I know. But how this compares to big wildfires, yearly coal and oil burnings and a volcano or two?
We are told, that the Giga tones of burnt coal and oil per year, warms the planet. About the same amount of plastics, wood and so on would trigger the so called Nuclear Winter?
I am a NW skeptic.
Just a reminder that some of the old threats are still around (and hence that AI is not only something that can go hideously badly, but also some thing that could help us with the other existential risks as well):
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/03/old-threats-never-die-they-fade-away-from-our-minds-nuclear-winter/
EDIT: as should have been made clear in that post (but wasn't!), the existential risks doesn't come from the full fledged nuclear winter directly, but from the collapse of human society and fragmentation of the species into small, vulnerable subgroups, with no guarantee that they'd survive or ever climb back to a technological society.