this analysis, it’s very interesting. You might find it simpler and more accurate to go straight from emissions to warming using the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) rather than climate sensitivity, though (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_climate_response_to_cumulative_carbon_emissions ). A problem with using ECS is that it gives you the warming that occurs after Earth has reached equilibrium with a given CO2 concentration. However, in reality, the CO2 concentration won’t stay constant once we’ve stopped emitting, but will decline as it is slowly taken up by the Earth system. The result found in many Earth system models is that temperatures rise linearly with emissions and once emissions stop, temperatures also stop rising, rather than rising to reach the value implied by the ECS for the peak concentration value (at the point when emissions stop). (Though, temperatures would still rise further if the ECS were very high, since the Earth would be experiencing a much larger radiative forcing in that case.) So I think this would reduce the chance of high temperatures a bit.
Thanks Michael for the post. I happened to be thinking in similar terms recently regarding how to divide donations between saving human lives and increasing welfare of farmed animals (though nothing like as thoroughly and generally). I thought perhaps this could be an interesting real-world example to analyse:
This review estimated that saving a life in a very poor country would result in a reduction in births of 0.33-0.5, hence giving 0.5-0.67 extra lives. Though, the uncertainty in the various studies included indicates to me it could plausibly give 1 extra life.
1 extra human life perhaps gives ~60 years of extra life (not counting extra descendants, so maybe it’s an underestimate).
Then I remember reading estimates that for every typical westerner there are around 5-10 farmed animals alive at a given time to produce the animals products they eat (though I can’t remember the source, and I’m not sure if this includes fish). An extra person in a developing world country isn’t going to consume as much as a typical westerner straight away of course, but I suppose the long-term consumption could be this large if they or their descendants reached present western levels of wealth and factory farming was still prevalent then, so it could be a reasonable pessimistic estimate of the effect of saving a human life on the increase in the number of farmed animals.
This 2018 Founders Pledge report gives a mean estimate of the effect of The Humane League’s corporate campaigns alone as “10 hen-years shift from battery cages to aviaries [equivalent] per dollar received” [p.68].
Perhaps shifting a hen from a battery to aviary system could be taken to be a tenth as good as removing an animal from the system (just based on a not-very-informed intuition).
So an estimate of an amount to donate to THL to be likely to offset any negative impact on animal welfare from saving a human life (using pessimistic figures to give the rough upper end of the uncertainty range) is [no. of extra human lives] x [no. of extra human years lived per life] x [no. of farmed animals per person]/[no. of animal years saved per $] = 1 x 60 x 10/(10*0.1) = $600.
This is ~20% of the cost of saving one life through Malaria Consortium from GiveWell’s 2020 cost effectiveness analysis. So perhaps this indicates that if you wanted to donate to save lives from malaria but were worried about potential negative impacts on farm animal welfare, splitting donations between MC and THL in a 5:1 ratio would be an option robustly better than doing nothing. (But the THL fraction may need to be higher if impacts on fish, long-term impacts of increasing the human population or other things I’ve not thought of need to be included).
Does this sound reasonable?
(Edited to correct “4:1 ratio” to “5:1 ratio”)
Thanks for your thoughts and the links. I agree that more consideration of long-term effects and population ethics seems important (also, I would have thought, for the impact of accelerating animal welfare improvements). I don’t know anything to go on for quantitative estimates of long-term effects myself, though.
Regarding the possibility of cage-free campaigns as being net negative, I agree this sounds like a risk, so perhaps I was loose in saying donating a certain amount to THL could be “robustly better”. I’m not sure it’s going to be possible to be 100% sure that any set of interventions won’t have a negative impact, though—I was basically going for being able to feel “quite confident” that the impact on farmed animals wouldn’t be negative (edit: given the assumptions I’ve made—all things considered I’m not as confident as that), and haven’t been able yet to be precise about what that means.Thinking about it, in general, it seems to me that the ranges of possible effects of interventions could be unbounded, so then you’d have to accept some chance of having a negative impact in the corresponding cause areas. Perhaps this is something your general framework could be augmented to take into account e.g. could one set a maximum allowed probability of having a negative effect in one cause area, or would it be sufficient to have a positive expected effect in each area?
It’s an interesting analysis. Just a thought—since the value of 1 unit is up to the responder if I’ve understood correctly, it might be more meaningful to calculate ratios of the responses for each person and average these rather than average the responses to each part—for the latter, if any responder picked small “unit” sizes and correspondingly gave large numerical values, they would make an outsized contribution. Calculating ratios first cancels out whatever “unit” people have decided on. Though it should only matter much if people’s “units” differ considerably in size.
‘in “humane” farms the animals are more often sick (since they do not take antibiotics, …)’
It sounds like the book is referring to organic farms, which are not necessarily as humane as could be possible, for reasons like this. I’ve read about UK organic farms and it seems that disease rates can be relatively low even without antibiotics due to using lower stocking densities. For sheep it’s a problem, though, because they can’t help encountering germs in their environment. There’s nothing to stop a truly humane farm from using antibiotics, though.
I only just saw your reply. Here’s a (fairly old) report that discusses organic farming in the UK, including management of disease, that may be useful—though note it was sponsored by a organic-promoting organisation, but it does include criticism and doesn’t just seem to be a piece of marketing: http://charliepyesmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/01/Batteries-not-included.pdf . I don’t know of any other thorough reports—it would be useful if there were more.
When thinking about whether to donate to Helen Keller International’s Vitamin A supplementation program, I wondered whether this is problematic for animal welfare, since Vit A is usually derived from animal sources as I understand it. So I asked HKI and they said their Vit A is chemically synthesised without animal origin, though their capsules do contain gelatin sourced from cattle. My perception is that the use of gelatin wouldn’t be expected to contribute a lot to animal welfare problems (though it might matter for people who never want to fund purchasing of animal products). I just thought I’d share this in case anyone else wondered.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
“I don’t want to put words in their mouths, but Peter overall seemed very positive”
As Peter, just in case this should come back to bite me if misinterpreted, I just thought I’d say I could give an informed review of certain physical climate science aspects and the report seems to capture those well. I am positive about the rest as being an interesting and in depth piece of scholarship into interesting questions, but I can’t vouch for it as an expert :-)
I’m a researcher in weather and climate science and this post is very interesting to me—weather forecasts, and forecasts of events that depend on those like for flooding, can be quite skilful and it’s possible that more could be done to tailor that information to people’s needs and get it out to them. Colleagues of mine would know more. If you happened to want to discuss that further, feel free to PM me.
Peer review is very variable so it’s hard to say what “the depth of peer review” is. I checked the bits I was asked to check in a similar way as I would a journal article. No I didn’t myself really review the methodology. The process was also quite different from normal review in involving quite a few back-and-forth discussions—I felt more like I was helping make the work better rather than simply commenting on its quality. It also differed in that the decision about “publishing” was taken by John rather than a separate editor (as far as I know).
I feel pretty sure that you are not ethically obliged to pay anything out of your savings. And you haven’t done anything wrong so I don’t think you have anything to feel guilty about.
I think, if grant money has been spent in good faith, then it makes ethical sense to treat it as gone and not needing to be repaid. I don’t think anyone should make themselves financially worse off for having received a grant.
It seems like there are quite a lot of people/orgs who made plans based on promised money that now seems unlikely to arrive. Is there a lesson that can be learned about how to reduce risk in grant awarding e.g. by waiting until funds are securely in the foundation’s hands? Or is there no way to avoid this risk given potential clawbacks, even in cases of bankruptcy that don’t involve any fraud?
Thanks for this. One thing that perplexes me about the Ricke et al. (2018) analysis is that the SCC for most African countries looks to be lower than for the USA (fig.2), whereas the general consensus seems to be that the impacts of climate change will have far worse effects on individuals’ utilities in Africa. So this makes me wonder have they properly captured the effect of marginal utility changing with income? I’m not an economist, so I don’t know how to judge this myself.