Why not read and review the IPCC report? I am confused by why this seems to not be the most popular recommendation for people on this forum who want to understand the most up-to-date scientific consensus on climate change risk. It’s written by an international community of scientists, it’s very accessible with further higher-level overviews aimed at decision-makers and the broader public, all claims include an estimated level of uncertainty (and are very conservative) and you can follow the citations for any particular claim made. The website is great, the writing and figures are very clear.
I would not recommend Halstead’s report to someone trying to learn more about this topic. His summary of the research is not great in my opinion. This is a huge topic that touches many fields and even an expert in one of these research areas would struggle to put together a good overview of all of the others. But as I skimmed through this I noticed a few takes that are quite...off, and papers that I know to be outdated or widely considered erroneous being used as evidence for claims.
Some more context for those interested: Climate impact research is almost never looking at ‘worst case’ scenarios, but plausible outcomes. Papers looking at projections with high warming levels are often older, when it was less certain that much action would be taken to curb emissions, and very high warming scenarios seemed more likely. Also, climate science has very different confidence levels than climate impact research. Climate science is heavily based on physics, and doesn’t have to deal with the messiness of animal and human biology and behaviours and so on. Impact research is much murkier, as it depends on accurate understanding of the way animals, plants and humans respond to conditions that are outside of what has previously been observed, and often cannot be studied in RCTs. A lack of scientific consensus that extreme impacts are likely should not be mistaken for the presence of scientific consensus that extreme impacts are unlikely.
Do you think you can learn something useful about existential risk from reading the IPCC report?
FWIW I only briefly looked at the latest report but from what I saw, it seemed hard to learn anything about existential risk from it, except for some obvious things like “humans will not go extinct in the median outcome”. I didn’t see any direct references to human extinction in the report, nor any references to runaway warming.
Why not read and review the IPCC report? I am confused by why this seems to not be the most popular recommendation for people on this forum who want to understand the most up-to-date scientific consensus on climate change risk. It’s written by an international community of scientists, it’s very accessible with further higher-level overviews aimed at decision-makers and the broader public, all claims include an estimated level of uncertainty (and are very conservative) and you can follow the citations for any particular claim made. The website is great, the writing and figures are very clear.
I would not recommend Halstead’s report to someone trying to learn more about this topic. His summary of the research is not great in my opinion. This is a huge topic that touches many fields and even an expert in one of these research areas would struggle to put together a good overview of all of the others. But as I skimmed through this I noticed a few takes that are quite...off, and papers that I know to be outdated or widely considered erroneous being used as evidence for claims.
Some more context for those interested: Climate impact research is almost never looking at ‘worst case’ scenarios, but plausible outcomes. Papers looking at projections with high warming levels are often older, when it was less certain that much action would be taken to curb emissions, and very high warming scenarios seemed more likely. Also, climate science has very different confidence levels than climate impact research. Climate science is heavily based on physics, and doesn’t have to deal with the messiness of animal and human biology and behaviours and so on. Impact research is much murkier, as it depends on accurate understanding of the way animals, plants and humans respond to conditions that are outside of what has previously been observed, and often cannot be studied in RCTs. A lack of scientific consensus that extreme impacts are likely should not be mistaken for the presence of scientific consensus that extreme impacts are unlikely.
Do you think you can learn something useful about existential risk from reading the IPCC report?
FWIW I only briefly looked at the latest report but from what I saw, it seemed hard to learn anything about existential risk from it, except for some obvious things like “humans will not go extinct in the median outcome”. I didn’t see any direct references to human extinction in the report, nor any references to runaway warming.