My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts: Climate change is probably anthropogenic. Climate change is possibly very dangerous, with, say, as a wild guess, a 10% chance of having severe socioeconomic worldwide repercussions, conditional on no AGI and no nanotech. There seem to be various easy ways to solve or ameliorate the problem (pumping stuff into the atmosphere or oceans), and if it came down to it, I think we’d implement those. The relevant nanotech doesn’t seem incredibly difficult. Trying to cut down on carbon emissions seems obviously insane. Moralizing about the virtues of being green sounds obviously insane unless you’re a politician or liberal socialite. If you find yourself caring deeply about climate change, your time would probably be better spent caring about bigger, more urgent, and less well-funded problems, like aging/death, or existential risks.
Well, I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t, but there are lots of broad statements without justification here, that I would love to expand.
Nevertheless my actual question is being answered, if you and SarahC are at all representative (obviously, I understand that many other opinions will exist). Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile—so we’ll deal with the consequences as they arise.
Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile—so we’ll deal with the consequences as they arise.
On the personal level, yes to an extent. If the government wasn’t crazy then of course changing the direction of industrialization would be best (after funding tons of existential risks research groups). But in the real world, for any sufficiently advanced social engineering project the quickest and easiest fix is to just build god. (Vassar said something like that.)
My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts: Climate change is probably anthropogenic. Climate change is possibly very dangerous, with, say, as a wild guess, a 10% chance of having severe socioeconomic worldwide repercussions, conditional on no AGI and no nanotech. There seem to be various easy ways to solve or ameliorate the problem (pumping stuff into the atmosphere or oceans), and if it came down to it, I think we’d implement those. The relevant nanotech doesn’t seem incredibly difficult. Trying to cut down on carbon emissions seems obviously insane. Moralizing about the virtues of being green sounds obviously insane unless you’re a politician or liberal socialite. If you find yourself caring deeply about climate change, your time would probably be better spent caring about bigger, more urgent, and less well-funded problems, like aging/death, or existential risks.
Well, I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t, but there are lots of broad statements without justification here, that I would love to expand.
Nevertheless my actual question is being answered, if you and SarahC are at all representative (obviously, I understand that many other opinions will exist). Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile—so we’ll deal with the consequences as they arise.
On the personal level, yes to an extent. If the government wasn’t crazy then of course changing the direction of industrialization would be best (after funding tons of existential risks research groups). But in the real world, for any sufficiently advanced social engineering project the quickest and easiest fix is to just build god. (Vassar said something like that.)