What does the community here think when it comes to climate change as a potential existential risk? While strategies for combating climate change are fairly straightforward, the seeming lack of political capital behind meaningful climate reform and legislation seems to indicate that the problem is going to get substantially worse before it gets better, and the potential consequences of ignoring this issue look to be quite severe indeed!
Should the rationality/x-risks community be spending more effort on evaluating this idea and exploring potential solutions? It certainly seems like a big problem, and the current trajectory is quite worrisome. On the other hand, the issue is a political minefield and could risk entangling the community in political squabbling, potentially jeopardizing its ability to act on other threats. What do you guys think?
An "existential risk" is an extinction risk. Climate change is not an extinction risk - not for the human race, anyway. It would just mean suffering. Pick any horrible historical event you can think of - plague, war, whatever - as lethal as you like - and clearly it wasn't enough to end the species, because the present generations are here. Things can get incredibly bad without actually killing us off. 6 billion people could die and the other 1 billion would continue the struggle amidst the ruins.
I am convinced that in any case, climate change is too slow to matter, when compared to the development of technology. We are going to have our AI/nanotech crisis long before we even have 2 more degrees, let alone 4. If we survive AI/nanotech, then we can solve the problem, and if we don't survive AI/nanotech, then the future is out of our hands anyway.
It is the way of extinction that what kills the last individual commonly has nothing to do with the underlying factors that doomed the species. Could climate change by itself kill everyone on earth? No. Could it be a significant contributing factor to a downward spiral that ends in extinction? I hope not, but I don't really know. Leaving aside the purely fictional versions of AI and nanotech to which you refer, could real-life versions of those technologies help us develop sustainable energy sources? Yes. Will they do so fast enough? I hope so, but I don't... (read more)