When I began writing this, I thought very little good could be done by working on climate change, since of how popular the topic is. But as I wrote, and thought about the issue, I realized that you have a point, and that working on effective solutions to the problem has a high chance of being effective, if not particularly suited for me. I would enjoy seeing more in-depth analyses which do actual research, and attach numbers to the vague feelings of importance I express here.
Neglectedness, at first glance, seems very low. For the past 20 years there’s been a huge media campaign to get people to “solve” climate change, and everyone’s aware of it. However, very little effort is expended working & advocating for effective solutions to the problem (ie helping developing countries prepare), and much of the effort seems to be going to low-Solvability & Scale tasks such as attempting to prevent carbon emissions. Thus, despite near-constant media attention, it seems likely that effective solutions are actually very Neglected.
Scale seems pretty large. Those hit hardest will be the people with the least ability to invest in mitigation technologies, and most reliance on nature. Aka: developing countries. Thus lifting developing countries out of their poverty will be much harder in the near-term future. Notably, this poses little risk to the long-term flourishing of the human race, whereas other global catastrophic risks such as dangerous AI, nuclear war, biological war, etc. seem to have both a higher Scale, and higher Neglectedness.
Solvability seems like it’d range from insurmountably low to medium-high, depending on what you choose to focus on. Many of the problems that affect more affluent nations seem like they’d be solved through mitigating technologies, and not through reversing climate change’s effects. Things like dams and levees are technologies we already have, and things that the Dutch (note: I looked that up, so I could provide a source, but I knew it was a thing already from an Environmental Science course I took during high school) already use to keep their cities above sea-level. I would bet there are other, similarly low-hanging technologies which would vastly lower the effects of climate change on developing countries. These developing countries would likely develop and implement these technologies once effects from climate change are seen, regardless of what they believe the cause of such climate change is.
Increases in resources here though, seem like they’d have little impact on the outcome for these developing countries. Since there is a large incentive for cities and companies to make and invest in these technologies, they will likely be developed regardless of what interventions are worked on.
By my understanding, even if we stopped all of our carbon output immediately, there’d still be a devastating 2C increase in the average temperature of the earth. And developing countries would be at a great disadvantage developing the infrastructure needed to mitigate it’s effects, so the Solvability here is incredibly low.
Thus the goal of “fighting” climate change should focus on providing developing countries the infrastructure they need to be prepared. This doesn’t seem like particularly interesting work to me, nor particularly suited to my skills when compared to other ways of improving the world. However, I’d need more knowledge about the effects and the current effective interventions to be confident in my conclusions. Currently, counter to what I thought before writing this, the field seems promising.
Developing technologies and best practices for enabling people to quickly adapt farming practices to a different local environment (rainfall, temperature, etc), including education and outreach and possibly switching crops (or generically engineering / breeding new varieties) along with associated farming tools and know-how and distribution and storage systems etc., would seem helpful for mitigating the damage of not only climate change but also nuclear winter / volcanic winter. While this seems very hard to do completely, it seems feasible to make progress on the margin. I haven’t heard of anyone working on that (except ALLFED arguably) but haven’t really looked.
I have noticed that work on adapting to climate change is sometimes regarded as taboo, I guess on the theory that it will undermine people’s motivation to reduce carbon emissions. I don’t believe that theory, not at all, but I gather that some people do. Admittedly it’s hard to be 100% sure.
By my understanding, even if we stopped all of our carbon output immediately, there’d still be a devastating 2C increase in the average temperature of the earth.
According to an analysis featured in the recent IPCC special report on 1.5C, reducing all human emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols to zero immediately would result in a modest short-term bump in global temperatures of around 0.15C as Earth-cooling aerosols disappear, followed by a decline. Around 20 years after emissions went to zero, global temperatures would fall back down below today’s levels and then cool by around 0.25C by 2100.
I.e., if we’re at +1.2C today, the maximum would be +1.35C.
This analysis assumes that we won’t do geoengineering. If we do geoengineering to keep temperatures from increasing too much over the present point all the spending on mitigation is wasted.
When I began writing this, I thought very little good could be done by working on climate change, since of how popular the topic is. But as I wrote, and thought about the issue, I realized that you have a point, and that working on effective solutions to the problem has a high chance of being effective, if not particularly suited for me. I would enjoy seeing more in-depth analyses which do actual research, and attach numbers to the vague feelings of importance I express here.
Using EA’s usual decision matrix of Scale, Solvability, and Neglectedness :
Neglectedness, at first glance, seems very low. For the past 20 years there’s been a huge media campaign to get people to “solve” climate change, and everyone’s aware of it. However, very little effort is expended working & advocating for effective solutions to the problem (ie helping developing countries prepare), and much of the effort seems to be going to low-Solvability & Scale tasks such as attempting to prevent carbon emissions. Thus, despite near-constant media attention, it seems likely that effective solutions are actually very Neglected.
Scale seems pretty large. Those hit hardest will be the people with the least ability to invest in mitigation technologies, and most reliance on nature. Aka: developing countries. Thus lifting developing countries out of their poverty will be much harder in the near-term future. Notably, this poses little risk to the long-term flourishing of the human race, whereas other global catastrophic risks such as dangerous AI, nuclear war, biological war, etc. seem to have both a higher Scale, and higher Neglectedness.
Solvability seems like it’d range from insurmountably low to medium-high, depending on what you choose to focus on. Many of the problems that affect more affluent nations seem like they’d be solved through mitigating technologies, and not through reversing climate change’s effects. Things like dams and levees are technologies we already have, and things that the Dutch (note: I looked that up, so I could provide a source, but I knew it was a thing already from an Environmental Science course I took during high school) already use to keep their cities above sea-level. I would bet there are other, similarly low-hanging technologies which would vastly lower the effects of climate change on developing countries. These developing countries would likely develop and implement these technologies once effects from climate change are seen, regardless of what they believe the cause of such climate change is.
Increases in resources here though, seem like they’d have little impact on the outcome for these developing countries. Since there is a large incentive for cities and companies to make and invest in these technologies, they will likely be developed regardless of what interventions are worked on.
By my understanding, even if we stopped all of our carbon output immediately, there’d still be a devastating 2C increase in the average temperature of the earth. And developing countries would be at a great disadvantage developing the infrastructure needed to mitigate it’s effects, so the Solvability here is incredibly low.
Thus the goal of “fighting” climate change should focus on providing developing countries the infrastructure they need to be prepared. This doesn’t seem like particularly interesting work to me, nor particularly suited to my skills when compared to other ways of improving the world. However, I’d need more knowledge about the effects and the current effective interventions to be confident in my conclusions. Currently, counter to what I thought before writing this, the field seems promising.
Developing technologies and best practices for enabling people to quickly adapt farming practices to a different local environment (rainfall, temperature, etc), including education and outreach and possibly switching crops (or generically engineering / breeding new varieties) along with associated farming tools and know-how and distribution and storage systems etc., would seem helpful for mitigating the damage of not only climate change but also nuclear winter / volcanic winter. While this seems very hard to do completely, it seems feasible to make progress on the margin. I haven’t heard of anyone working on that (except ALLFED arguably) but haven’t really looked.
I have noticed that work on adapting to climate change is sometimes regarded as taboo, I guess on the theory that it will undermine people’s motivation to reduce carbon emissions. I don’t believe that theory, not at all, but I gather that some people do. Admittedly it’s hard to be 100% sure.
I don’t think this is true:
I.e., if we’re at +1.2C today, the maximum would be +1.35C.
This analysis assumes that we won’t do geoengineering. If we do geoengineering to keep temperatures from increasing too much over the present point all the spending on mitigation is wasted.
This analysis assumes that we will succeed in geoengineering without further deleterious externalities, which has less than no current basis
No, spending on adapting a country to be able to handle +2C warming doesn’t help you with random deleterious externalities.
I agree that responsible policy is preferable to ecosystem stress testing
It seems like you ignore what the above exchange was about.