I just attended an NAS meeting on climate control systems, where the consensus was that it was too dangerous to develop, say, solar radiation management systems—not because they might produce unexpected disastrous effects but because the fossil fuel corporations would use their existence as a further form of leverage in their so-far successful campaign to keep burning more carbon.
Unrelated to the primary point, but how does this make sense? If geoengineering approaches successfully counteract climate change, and it’s cheaper to burn carbon and dim the sun than generate power a different way (or not use the power), then presumably civilization is better off burning carbon and dimming the sun.
It looks to me the argument is closer to “because the fossil fuel corporations are acting adversarially to us, we need to act adversarially to them,” or expecting that instead of having sensible engineering or economic tradeoffs, we’ll choose ‘burn carbon and dim the sun’ even if it’s more expensive than other options, because we can’t coordinate on putting the costs in the right place.
Which… maybe I buy, but this looks to me like net-negative environmentalism again (like anti-nuclear environmentalism).
It seems to me that the intention is that solar radiation management is a solution that sounds good without actually being good. That is, it’s an easy sell for fossil fuel corporations who have an interest in providing simple solutions to the problem rather than actually removing the root cause and thus solving the issue completely. I have little idea if this argument is actually true.
It is true, as far as I can tell. It’s going to be very important that we deploy SRM (and I hope we can do marine cloud brightening instead of aerosols cause it seems like it’d have basically no side-effects) at some stage… probably around 2030… but the remaining CO2 will pose a huge problem. Ocean acidification, and also, once CO2 gets high enough, it starts impacting human cognition. We don’t really know why, but it’s an easily measurable effect, the loss in productivity will be immense, and we might imagine that our hopes of finding better carbon sequestration technologies after that dumbing point may plummet.
I get the sense that environmentalists, for now, should not talk about SRM. We should let the public believe that we don’t have a way of preventing temperature increases so that we retain some hope of getting political support for doing something about the CO2.
once CO2 gets high enough, it starts impacting human cognition.
Do you have a citation for this being a big deal? I’m really curious whether this is a major harm over reasonable timescales (such as 100 years), as I don’t recall ever hearing about it in an EA analysis of climate change. That said, I haven’t looked very hard.
I don’t remember what the concentrations were where it’d become a cognition problem, but they always seemed shockingly low. I note that CO2 is heavier than oxygen so the concentration on the ground is probably (?) going to be higher than the concentration measured for the purposes of estimating greenhouse effects.
I wonder how many climate models take the decreases in productivity of phytoplankton into account. With numbers of whales decreasing, there will be less carbon turnover, and some aspects of their productivity seems to be affected dramatically by microplastics.
For cites, I wont be able to do better than a google search.
I think I remember hearing that there was no data on what happens if a human is kept in a high CO2 environment for longer timespans, though. Might turn out we adapt in the same way some populations adapt to high altitudes.
I have no citation for that being a big deal. But there’s some discussion of the matter (which I haven’t read) in the comments on this post, and it was also discussed on an episode of the 80k podcast:
Paul Christiano: I think the current state of the literature on carbon dioxide and cognition is absurd. I probably complained about this last time I was here.
[...]
Robert Wiblin: Yes, talk about the carbon dioxide one for a minute because this is one that’s also been driving me mad the last few months just to see that carbon dioxide potentially has enormous effects on people’s intelligence and in offices but you eventually just have extremely– And lecture halls especially just have potentially incredibly elevated CO2 levels that are dumbing us all down when we most need to be smart.
Paul Christiano: Yes. I reviewed the literature a few years ago and I’ve only been paying a little bit of attention since then, but I think the current state of play is, there was one study with preposterously large effect sizes from carbon dioxide in which the methodology was put people in rooms, dump some gas into all the rooms. Some of the gases were very rich in carbon dioxide and the effect sizes were absurdly large.
They were like, if you compare it to the levels of carbon dioxide that occur in my house or in the house I just moved out of, the most carbon dioxide-rich bedroom in that house had one standard deviation effect amongst Berkeley students on this test or something, which is absurd. That’s totally absurd. That’s almost certainly–
Robert Wiblin: It’s such a large effect that you should expect that people, when they walk into a room with carbon dioxide which has elevated carbon dioxide levels, they should just feel like idiots at that point or they should feel like noticeably dumber in their own minds.
Paul Christiano: Yes, you would think that. To be clear, the rooms that have levels that high, people can report it feels stuffy and so part of the reason that methodology and the papers like just dumping in carbon dioxide is to avoid like if you make a room naturally that CO2 rich, it’s going to also just be obvious that you’re in the intervention group instead of the control.
Although to be fair, even if I don’t know, at that point, like even a placebo effect maybe will do something. I think almost certainly that seems wrong to me. Although maybe this is not a good thing to be saying publicly on a podcast. There’s a bunch of respected researchers on that paper. Anyway, it would be great to see a replication of that. There was subsequently replication with exactly the same design which also had p = 0.0001.
Now, we’ve got the two precise replications with p = 0.0001. That’s where we’re at. Also the effects are stupidly large. So large. You really, really need to care about ventilation effects. This room probably is, this is madness. Well, this building is pretty well ventilated but still, we’re at least a third of a standard deviation dumber.
Robert Wiblin: Yes, I’m sure dear listeners you can hear us getting dumber over the course of this conversation as we fill this room with poison. Yes, I guess potentially the worst case would be in meeting rooms or boardrooms where people are having very long– Yes prolonged discussions about difficult issues. They’re just getting progressively dumber as the room fills up with carbon dioxide and it’s going to be more irritable as well.
Paul Christiano: Yes, it would be pretty serious and I think that people have often cited this in attempts to improve ventilation, but I think people do not take it nearly as seriously as they would have if they believed it. Which I think is right because I think it’s almost certainly, the effect is not this large. If it was this large, you’d really want to know and then–
Robert Wiblin: This is like lead poisoning or something?
Paul Christiano: Yes, that’s right.
Robert Wiblin: Well, this has been enough to convince me to keep a window open whenever I’m sleeping. I really don’t like sleeping in a room that has no ventilation or no open door or window. Maybe I just shouldn’t worry because at night who really cares how smart I’m feeling while I’m dreaming?
Paul Christiano: I don’t know what’s up. I also haven’t looked into it as much as maybe I should have. I would really just love to be able to stay away, it’s not that hard. The facts are large enough but it’s also short term enough to just like extremely easy to check. In some sense, it’s like ”What are you asking for, there’s already been a replication”, though, I don’t know, the studies they use are with these cognitive batteries that are not great.
If the effects are real you should be able to detect them in very– Basically with any instrument. At some point, I just want to see the effect myself. I want to actually see it happen and I want to see the people in the rooms.
Robert Wiblin: Seems like there’s a decent academic incentive to do this, you’d think, because you’d just end up being famous if you pioneer this issue that turns out to be extraordinarily important and then causes buildings to be redesigned. I don’t know, it could just be a big deal. I mean, even if you can’t profit from it in a financial sense, wouldn’t you just want the kudos for like identifying this massive unrealized problem?
Paul Christiano: Yes, I mean to be clear, I think a bunch of people work on the problem and we do have– At this point there’s I think there’s the original– The things I’m aware of which is probably out of date now is the original paper, a direct replication and a conceptual replication all with big looking effects but all with slightly dicey instruments. The conceptual replication is funded by this group that works on ventilation unsurprisingly.
Robert Wiblin: Oh, that’s interesting.
Paul Christiano: Big air quality. Yes, I think that probably the take of academics, insofar as there’s a formal consensus process in academia, I think it would be to the effect that this is real, it’s just that no one is behaving as if the effect of that size actually existed and I think they’re right to be skeptical of the process, in academia. I think that does make– The situation is a little bit complicated in terms of what you exactly get credit for.
I think people that would get credit should be and rightfully would be the people who’ve been investigating it so far. This is sort of more like checking it out more for– Checking it out for people who are skeptical. Although everyone is implicitly skeptical given how much they don’t treat it like an emergency when carbon dioxide levels are high.
Robert Wiblin: Yes, including us right now. Well, kudos to you for funding that creatine thing [discussed elsewhere in the episode]. It would be good if more people took the initiative to really insist on funding replications for issues that seemed important where they’re getting neglected.
Paul Christiano: Yes, I think a lot of it’s great– I feel like there are lots of good things for people to do. I feel like people are mostly at the bottleneck just like people who have the relevant kinds of expertise and interests. This is one category where I feel people could go far and I’m excited to see how that goes.
---
(Not quoting people anymore)
That’s all the knowledge I have on the matter.
But I’ll just add that I’m quite skeptical about the suggestion that “we might imagine that our hopes of finding better carbon sequestration technologies after that dumbing point may plummet.” It seems like it’s unclear whether increased CO2 leads to e.g. a several IQ point drop. And then on top of that it’s also not clear to me that, if it did that globally (which would definitely be a very big deal), that would cause a “plummeting” in our chances of finding some particular tech. (Though I guess it might.)
I agree but the steel man (not sure actually intended) is a mean variance issue and whether you’re introducing a more sensitive parameter. i.e. you get the mean you want using the new control variable but variance is now higher and you don’t actually understand the new parameter space this puts you in.
If geoengineering approaches successfully counteract climate change, and it’s cheaper to burn carbon and dim the sun than generate power a different way (or not use the power), then presumably civilization is better off burning carbon and dimming the sun.
AFAIK, the main arguments against solar radiation management (SRM) are:
1. High level of CO2 in the atmosphere creates other problems too (e.g. ocean acidification) but those problems are less urgent / impactful so we’ll end up not caring about them if we implement SRM. Reducing CO2 emissions allows us to “do the right thing” using already existing political momentum.
2. Having the climate depend on SRM gives a lot of power to those in control of SRM and makes the civilization dependent on SRM. We are bad at global cooperation as is and having SRM to manage will put additional stress on that. This is a more fragile solution than reducing emissions.
It’s certainly possible to argue against either of these points, especially introducing the assumption that humanity as a whole is close enough to a rational agent. My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM. It also seems increasingly likely that we won’t have that option. Our emission reduction efforts are too slow and once we hit +5ºC and beyond the option to “turn this off tomorrow” will look too attractive.
My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM.
Sure, I think carbon sequestration is a solid approach as well (especially given that it’s still net energy-producing to burn fossil fuels and sequester the resulting output as CO2 somewhere underground!), and am not familiar enough with the numbers to know if SRM is better or worse than sequestration. My core objection was that Russell’s opinion of the NAS meeting wasn’t “SRM has expected disasters or expected high costs that disqualify it”, and instead it looked like that the NAS thought it was more important to be adversarial to fossil fuel interests than make the best engineering decision.
Unrelated to the primary point, but how does this make sense? If geoengineering approaches successfully counteract climate change, and it’s cheaper to burn carbon and dim the sun than generate power a different way (or not use the power), then presumably civilization is better off burning carbon and dimming the sun.
It looks to me the argument is closer to “because the fossil fuel corporations are acting adversarially to us, we need to act adversarially to them,” or expecting that instead of having sensible engineering or economic tradeoffs, we’ll choose ‘burn carbon and dim the sun’ even if it’s more expensive than other options, because we can’t coordinate on putting the costs in the right place.
Which… maybe I buy, but this looks to me like net-negative environmentalism again (like anti-nuclear environmentalism).
It seems to me that the intention is that solar radiation management is a solution that sounds good without actually being good. That is, it’s an easy sell for fossil fuel corporations who have an interest in providing simple solutions to the problem rather than actually removing the root cause and thus solving the issue completely. I have little idea if this argument is actually true.
It is true, as far as I can tell. It’s going to be very important that we deploy SRM (and I hope we can do marine cloud brightening instead of aerosols cause it seems like it’d have basically no side-effects) at some stage… probably around 2030… but the remaining CO2 will pose a huge problem. Ocean acidification, and also, once CO2 gets high enough, it starts impacting human cognition. We don’t really know why, but it’s an easily measurable effect, the loss in productivity will be immense, and we might imagine that our hopes of finding better carbon sequestration technologies after that dumbing point may plummet.
I get the sense that environmentalists, for now, should not talk about SRM. We should let the public believe that we don’t have a way of preventing temperature increases so that we retain some hope of getting political support for doing something about the CO2.
Do you have a citation for this being a big deal? I’m really curious whether this is a major harm over reasonable timescales (such as 100 years), as I don’t recall ever hearing about it in an EA analysis of climate change. That said, I haven’t looked very hard.
I don’t remember what the concentrations were where it’d become a cognition problem, but they always seemed shockingly low. I note that CO2 is heavier than oxygen so the concentration on the ground is probably (?) going to be higher than the concentration measured for the purposes of estimating greenhouse effects.
I wonder how many climate models take the decreases in productivity of phytoplankton into account. With numbers of whales decreasing, there will be less carbon turnover, and some aspects of their productivity seems to be affected dramatically by microplastics.
For cites, I wont be able to do better than a google search.
I think I remember hearing that there was no data on what happens if a human is kept in a high CO2 environment for longer timespans, though. Might turn out we adapt in the same way some populations adapt to high altitudes.
I have no citation for that being a big deal. But there’s some discussion of the matter (which I haven’t read) in the comments on this post, and it was also discussed on an episode of the 80k podcast:
Paul Christiano: I think the current state of the literature on carbon dioxide and cognition is absurd. I probably complained about this last time I was here.
[...]
Robert Wiblin: Yes, talk about the carbon dioxide one for a minute because this is one that’s also been driving me mad the last few months just to see that carbon dioxide potentially has enormous effects on people’s intelligence and in offices but you eventually just have extremely– And lecture halls especially just have potentially incredibly elevated CO2 levels that are dumbing us all down when we most need to be smart.
Paul Christiano: Yes. I reviewed the literature a few years ago and I’ve only been paying a little bit of attention since then, but I think the current state of play is, there was one study with preposterously large effect sizes from carbon dioxide in which the methodology was put people in rooms, dump some gas into all the rooms. Some of the gases were very rich in carbon dioxide and the effect sizes were absurdly large.
They were like, if you compare it to the levels of carbon dioxide that occur in my house or in the house I just moved out of, the most carbon dioxide-rich bedroom in that house had one standard deviation effect amongst Berkeley students on this test or something, which is absurd. That’s totally absurd. That’s almost certainly–
Robert Wiblin: It’s such a large effect that you should expect that people, when they walk into a room with carbon dioxide which has elevated carbon dioxide levels, they should just feel like idiots at that point or they should feel like noticeably dumber in their own minds.
Paul Christiano: Yes, you would think that. To be clear, the rooms that have levels that high, people can report it feels stuffy and so part of the reason that methodology and the papers like just dumping in carbon dioxide is to avoid like if you make a room naturally that CO2 rich, it’s going to also just be obvious that you’re in the intervention group instead of the control.
Although to be fair, even if I don’t know, at that point, like even a placebo effect maybe will do something. I think almost certainly that seems wrong to me. Although maybe this is not a good thing to be saying publicly on a podcast. There’s a bunch of respected researchers on that paper. Anyway, it would be great to see a replication of that. There was subsequently replication with exactly the same design which also had p = 0.0001.
Now, we’ve got the two precise replications with p = 0.0001. That’s where we’re at. Also the effects are stupidly large. So large. You really, really need to care about ventilation effects. This room probably is, this is madness. Well, this building is pretty well ventilated but still, we’re at least a third of a standard deviation dumber.
Robert Wiblin: Yes, I’m sure dear listeners you can hear us getting dumber over the course of this conversation as we fill this room with poison. Yes, I guess potentially the worst case would be in meeting rooms or boardrooms where people are having very long– Yes prolonged discussions about difficult issues. They’re just getting progressively dumber as the room fills up with carbon dioxide and it’s going to be more irritable as well.
Paul Christiano: Yes, it would be pretty serious and I think that people have often cited this in attempts to improve ventilation, but I think people do not take it nearly as seriously as they would have if they believed it. Which I think is right because I think it’s almost certainly, the effect is not this large. If it was this large, you’d really want to know and then–
Robert Wiblin: This is like lead poisoning or something?
Paul Christiano: Yes, that’s right.
Robert Wiblin: Well, this has been enough to convince me to keep a window open whenever I’m sleeping. I really don’t like sleeping in a room that has no ventilation or no open door or window. Maybe I just shouldn’t worry because at night who really cares how smart I’m feeling while I’m dreaming?
Paul Christiano: I don’t know what’s up. I also haven’t looked into it as much as maybe I should have. I would really just love to be able to stay away, it’s not that hard. The facts are large enough but it’s also short term enough to just like extremely easy to check. In some sense, it’s like ”What are you asking for, there’s already been a replication”, though, I don’t know, the studies they use are with these cognitive batteries that are not great.
If the effects are real you should be able to detect them in very– Basically with any instrument. At some point, I just want to see the effect myself. I want to actually see it happen and I want to see the people in the rooms.
Robert Wiblin: Seems like there’s a decent academic incentive to do this, you’d think, because you’d just end up being famous if you pioneer this issue that turns out to be extraordinarily important and then causes buildings to be redesigned. I don’t know, it could just be a big deal. I mean, even if you can’t profit from it in a financial sense, wouldn’t you just want the kudos for like identifying this massive unrealized problem?
Paul Christiano: Yes, I mean to be clear, I think a bunch of people work on the problem and we do have– At this point there’s I think there’s the original– The things I’m aware of which is probably out of date now is the original paper, a direct replication and a conceptual replication all with big looking effects but all with slightly dicey instruments. The conceptual replication is funded by this group that works on ventilation unsurprisingly.
Robert Wiblin: Oh, that’s interesting.
Paul Christiano: Big air quality. Yes, I think that probably the take of academics, insofar as there’s a formal consensus process in academia, I think it would be to the effect that this is real, it’s just that no one is behaving as if the effect of that size actually existed and I think they’re right to be skeptical of the process, in academia. I think that does make– The situation is a little bit complicated in terms of what you exactly get credit for.
I think people that would get credit should be and rightfully would be the people who’ve been investigating it so far. This is sort of more like checking it out more for– Checking it out for people who are skeptical. Although everyone is implicitly skeptical given how much they don’t treat it like an emergency when carbon dioxide levels are high.
Robert Wiblin: Yes, including us right now. Well, kudos to you for funding that creatine thing [discussed elsewhere in the episode]. It would be good if more people took the initiative to really insist on funding replications for issues that seemed important where they’re getting neglected.
Paul Christiano: Yes, I think a lot of it’s great– I feel like there are lots of good things for people to do. I feel like people are mostly at the bottleneck just like people who have the relevant kinds of expertise and interests. This is one category where I feel people could go far and I’m excited to see how that goes.
---
(Not quoting people anymore)
That’s all the knowledge I have on the matter.
But I’ll just add that I’m quite skeptical about the suggestion that “we might imagine that our hopes of finding better carbon sequestration technologies after that dumbing point may plummet.” It seems like it’s unclear whether increased CO2 leads to e.g. a several IQ point drop. And then on top of that it’s also not clear to me that, if it did that globally (which would definitely be a very big deal), that would cause a “plummeting” in our chances of finding some particular tech. (Though I guess it might.)
I agree but the steel man (not sure actually intended) is a mean variance issue and whether you’re introducing a more sensitive parameter. i.e. you get the mean you want using the new control variable but variance is now higher and you don’t actually understand the new parameter space this puts you in.
AFAIK, the main arguments against solar radiation management (SRM) are:
1. High level of CO2 in the atmosphere creates other problems too (e.g. ocean acidification) but those problems are less urgent / impactful so we’ll end up not caring about them if we implement SRM. Reducing CO2 emissions allows us to “do the right thing” using already existing political momentum.
2. Having the climate depend on SRM gives a lot of power to those in control of SRM and makes the civilization dependent on SRM. We are bad at global cooperation as is and having SRM to manage will put additional stress on that. This is a more fragile solution than reducing emissions.
It’s certainly possible to argue against either of these points, especially introducing the assumption that humanity as a whole is close enough to a rational agent. My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM. It also seems increasingly likely that we won’t have that option. Our emission reduction efforts are too slow and once we hit +5ºC and beyond the option to “turn this off tomorrow” will look too attractive.
Sure, I think carbon sequestration is a solid approach as well (especially given that it’s still net energy-producing to burn fossil fuels and sequester the resulting output as CO2 somewhere underground!), and am not familiar enough with the numbers to know if SRM is better or worse than sequestration. My core objection was that Russell’s opinion of the NAS meeting wasn’t “SRM has expected disasters or expected high costs that disqualify it”, and instead it looked like that the NAS thought it was more important to be adversarial to fossil fuel interests than make the best engineering decision.