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):
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.
you doubt that 10 to 100 times more over a 1000..10000 times shorter interval - ~ 100 000 larger intensity than 'no really bad consequences' - can cause nuclear winter?
How so? If you doubt that kind of stuff because 5 orders of magnitude are never enough to get from 'not really bad consequences' to 'really bad consequences', then i don't know what you wouldn't doubt.
As I've said. All the atom bombs we have, have combined less energy than a big wildfire. So the energy is not a problem.
Then, the amount of "black smoke", which would those bombs emits, compared to a volcano is small. There is nowhere one ton of a black smoke emitting plastics per person alive, not to mention that everything will not be burned.
I don't see where they are getting their numbers. One of those scenarist was Carl Sagan. He made quite a panic when Saddam Hussein ignited those Kuwait oil pumps. He was wrong.
Look it now either from the e... (read more)