Ok, fair, ‘prove’ is a strong word and we can have different opinions on both the probability estimate of climate-induced-extinction and the threshold for that probability being low enough to count as ‘not an x-risk.’
In order to actually wipe out all humanity, such that there were no residual populations able to hang on long enough to recover and rebuild, the climate would need to change faster than any human population, anywhere in the world, could adapt or invent solutions. Even if life sucked for a decade or a millennium, or if there were only 10k of us left in a few enclaves worldwide, that could still avert extinction. Considering the range of environments humans can survive in today, that’s an extremely high bar. Considering the pace of technological advance we have been ability to achieve under duress, it’s even higher. Climate change could cause catastrophic events that are extremely disruptive to huge numbers of people. It could, over the scale of decades, make it much harder for the world to support the current population of humans using current technology. It could force mass migrations over decades of large numbers of people. But IMO, none of those are enough to wipe out all of humanity faster than we could develop solutions for some subset of us to survive.
It could, however, trigger resource wars that increase other forms of x-risk, like nuclear and biological warfare. I wasn’t counting that as climate change x-risk in my accounting, not sure if you were.
I directionally agree but I don’t think that’s the sort of reasoning in which you can be >99.9% confident.
I’m also concerned about runaway warming making earth uninhabitable. Climate models suggest that won’t happen but Halstead (implicitly) expects a <0.001% chance of runaway warming which seems hard to justify to me.
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).
Ok, fair, ‘prove’ is a strong word and we can have different opinions on both the probability estimate of climate-induced-extinction and the threshold for that probability being low enough to count as ‘not an x-risk.’
In order to actually wipe out all humanity, such that there were no residual populations able to hang on long enough to recover and rebuild, the climate would need to change faster than any human population, anywhere in the world, could adapt or invent solutions. Even if life sucked for a decade or a millennium, or if there were only 10k of us left in a few enclaves worldwide, that could still avert extinction. Considering the range of environments humans can survive in today, that’s an extremely high bar. Considering the pace of technological advance we have been ability to achieve under duress, it’s even higher. Climate change could cause catastrophic events that are extremely disruptive to huge numbers of people. It could, over the scale of decades, make it much harder for the world to support the current population of humans using current technology. It could force mass migrations over decades of large numbers of people. But IMO, none of those are enough to wipe out all of humanity faster than we could develop solutions for some subset of us to survive.
It could, however, trigger resource wars that increase other forms of x-risk, like nuclear and biological warfare. I wasn’t counting that as climate change x-risk in my accounting, not sure if you were.
I directionally agree but I don’t think that’s the sort of reasoning in which you can be >99.9% confident.
I’m also concerned about runaway warming making earth uninhabitable. Climate models suggest that won’t happen but Halstead (implicitly) expects a <0.001% chance of runaway warming which seems hard to justify to me.
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).