StevenKaas

Karma: 422

StevenKaas Oct 8, 2019, 12:42 AM
30 points
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on: Updated Climate Change Problem Profile
A piece such as this should engage with the direct cost/benefit calculations that have been done by economists and EAs (e.g. Giving What We Can), which make it seem hard to argue that climate change is competitive with global health as a cause area.
How much it would take to stay under a mostly arbitrary probability of a mostly arbitrary level of temperature change is a less relevant statistic than how much future temperatures would change in response to reduced emissions.

StevenKaas Sep 13, 2019, 7:06 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than Climate change interventions
My nonconfident best guess at an interpretation is that, according to these estimates, for every tonne of carbon:
Future Indians suffer damages utility-equivalent to the present population of India paying a total of $76
Future Americans suffer damages utility-equivalent to the present population of the USA paying a total of $48
Future Saudis suffer damages utility-equivalent to the present population of Saudi Arabia paying a total of $47
Next are China, Brazil, and the UAE, all with $24, and then a lot of other countries, and the sum of all these numbers is $417. So it’s as if the $417 is paid by this particular mix of the world’s people, making it iii), something in between. These numbers are totals that don’t divide by population, so an individual inhabitant of Saudi Arabia or the UAE pays a greater absolute amount than an individual American, who pays a greater absolute amount (but a smaller percentage of income) than an individual Indian.

StevenKaas Sep 10, 2019, 8:59 PM
24 points
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in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than Climate change interventions
I was about to say this and then saw your comment. My impression from the paper is the $417 is a sum of costs to different countries, and for each of them the cost is a present value to the people in that country, with discounting being applied based on the expected amount of economic growth in that country. So I don’t think it’s calibrated to present-day Americans, but I don’t think it’s calibrated to the world’s poorest either, and I agree the argument doesn’t go through.
There’s another problem with the quoted claim, which becomes clear if you pick a value like X = 1/1000. Paying $417,000 to avert a tonne of carbon is a huge net bad and not just a much smaller net good.
It seems to me another problem is that if the social cost of carbon comes from effects on growth, you have to compare that to the effects on growth of cash transfers. It’s generally easy for small changes in growth rate to outweigh small changes to level in the long run, so if you compare the growth effects of one intervention to the level effects of another intervention, it’s no surprise that the former would seem more effective.

StevenKaas Jun 17, 2019, 5:52 PM
17 points
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on: Which nuclear wars should worry us most?
A nuclear exchange may have the potential to … possibly lead to the extinction of life on Earth.
I haven’t seen anyone seriously argue for this claim and I don’t think it’s true or true-adjacent.

StevenKaas Apr 19, 2019, 3:54 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?
3. The goal for climate change mitigation should be getting to net zero emissions as fast as possible, as anything other than that still causes warming, and this goal is absent from many EA and the 80,000 Hours write-up.
If there’s already the goal of reducing emissions in general, with more reduction being better, is there any reason to add a goal about the zero level specifically? EA generally (and I think rightly) just cares about the expected amount of problem reduction, with exceptions where zero matters being things like diseases that can bounce back from a small number of cases.

StevenKaas Apr 18, 2019, 1:43 AM
8 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?
What is wrong with it?
If the claims made here from p.13 on are true, it seems like the model can’t be reliable. This also disagrees. In general, it seems intuitively like it would be extremely hard to do this kind of statistics and extrapolate to the future with any serious confidence or rely on it for an estimate without a lot more thought. (I haven’t tried to look for critiques of the critiques and don’t claim to have a rigorous argument.)
Economic activity already goes to wherever it will be the most profitable. I don’t see why we would expect companies to predictably err.
I was thinking if climate has effects on growth rate, companies may not be capturing the full costs/benefits from that. My intuition that it could be extremely effective was something like “if an extremely blunt tool like global average temperature can have big effects on growth through improving local temperature in more places than it worsens local temperature, you can probably get much bigger effects by optimizing local temperature in a fine grained way through changing the locations of things.” Maybe that’s wrong, I don’t know.

StevenKaas Apr 18, 2019, 1:00 AM
16 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?
My understanding is there are two somewhat separate issues, one being the improper use of uniform priors and the other being a failure to give estimates that take all evidence (GCMs, recent temperatures, paleoclimate, etc) into account, with probability distributions from mostly-independent evidence sometimes having wrongly been taken as confirmation of the same uncertainty range instead of being combined into a narrower one. Do the estimates that you’re eyeballing update on every line of evidence? Annan and Hargreaves under some assumptions find numbers like a 95% upper probability bound of 3.6 degrees, which would imply virtually no risk of ECS>5. (Structural uncertainty may, of course, weaken such conclusions.)
As you explain in your writeup, the 7 degrees here represents an eventual temperature increase that will only be attained in centuries, and the increase over the 21st century would be significantly less (though still major), which makes the scenario less extreme than it sounds.
Your writeup uses Wagner and Weitzman’s interpretation of the IPCC’s uncertainty range for sensitivity. If I remember correctly, AR5 does discuss the issues of priors and combined evidence, but bases the 1.5-4.5 degree range on subjective judgment, so it’s hard for me to be sure that bad Bayesianism is what’s causing this interval to be as wide as it is, but Annan seems to think people aren’t taking his points into account enough.
I’ve found it hard to find good information on the questions most directly relevant to estimating the pdf of the size of the effects of climate change (with your writeup as one of the main exceptions) and may be getting things wrong.
What links here?
- StevenKaas's comment on Good news on climate change by John G. Halstead (Oct 29, 2021, 12:34 AM; 18 points)

StevenKaas Apr 17, 2019, 7:29 PM
10 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?
If the Burke et al. article that you’re largely basing the 26% number on is accurate (which I strongly doubt), it seems like trying to cause economic activity to move to more moderate climates might be an extremely effective intervention.

StevenKaas Apr 17, 2019, 6:33 PM
41 points
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on: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?
This source suggests we’re on for 4.1-4.8C of warming by 2100, so it seems erroneous to assume 2-4C should be our baseline assumption.
It’s hard to tell where this site is getting its numbers from, but my understanding is such claims are usually based on misrepresenting the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario as representative of business as usual even though it makes a number of pessimistic assumptions about other uncertainties and is widely considered as more like a worst case scenario than a median case scenario.
As far as I can tell, claims that extremely high climate sensitivities are plausible tend to be based on conceptual misunderstandings of Bayesian probability.
The Stern Review isn’t representative of climate economics as a whole and has various problems that you can find using your favorite web search engine.