I also don’t think I would estimate anywhere near that low, especially since the risk is spread over many years. On a per-year basis that is near or below asteroid x-risk level. 99.9 to 99.99 seems like the right range to me.
Total, but I don’t think the difference is as large as it might seem. Fundamentally, barring another collapse that stops our advancement, I don’t think we have more than about a century, at the high end, before we reach a point technologically where we’re no longer inescapably dependent on the climate for our survival. Which means almost all my probability for how climate could cause human extinction involves something drastic happening within the next handful of decades.
Most of that remaining probability looks something like “We were wrong to reject the methane clathrate gun hypothesis, and also the older, higher estimates of how much carbon they contain were right. There really can be catastrophic release over just a few years that kills all life in the seas and makes the world essentially jump forward several hundred years’ worth of carbon emissions all at once.” There are other catastrophic events that could happen—sudden collapse of the west antarctic ice sheet, rapid shutdown of the gulf stream—but none I know of that would literally render the planet uninhabitable or unable to support enough humans to eventually recover.
Ok, it sounds like we agree on pretty much everything except what it means for something to “be an existential risk”. I think 0.01% still counts as a risk worth worrying about (or it would, if AI x-risk weren’t multiple orders of magnitude higher).
I also don’t think I would estimate anywhere near that low, especially since the risk is spread over many years. On a per-year basis that is near or below asteroid x-risk level. 99.9 to 99.99 seems like the right range to me.
Are you saying 99.9 to 99.99 per year, or total?
Total, but I don’t think the difference is as large as it might seem. Fundamentally, barring another collapse that stops our advancement, I don’t think we have more than about a century, at the high end, before we reach a point technologically where we’re no longer inescapably dependent on the climate for our survival. Which means almost all my probability for how climate could cause human extinction involves something drastic happening within the next handful of decades.
Most of that remaining probability looks something like “We were wrong to reject the methane clathrate gun hypothesis, and also the older, higher estimates of how much carbon they contain were right. There really can be catastrophic release over just a few years that kills all life in the seas and makes the world essentially jump forward several hundred years’ worth of carbon emissions all at once.” There are other catastrophic events that could happen—sudden collapse of the west antarctic ice sheet, rapid shutdown of the gulf stream—but none I know of that would literally render the planet uninhabitable or unable to support enough humans to eventually recover.
Ok, it sounds like we agree on pretty much everything except what it means for something to “be an existential risk”. I think 0.01% still counts as a risk worth worrying about (or it would, if AI x-risk weren’t multiple orders of magnitude higher).