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Firstly, on the assumption that the direct or indirect global catastrophic risk (defined as killing >10% of the global population or doing equivalent damage) of climate change depends on warming of more than 6 degrees, the global catastrophic risk from climate change is at least an order of magnitude lower than previously thought. If you think 4 degrees of warming would be a global catastrophic risk, then that risk is also considerably lower than previously thought: where once it was the most likely outcome, the chance is now arguably lower than 5%.
I think that the crux between climate pessimists and optimists is, at the moment, mostly about how much damage the effects of 2-4 degrees of warming would cause. This has been a recent development - I feel like I saw a lot more arguments that 6+ degrees of warming would make earth uninhabitable in the past when that seemed more likely, and now I see more arguments that 2-4 degrees of warming could cause way more damage than we think. Mark Lynas in a recent 80k podcast puts it this way when asked about civilisational collapse:
Mark Lynas: Oh, I think… You want to put me on the spot. I would say it has a 30 to 40% chance of happening at three degrees, and a 60% chance of happening at four degrees, and 90% at five degrees, and 97% at six degrees.
Arden Koehler: Okay. Okay. No, I appreciate you being willing to put numbers on this because I feel that’s always really hard, but it’s really helpful.
Mark Lynas: Maybe 10% at two degrees.
These new environmentalist arguments for climate posing a GCR aren't that we expect to get a lot of warming, but that even really modest amounts of warming, like 2-4 degrees, could be enough to cause terrible famines by reducing global food output suddenly or else knock out key industries in a way that cascades to cause mass deaths and civilisational collapse.
They don't dispute the basic physical effects of 2-4 degrees of warming, but they think that human civilisation is way more fragile than it appears, such that a modest loss of agricultural productivity and/or a couple of key industries being badly damaged by extreme weather could knock out other industries and so on leading to massive economic damage.
Now, I've always been very sceptical of these arguments because they seem to rely on nothing but intuition and go against historical precendent, but also because I thought we had reliable evidence against them - the IPCCs economic models of climate change say that 2 degrees of warming, for example, represents only a few percent in lost economic output.
E.g. this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/the-economic-geography-of-global-warming.html So the damage is bounded and not that high.
However, I found out recently that these models are so oversimplified as to be close to useless - at least according to Noah Smith:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-has-climate-economics-failed
For example, in 2011, Michael Greenstone and Olivier Deschenes published a paper about climate change and mortality (I studied an earlier version of this paper in a grad school class). Their approach is to measure the effect of temperature on mortality rates in normal times, and use that estimate to predict how a warmer world would affect mortality.
The authors make the obvious and grievous mistake of assuming that climate change affects human mortality only through the direct effects of air temperature — heatstroke, heart attack, freezing, and so on. The word “storm” does not appear in the paper. The word “fire” does not appear in the paper. The word “flood” does not appear in the paper. The authors do mention that climate change might increase disease vectors, but wave this away. Near the end of the paper they write that “it is possible that the incidence of extreme events would increase, and these could affect human health…This study is not equipped to shed light on these issues.”
You don’t say.
The big conceptual mistake here is to assume that whatever economists can easily measure is the sum total of what’s important for the world — that events for which a reliable cost or benefit cannot be easily guessed should simply be ignored in cost-benefit calculations. That is bad science and bad policy advice.
His source for a lot of these criticisms appears to be this (admittedly very clearly biased) paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856 by Steve Keen, who seems to be some sort of fringe economist. But I see them repeated by environmentalists a lot. The claim is that the economic models are really wrong and therefore we should expect lots more damage from relatively minor amounts of global warming.
So, if we accept these criticisms of the IPCCs climate economic forecasts (and please let me know if there are good responses to them), then where does that leave us epistemically? It means that the total economic damage caused by e.g. 3 degrees of warming doesn't have a clear, low, upper bound and that the 'extreme fragility' argument doesn't have strong evidence against it.
However there still isn't any positive evidence for it either! And it still strikes me as implausible, and against historical precedent for how famines work (plus resource shorages are the sort of problem markets are good at solving).
As far as I can tell, this really is the epistemic situation we're in with regard to the economic side of climate change forecasting - in the podcast episode with Rob Wiblin and Mark Lynas, they discuss this extreme fragility idea and neither cite climate forecasts to try and assess if modest losses to agricultural productivity would cause massive famines or not - it's just intuition Vs intuiton
Mark Lynas: So that’s, for me, the main question. And one of the most important studies I think that’s ever been performed on this was a study in the PNAS Journal, which looked at what they called synchronous collapse in breadbaskets around the world. So at the moment, the world still produces enough food every single year very reliably. We’ve never had a major food shortage which has been as a result of harvest failure.
Mark Lynas: So I mean, if the U.S. Corn Belt was knocked out one year, that would have a huge impact on food prices, and have a huge impact on food security, in fact, as a direct result of that. But imagine if it really wasn’t just the U.S. Corn Belt. It was Australia, it was Brazil, and Argentina, it was breadbaskets of Eastern Europe, and the former USSR, all of that added together, then you enter a situation which humanity has never experienced before, and which looks very much like famine.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/
Robert Wiblin: So when I envisage a situation where there’s a huge food shortfall like that, firstly, I think we’ll probably have some heads up that this is coming ahead of time. You start to notice the warning signs earlier, like food prices going up, and food futures going up. And then I imagine that people would start… Because it’ll be a global emergency much worse than the coronavirus, say. You just start seeing everyone starts paying attention to how the hell can we get more calories produced? And fortunately, unlike 500 years ago, we are in the fortunate situation where most people today aren’t already producing food, and most capital today isn’t already allocated towards producing more food. So there’s potentially a bunch of elasticity there where, if food prices go up tenfold, that a lot more people can go out and try to grow food one way or another. And a lot more capital can be reallocated towards agriculture in order to try to ameliorate the effects.
Robert Wiblin: And you can also imagine, just as everyone in March was trying to figure out how the hell do we solve this COVID problem, everyone’s going to be thinking “How can I store food? How can I avoid consuming food? How can we avoid wasting food? Because every calorie looks precious”. And maybe that sense of our adaptability, or our ability to set our mind to something when there’s a huge disaster and just throw everything at it, perhaps makes me more optimistic that we’ll be able to muddle through, perhaps more than you’re envisaging. Do you have a reaction to that?
Mark Lynas: My reaction is: imagine if Donald Trump is in charge of the response. It’s all very well to have optimistic notions of technological progress and adaptive capacity and things. And yeah, if smart people were running the show, that would no doubt be the most likely outcome. But smart people don’t run the show most of the time, in most places, and people are amenable to hate and fear, and denial and conspiracies, and all of those kinds of things as you’ve seen, even in the very short term challenges of COVID.
My point is that, unlike temperature forecasts, there aren't any concrete models to support either Rob or Mark's position. And elsewhere in the article Mark claims this scenario is 10% likely with 2 degrees of warming. If he's right, butterfly effects of 2 degrees of warming causing civilisational collapse is twice as likely as the 5% chance of 4 degrees of warming cited in this post, and it's therefore where the majority of the subjective risk comes from.
Regardless, as the physics side of climate change modelling has started to rule out enough warming to directly end civilisation by clear obvious mechanisms, this 'other climate tail risk' (i.e. what if the fragility argument is right) seems worth investigating if only to exclude the possibility. I still place a very low weight on these arguments being right, but it's probably higher than the chance we get 6+ degrees of warming.
Again, this isn't my area so please let me know if this has all been heavily debunked by climate economists. But currently it seems to me that the main arguments of climate pessimists aren't addressed by ruling out extreme warming scenarios.
One substantive point that I do think is worth making is that Torres isn't coming from the perspective of common-sense morality Vs longtermism, but rather a different, opposing, non-mainstream morality that (like longtermism) is much more common among elites and academics.
Yet this Baconian, capitalist view is one of the most fundamental root causes of the unprecedented environmental crisis that now threatens to destroy large regions of the biosphere, Indigenous communities around the world, and perhaps even Western technological civilisation itself.
When he says that this Baconian idea is going to damage civilisation, presumably he thinks that we should do something about this, so he's implicitly arguing for very radical things that most people today, especially in the Global South, wouldn't endorse at all. If we take this claim at face value, it would probably involve degrowth and therefore massive economic and political change.
I'm not saying that longtermism is in agreement with the moral priorities of most people or that Torres's (progressive? degrowth?) worldview is overall similarly counterintuitive to longtermism. His perspective is more counterintuitive to me, but on the other hand a lot more people share his worldview, and it's currently much more influential in politics.
But I think it's still important to point out that Torres's world-view goes against common-sense morality as well, and that like longtermists he thinks it's okay to second guess the deeply held moral views of most people under the right circumstances.
Practically what that means is that, for the reasons you've given, many of the criticisms that don't rely on CSM, but rather on his morality, won't land with everyone reading the article. So I agree that this probably doesn't make longtermism look as bad as he thinks.
FWIW, my guess is that if you asked a man in the street whether weak longtermist policies or degrowth environmentalist policies were crazier, he'd probably choose the latter.
I don't think Hanson would disagree with this claim (that the future is more likely to be better by current values, given the long reflection, compared to e.g. Age of Em). I think it's a fundamental values difference.
Robin Hanson is an interesting and original thinker, but not only is he not an effective altruist, he explicitly doesn't want to make the future go well according to anything like present human values.
The Age of Em, which Hanson clearly doesn't think is an undesirable future, would contain very little of what we value. Hanson says this, but it's a feature, not a bug. Scott Alexander:
Hanson deserves credit for positing a future whose values are likely to upset even the sort of people who say they don’t get upset over future value drift. I’m not sure whether or not he deserves credit for not being upset by it. Yes, it’s got low-crime, ample food for everybody, and full employment. But so does Brave New World. The whole point of dystopian fiction is pointing out that we have complicated values beyond material security. Hanson is absolutely right that our traditionalist ancestors would view our own era with as much horror as some of us would view an em era. He’s even right that on utilitarian grounds, it’s hard to argue with an em era where everyone is really happy working eighteen hours a day for their entire lives because we selected for people who feel that way. But at some point, can we make the Lovecraftian argument of “I know my values are provincial and arbitrary, but they’re my provincial arbitrary values and I will make any sacrifice of blood or tears necessary to defend them, even unto the gates of Hell?”
Since Hanson doesn't have a strong interest in steering the long-term future to be good by current values, it's obvious why he wouldn't be a fan of an idea like the long reflection, which has that as its main goal but produces bad side effects in the course of giving us a chance of achieving that goal. It's just a values difference.
Great post! You might be interested in this related investigation by the MTAIR project I've been working on, whch also attempts to build on Ajeya's TAI timeline model, although in a slightly different way to yours (we focus on incorporating non-DL based paths to TAI as well as trying to improve on the 'biological anchors' method already described): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z8YLoa6HennmRWBr3/link-post-paths-to-high-level-machine-intelligence
One thing that your account might miss is the impact of ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line. E.g. it's a very common argument that Christan ideas about the golden rule motivated anti-slavery sentiment, so if the Roman empire hadn't spread Christianity across Europe then we'd have ended up with very different values.
Similarly, even if the content of ancient Greek moral philosophy wasn't directly useful to improve wellbeing, they inspired the Western philosphical tradition that led to Enlignment ideals that led to the abolition of slavery.
I've told two stories about why the Greeks and Romans might have been necessary for future moral progress - are you skeptical of these appeals to historical contingency or are the long run causes of these events just outside the scope of this way of looking at history?
Very good summary! I've been working on a (much drier) series of posts explaining different AI risk scenarios - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KxDgeyyhppRD5qdfZ/link-post-how-plausible-are-ai-takeover-scenarios
But I think I might adopt 'Sycophant'/'Schemer' as better more descriptive names for WFLL1/WFLL2, Outer/Inner alignment failure going forward
I also liked that you emphasised how much the optimist Vs pessimist case depends on hard to articulate intuitions about things like how easily findable deceptive models are and how easy incremental course correction is. I called this the 'hackability' of alignment - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zkF9PNSyDKusoyLkP/investigating-ai-takeover-scenarios#Alignment__Hackability_
Thanks for this reply. Would you say then that Covid has strengthened the case for some sorts of democracy reduction, but not others? So we should be more confident in enlightened preference voting but less confident in Garett Jones' argument (from 10% less democracy) in favour of more independent agencies?
Do you think that the West's disastrous experience with Coronavirus (things like underinvesting in vaccines, not adopting challenge trials, not suppressing the virus, mixed messaging on masks early on, the FDA's errors on testing, and others as enumerated in this thread- or in books like The Premonition) has strengthened, weakened or not changed much the credibility of your thesis in 'Against Democracy', that we should expect better outcomes if we give the knowledgeable more freedom to choose policy?
For reasons it might weaken 'Against Democracy', it seems like a lot of expert bureaucracies did an unusually bad job because they couldn't take correction, see this summary post for examples:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dYiJLvcRJ4nk4xm3X#Vax
For reasons it might strengthen the argument, it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/the-premonition.html
Or this summary
I don't think the view that moral philosophers had a positive influence on moral developments in history is a simple model of 'everyone makes a mistake, moral philosopher points out the mistake and convinces people, everyone changes their minds'. I think that what Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill were getting at is that these people gave history a shove at the right moment.
At the very least, it doesn't seem that discovering the correct moral view is sufficient for achieving moral progress in actuality.
I have no doubt that they'd agree with you about this. But if we all accept this claim, there are two further models we could look at.
One is a model where changing economic circumstances influence what moral views it is feasible to act on, but progress in moral knowledge still affects what we choose to do, given the constraints of our economic circumstances.
The other is a model where economics determines everything and the moral views we hold are an epiphenomenon blown about by these conditions (note this is very similar to some Marxist views of history). Your view is that 'the two are totally decoupled', but at most your examples just show that the two are decoupled somewhat, not that moral reasoning has no effect. And there are plenty of examples that show explicit moral reasoning having at least some effect on events - see Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill's original list.
The strawman view that moral advances determine everything is not what's being proposed by Bykvist, Ord and MacAskill, it's the mixed view that ideas influence things within the realm of what's possible.
I see - that seems really valuable and also exactly the sort of work I was suggesting (I.e. addressing impact uncertainty as well as temperature uncertainty).
In the meantime, are there any sources you could point me to in support of this position, or which respond to objections to current economic climate models?
Also, is your view that the current Econ models are fundamentally flawed but that the economic damage is still nowhere near catastrophic, or that those models are actually reasonable?