Nuclear war, if the worst nuclear winter predictions are correct, could be a lot worse but there would still be some survivors.
Unaligned ASI though, could actually make us extinct.
Climate change leads to conflict. For example, the Syria drought of 2006-2010.
More climate change leads to larger conflicts, and large conflicts can lead to nuclear exchanges. Think about what happens if India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) get into a major conflict over water again.
Still, like I said somewhere else, even all out nuclear war is unlikely to lead to human extinction. It could push us back to the neolithic in some scenarios, but even then there is some disagreement about what would happen.
Of course, even in the most optimistic scenario it would be really bad and we should do everything we can to avoid it - that goes without saying.
In any case, besides addressing the root cause vs. proximal cause, you couldn't even address the proximal cause anyways: it's more likely that the world could do something about climate change than about war in general.
My take is that if you remove nuclear/biological war out of the picture somehow, climate change is not an existential risk. If you remove the latter then the former is still an existential risk (and there are unfortunately a lot of other possible sources of geopolitical instability). So the fundamental source of risk if the former. But it's a matter of opinion.
Conventional or chemical warfare, even on a global scale, are definitely not existential risks though. And like I said, probably not even nuclear. Biological... that I could see leading to extinction.
The assumption we’d need to use nukes is insane. For the same cost (and energy requirements) for a set of nukes we can filter salt from ocean water or collect rain.
I agree famine and drought can cause conflict. But we are no where need that. If you read the climate change predictions (from the UN), they actually suspect more rain (and flooding) in many regions.
I was referring to the Indo-Pakistani war of 1947-1948 where the conflict focused on water rights. Nuclear weapons did not enter the picture until much later.
Earlier this year, those old tensions about water rights resurfaced:
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/02/india-and-pakistan...
> For the same cost (and energy requirements) for a set of nukes we can filter salt from ocean water or collect rain.
The fight would be over the water flowing through the Indus, which is orders of magnitudes more than all Indian and Pakistani desalination projects combined.
Chunks of the world suddenly becoming unlivable and resources getting more scarce sounds like a recipe for escalation into war to me.
The principals in a nuclear conflict do not appear to even have a method to launch just a few nukes in response to a nuclear attacks: they will launch thousands of warheads at hundreds of cities.
climate change will happen, and it will do that, left unchecked
Daniel Ellsberg, the top nuclear war planner at RAND during the Cold War, claims that the Joint Chiefs gave an estimate to Kennedy in 1961 that they'd expect 600,000,000 deaths from the US's war plan alone.
That's 600 million people:
1. At 1960s levels of urban populations (especially in China, things have changed quite a lot -- and yes the plan was to attack China... every moderately large city in China, in fact!)
2. Using 1960s nuclear weapons
3. Not including deaths from the Russian response (and now Chinese), at the time estimated to be 50 - 90 million Americans
4. Before the global nuclear winter
But it is a topic that is extremely biased towards some interests anyways
> There is no scenario where climate change leads to human extinction.
He was talking about the human CIVILIZATION...
Human extinction via climate change is off the table.
The end of human civilization? Depends on what one means by it. If it means we'll go back to being hunter gatherers it's ridiculous. Some civilizational wide regression is not impossible, but even the direst IUPAC scenario projects only a one digit drop in global GDP (of course, that's the average, it will be much worse in some regions).
I don't think IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) has come out with views on impact of global warming :)
Indeed, but even going back to the 19th century would have dire consequences, given our current global dependence on the industrial fixing of nitrogen.
If civilization were to collapse (and I don't think it will, other than from a near-extinction event), I doubt it would be like going back to any earlier time.
I would still bet against going back to 19th century. Worst case scenario for me is hundreds of millions dying and a big regression in global standards of living, but keeping our level of civilization. Which is horrible, it would be the worst thing that ever happened.
I am just saying it's not an extinction risk.
The main AI threats for the foreseeable future are its energy usage contributing to climate change, and the use of generative AI to produce and enhance political unrest, as well as its general use in accelerating other political and economic crises. AGI isn't even on the radar, much less ASI.
Why is the default to assume that every change will be negative?
I mean you're right that conditions in some places might get better, but that doesn't help if people have to build the infrastructure there to support a modern settlement in order to take advantage of it. When people talk about the cost of climate change, they're taking about the costs of building or adapting infrastructure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
May not be possible with modern deposits but I don’t think we are 100% sure of that, and you asked.
We could also probably burn enough carbon to send CO2 levels up where they would cause cognitive impairment to humans if we really didn’t give a damn. That would be upwards of 2000ppm. We probably have enough coal for that if we decide we don’t need Alaska. Of course that would be even more of a species level Darwin Award because we’d see that train coming for a long time.
But according to your link, IPCC says it's not a plausible scenario in the medium term. And I'd say that even 8 degrees of warming wouldn't be enough for extinction or end of human civilization. But there it could be double digit percentage of human population dying.
>Horrible, horrible stuff, but not extinction.
anyway climate change drop single percentage directly caused, but that kind of thing seems like it would have LOTS of side effects.
One of the possible scenario is tricking humans into starting WWIII, perhaps entirely by accident. Another is that even being benignly applied to optimize economic activity in broad terms might have the AI strengthen the very failure modes that accelerate climate change.
Point being, all the current global risks won't disappear overnight with the rise of a powerful AI. The AI might affect them for the better, or for worse, but the definition of ASI/AGI is that whichever way it will affect them (or anything in general), we won't have the means to stop it.
This sounds more like a plot of a third-grade movie than something that could happen in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Site_J#RCA_operations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
Post-collapse Russia also came close one time because someone lost the paperwork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
And using movie plots as a basis generally doesn't directly work as fiction has to make sense to sell whereas reality has no requirement of making sense to people. The reality we live in this day is mostly driven by people for people (though many would say by corporations for corporations) and therefore things still make sense to us people. When and if an intellect matches or exceeds that of humans it can easily imagine situations where 'the algorithm' does things humans don't comprehend, but because we make more (whatever) we keep giving it more power to do its job in an autonomous fashion. It is not difficult to end up in a situation where you have a system that is not well understood by anyone and you end up cargo culting it to hope it continues working into the future.
In fact, this is a perfect description of what the market economy itself is right now.