!tags:: #lit✍/🎤talk #status🚦/🟢green
!links:: Longtermism, Neartermism, Climate Change, Effective Altruism (EA)

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Reference

• Founder's Pledge + Giving What We Can: How big are the risks from climate change and how can we effectively mitigate these risks? - YouTube

Notes

Climate Change and the Long-Term

by John Halstead - Researcher, Forethought Foundation

• Loved the analogy of climate change as a "slow burn" vs nuclear winter/biorisk as quick shocks - First talk gave me a new perspective on climate's long term effects
• Effects on food yields at 5°C of warming by the end of century not big enough to threaten the global food supply
• Climate Change Boom and Bust Scenario
  1. High emissions
  2. High warming
  3. Collaprse for other reasons (e.g. war or use of nuclear weapons or escape of an engineered pathogen)
  4. Stuck in an inhospitable greenhouse world for tens of thousands of years
• Energy demand will rise rapidly to 2100
  • 2-5 billion more people
  • Incomes 2-20x higher
• The climate system has lots of unknown unknowns
  • We don't know what would happen if we burned all the fossile fuels
  • Most models break if you try
  • Example: Schneider et al (2019) - the clouds burn off if we go past 1,300 ppm, causing 8°C of warming
• CO2-induced warming lasts for ages
• "When we're thinking about [climate] solutions, we might want to start focusing especially on solutions that are robust to breakdowns in cooperation"
  • Carbon tax is not one of them

How can you have the biggest impact to reduce climate risk?

By Johannes Ackva - Applies Researcher, Founder's Pledge

• Climate damage is non-linear
  • "In world's where there's more warming, climate damage is very non-linear. It's not about whether we miss the 1.5°C target and avoid 1.8°C, it's more like how do we avoid 6°C altogether."
• Shit-Hits-The-Fan Principle
• 3 Impact multipliers - Things within climate that allows that resources you're spending to have much higher impact
  1. Audacious Advocacy - Innovating to improve large-scale response
     • By funding advocates making sure those resources in a better way, you can have extreme leverage
       • By default, funds allocated to climate resources are unlikely to be spent well, due to forces such as special interest politics and ideologies (focusing on national vs global emissions)
     • Don't plant trees, do advocacy that leverages public resources
       
  2. Making blindspots visible - Address under funded areas of concern
  3. Improving co-coordination - Combining efforts & collaborating to affect change
     • e.g. Pooling funds into a Climate Fund
• "The goal is not to solve climate change by keeping countries poor."