Astral Codex Ten

climate change

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climate change

Article

climate change is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between January 29, 2021 and August 25, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the greatest and most probable risks to be avoided are anthropogenic (climate change, nuclear war, the rise of a totalitarian regime, other environmental catastrophes etc.)”; “People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100”; “Not having children because of climate change hysteria”. It most often appears alongside AGI, America, Bill Gates.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: August 25, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
4. Climate change: In the second half of the 20th century, scientists determined that carbon dioxide emissions were raising global temperatures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climatologists created complicated formal models to determine how quickly global temperatures might rise, and economists designed clever from-first-principle mechanisms that could reduce emissions, like cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes. But these people were members of the elite toying with equations that could not possibly include all the relevant factors, and who were vulnerable to their elite biases. So the United States decided to leave the decision up to democratic mechanisms, which allowed people to contribute "outside-the-system" insights like "Actually global warming is fake and it's all a Chinese plot".
Yet, interestingly, the conclusions of the analysis emerging from the community increasingly undermine these foci and the approach of the community more broadly. In particular, recent research in the community suggests that the greatest and most probable risks to be avoided are anthropogenic (climate change, nuclear war, the rise of a totalitarian regime, other environmental catastrophes etc.). Leaders in the community have in turn suggested that the most effective ways to avoid these are likely finding solutions to problems of political organization and legitimacy of social systems to help reduce the likelihood of conflict or inability to cooperate in the provision of critical global public goods.
Inline links: recent research
Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
July 27, 2021 · Original source
I wonder if other fields have to deal with this. “People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires right now! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all.”
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
Of course, this was immediately followed by some people (1, 2) saying they were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down).
Inline links: 1,, 2
Some people in the comments linked to a University of Bath survey in which 56% of young people said they thought “humanity is doomed” because of climate change. I haven’t looked at the survey closely to see if the methodology was good or if this is a fair summary, and probably some of this is just mood affiliation - “‘yes’ is the side you’re supposed to take if you’re progressive, right?” But I think a lot of young people actually think the world is doomed. If you think the world is doomed - and that its death throes will be pretty horrible - that actually does sound like a good reason not to have children, doesn’t it?
Inline links: 56% of young people
Movie Review: Don't Look Up
January 04, 2022 · Original source
There’s a debate over whether Don’t Look Up is supposed to be pushing the progressive line on climate change vs. the progressive line on COVID. I’m not sure it can honestly push either.
Apply it to climate change, and you end up in some pretty weird places: I’m sure I can find a grocery-bagger to tell me all the climatologists are wrong and lying; should I believe her?
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
Ditto seeing how little action climate change receives, for all the attention it gets. And the same for pandemic prevention. It's even worse for nuclear war prevention, or food supply security, which don't even get attention. And to be clear, all of these seem like they are obviously under-resourced with a discount rate of 2%, rather than MackAskill's suggested 0%. I'd argue this is true for the neglected issues even if we were discounting at 5%, where the 30-year future is only worth about a quarter as much as the present - though the case for economic reactions to climate change like imposing a tax of $500/ton CO2, which I think is probably justified using a more reasonable discount rate, is harmed.