Thanks, spelling these kind of things out is what I was trying to get at, this could make the case stronger working through them.

I don't have time to go through these points here one by one, but I think the one thing I would point out is that this strategy should be risk-reducing in those cases where the risk is real, i.e. not arguing from current public opinion etc.

I.e. in the worlds where we have the buy-in and commercial interest to scale up AI that much that it will meaningfully matter for electricity demand, I think in those worlds climate advocates will be side-lined. Essentially, I buy the Shulmanerian point that if the prize from AGI is observably really large then things that look inhibiting now - like NIMBYism and environmentalists - will not matter as much as one would think if one extrapolated from current political economy.

Ok, so I think we converge pretty much then -- essentially what I am saying is that people concerned about compounding risks would argue that these are not modeled correctly in GBD and that there is much more uncertainty there (and that the estimate is probably an underestimate, from the perspective of taking the compounding risk view seriously).

Thanks!

I think I remain confused as to what you mean with "all deaths from non-optimal temperature".

It is clear that the data source you cite (GBD, focused on current deaths) will not feature nor proxy what people concerned about compounding risks from climate are concerned about.

So to me it seems you are saying "I don't trust arguments about compounding risks and the data is evidence for that" whereas the data is inherently not set up to include that concern and does not really speak to the arguments that people most concerned about climate risk would make.

As said before, I think it is fine to say "I don't trust arguments about compounding risks" and I am probably with you there to a large degree at least compared to people most concerned about this, but I don't think the data from GBD is additional evidence for that mistrust, as far as I can tell.

By crude analogy, if you believed that COVID restrictions had a big toll on the young and this will affect long-run impacts somehow, pointing to few COVID deaths amongs this age cohort would not be evidence against this concern.

Something like this:

1. I think an obvious risk to this strategy is that it would further polarize AI risk discourse and make it more partisan, given how strongly the climate movement is aligned with Democrats.

2. I think pro-AI forces can reasonably claim that the long-term impacts of accelerated AI development are good for climate -- increased tech acceleration & expanded industrial capacity to build clean energy faster -- so I think the core substantive argument is actually quite weak and transparently so (I think one needs to have weird assumptions if one really believes short-term emissions from getting to AGI would matter from a climate perspective - e.g. if you believed the US would need to double emissions for a decade to get to AGI you would probably still want to bear that cost given how much easier it would make global decarbonization, even if you only looked at it from a climate maximalist lens).

3. If one looks at how national security / competitiveness considerations regularly trump climate considerations and this was true even in a time that was more climate-focused than the next couple of years, then it seems hard to imagine this would really constrain things -- I find it very hard to imagine a situation where a significant part of US policy makers decide they really need to get behind accelerating AGI, but then they don't do it because some climate activists protest this.

So, to me, it seems like a very risky strategy with limited upside, but plenty of downside in terms of further polarization and calling a bluff on what is ultimately an easy-to-disarm argument.

Thanks for this, Vasco, thought-provoking as always!

I do not have too much time to discuss this, but I want to point out that I am pretty unconvinced by the argument for why indirect effects should be easy to discount by the type of the argument you make. So, to be clear, I am not arguing that the conclusion is necessarily wrong (I think this would require stronger arguments), but rather that the argumentation strategy here does not work.

As far as I understand it your argument for "indirect effects cannot be very large" is something like:

1. Deaths from heat are very overstated and not that significant and they capture the most important direct effect.

2. A claim for strong indirect effects is then implausible because onto that direct effect you need to sequence a bunch of very uncertain additional effects with uncertain signs.

Insofar as is this a correct representation of your argument -- please let me know -- I think it has a couple of problems:

1.

a. Dying from heat stress is a very extreme outcome and people will act in response to climate change much earlier than dying. For example, before people die from heat stress, they might abandon their livelihoods and migrate, maybe in large numbers.

b. More abstractly, the fact that an extreme impact outcome (heat death) is relatively rare is not evidence for low impact in general. Climate change pressures are not like a disease that kills you within days of exposure and otherwise has no consequence.

2.

a. You seem to suggest we are very uncertain about many of the effect signs. I think the basic argument why people concerned about climate change would argue that changes will be negative and that there be compounding risks is because natural and human systems are adapted to specific climate conditions. That doesn't mean they cannot adapt at all, but that does mean that we should expect it is more likely that effects are negative, at least as short-term shocks, than positive for welfare. Insofar as you buy a story where people migrate because of climate impacts, for example, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that increased migration pressures are more likely to increase tensions than to reduce them, etc.

b. I think a lot of the other arguments on the side of "indirect risks are low" you cite are ultimately of the form (i) "indirect effects in other causes are also large" or (ii) "pointing to indirect effects make things inscrutable and unverifiable".  (i) might be true but doesn't matter, I think, for the question of whether warming is net-bad and (ii) is also true, but does nothing by itself on whether those indirect effects are real -- we can live in a world where indirect effects are rhetorically abused and still exist and indeed dominate in certain situations!
 

I disagree with the substance, but I don't understand why it gets downvoted.

Apologies if my comment was triggering the sense that I am questioning published climate science. I don't. I think / hope we are mostly misunderstanding each other.

With "politicized" here I do not mean that the report says inaccurate things, but merely that the selection of what is shown and how things are being framed in the SMP is a highly political result.
And the climate scientists here are political agents as well, so comparing it with prior versions would not provide counter-evidence.

To make clear what I mean with "politicized".
1. I do not think it is a coincidence that the fact that the graphic on climate impacts only shows very subtly that this assumes no adaptation. 
2. And that the graph on higher impacts at lower levels of warming does not mention that since the last update of the IPCC report we also have now expectations of much lower warming.

These kind of things are presentational choices that are being made, omissions one would not make if the goal was to maximally clarify the situation because those choices are always made in ways justifying more action. This is what I mean with "politicized", selectively presented and framed evidence.

 [EDIT: This is a good reference from very respected IPCC authors that discusses the politicized process with many examples]

Sorry for the delay!

Here is a good summary of whether or not the recent warming should make us worried more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/

It is nuanced, but I think the TLDR is that recent observations are within the expected range (the trend observed since 2009 is within the range expected by climate models, though the observations are noisy and uncertain, as are the models).

 

It is true that this is not true for the long-form summary of the science.

What I mean is that this graphic is out of the "Summary for Policymakers", which is approved by policymakers and a fairly political document. 

Less formalistically, all of the infographics in the Summary for Policymakers are carefully chosen and one goal of the Summary for Policymakers is clearly to give ammunition for action (e.g. the infographic right above the cited one displays impacts in scenarios without any additional adaptation by end of century, which seems like a very implausible assumption as a default and one that makes a lot more sense when the goal is to display gravity of climate impacts rather than making a best guess of climate impacts).

Thanks for this!

I think one important caveat to the climate picture is that part of the third of the three factors -- climate impacts at given levels of warming -- has also changed and that this change runs in the other direction.

Below is the graphic on this from the recent IPCC Synthesis Report (p. 18), which shows on the right hand side how the expected occurrence of reasons for concern has moved downwards between AR 5 (2014) and AR6 (2022). In other words, there is an evidential change that moves higher impacts towards lower temperatures and could potentially compensate the effect of lower expected temperature (eyeballing this, for some of the global reasons for concern it moves down by a degree).

I think one should treat the IPCC graphic with some skepticism -- it is a bit suspicious that all the impact estimates move to lower temperatures at the same time as higher temperatures become less likely and IPCC reports are famously politicized documents -- but it is still a data point worth taking into account.

I haven't done the math on this, but I would expect that the effect of a lowered distribution of warming will still dominate, but it is something that moderates the picture and I think is worth including when giving complete accounts to avoid coming across as cherry-picking only the positive updates.