You don’t understand the enormous immediate risk of climate change if you think that AGI is a comparable risk. Climate change is now and is killing people every day
I’m not sure the world would be able to pull off the Montreal protocol today, even if largely manufacturing changes and having to find a new hairspray brand.
Things like CFCs were taken seriously. Things like radiation were taken seriously (for better or worse, yielding our insane regulatory landscape around building new nuclear power plants).
The last major thing that scientists warned about that was really taken seriously (in the sense that something was done about it before it had/would have had massive negative effects) was world overpopulation, with the publication of things like "The Population Bomb" and China's one-child policy, etc.
Unfortunately, that one was gotten wrong; we now know that without any intervention, world population will tend to moderate itself and we won't actually see mass starvation due purely to too many people. I think that error was the first major blow resulting in people no longer really trusting catastrophic predictions.
I wonder what the world would be like if instead climate change was put forth as a catastrophic issue with the same fervor back then.
With the ozone layer, we already had alternatives to CFCs that were viable. A handful of companies lost out on product lines, but they're all still doing fine today. Individuals didn't have to do anything.
With the problem of CO2 emissions, lifestyle changes are required to fundamentally solve the issue, and people aren't willing to make them. Yes, it's possible that geoengineering can buy us some time. It's possible there will be a battery revolution. Renewable energy is increasingly widespread. But there's nothing right now that's a drop-in replacement. The only sure-fire solution that we have right now is a widespread reduction of consumption and mobility, and very few people are on board with that.
Reverse Carbon Sequestration employs a very large population.
AGI actually has a plausible case for existential risk and would result in a much greater GDP shift.
I'd put nukes above climate change. See does metaculus: https://possibleworldstree.com/
[0] https://twitter.com/HumanProgress/status/1634509546067574790
Do you really expect to be taken seriously with this "rebuttal" ?
> As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 – at least five times lower than these peaks. This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population – showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) – then we see a more than 10-fold decline over the past century.
It's further skewed by the use of decadal averages, which hid the fact that the greatest peaks included deaths that were either the direct result of--or greatly worsened by, conflict and/or a handful of specific policy decisions--food production failures during and conflicts such as the Zhili-Anhui War in 1920-21[1], floods that occurred during the Chinese civil war which dramatically worsened responses and recovery, the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33 and the Soviet famine of 1930-33 more broadly, the 1938 Yellow River Flood[2] following the intentional destruction of dikes in an attempt to slow the Japanese Army's advance, World War 2 more broadly in the 40s where you had both the food production interruptions of war on a massive scale and explicit acts of mass starvation, the Great Chinese Famine in 1959-61 which is considered to be one of the largest man-made disaster in history,[3] etc.
The graph falsely suggests that we've we've somehow stumbled upon a viable adaptation strategy that makes climate change nothing to worry about. Since 1900, we've seen massive medical advancements, improved early warning systems for at least some types of disasters, transportation networks and technology that helps move people away from disaster zones both before some disasters and in their aftermath, the ability to rapidly move large amounts of food to disaster areas, and more.
Those are all great achievements, but the largest factor in the decline your chart suggests (albeit through data misrepresentation) is the fact that we don't have massive conflicts on the scale we saw in the first half of the 20th century, genocidal dictators looking to quickly wipe out millions of people through starvation, or political ideology driving inane agricultural policies that killed tens of millions of people because the autocratic dictators of some of the most populous nations on Earth read some pseudoscientific drivel (Lysenko and others managed to inspire not only the Soviet Famine in the 30s but also the Great Chinese Famine in the late 50s) and decided it sounded pretty ideologically reliable. We still have conflict and famine, but nothing on the same scale.
Trying to take that and spin it as climate adaptation is, well, absurd. Even by climate skeptic standards, that argument's a real stinker.
0. https://twitter.com/TheDisproof/status/1633492932484374530
1. https://disasterhistory.org/north-china-famine-1920-21
The easy way to think about it by handwaving half-lives of an element. You start with 100 and end up with 50 for a 50% survival rate but also a raw loss of 50. Each of those remaining 50 still are going to have a 50% survival rate despite that the next raw loss is ~25.
But yeah; you can challenge the source of the argument as invalid as opposed to just challenging the argument as invalid.