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?
I'm surprised to find statements here such as "the existence of anthropogenic global warming is a fact". I'm new here, haven't read all the sequences, and this may seem obnoxious. But I'm testing my beliefs and willing to change my mind.
Let's start with the article linked to by the OP. It says that 4 degrees of warming is likely and bad. I'll concentrate on likely.
The argument for athropogenic global warming goes something like this:
1 and 2 are uncontroversial.
3 is difficult to measure. For example land based thermometers are only accurate to, say, 1C, and we are extracting a signal that varies by tenths of a degree. Or we are using proxies like tree rings that are difficult or impossible to calibrate. The signal we do extract is not linear, to say the least. For example warming stops at times even as CO2 increases, so we know there are large variations not accounted for by CO2 which makes it hard to determine the influence of CO2 alone. The signal looks very different depending on what timescale one looks at, hence arguments about natural variation, decadal oscillations, the medieval warm period and so on.
The feedback effects in (4) are not well understood, which means that the models in (5) do not necessarily reflect how the real climate system works.
And if a model does not include important parts of the system, even if it correctly predicts past events that does not mean it can predict future events. I could build psuedo-random-number generators until I find one that happens to match closely the observed past temperature signal, but it will not predict future temperatures.
All this does not add up to a high level of certainty that additional CO2 will lead to any particular amount of warming. The sensitivity of climate to doubling of CO2 is not known with any degree of certainty. In short, climate is not as well understood as evolution and atoms.
The OP speaks of "meaningful climate reform and legislation" which means redirecting lots of resources to change the amount of CO2 emitted. Resources that could generate more utility elsewhere.
So what is going wrong? Possibilities: