Really appreciate this article. It’s been a number of years since I’ve really been caught up with the latest predictions and data; it’s nice and convenient to have the latest stuff compiled into one piece.
Starting to realize summaries of academic studies are my favorite (somewhat niche) genre of Substack article, lol
One sign for me that left-leaning journalists have lost the thread in catastrophizing climate change is in the literature attacking pro-natalism. Outlets like the New York Times, NPR, Slate, and the Atlantic always list climate change as one of the reasons against having kids. It’s bonkers.
Great article… except… You paint quite a straw man. “Existential” doesn’t mean “everyone” will die. It seems reasonable to interpret “climate change is an existential risk” to mean “many people worldwide are at increased risk of dying due to the effects of climate change”. Plausibly, many people do not rank “climate change” high on their worries list because a) they think it is unlikely they are one of the “many”, and b) they care more about their own “taxes and healthcare” than the deaths of others from climate change.
That’s quite a claim! I say it, and I am a member of the set “people”. At any rate, a quick google search shows usages spanning your extreme (“death of all humanity”) to middle (“curtailment of human potential”) to my extreme (“one’s individual existence”).
I would also generally interpret "existential threat" as meaning it is posing a threat to the world as we currently know it. A full-scale nuclear war is unlikely to kill literally all humans either, but if 10% survive then they are still going to be living in a world that is unfathomably different from the one that existed before.
When people say they think it is irresponsible to have children because of climate change, they clearly seem to think that the bad effects of climate change are on the scale of nuclear war, rather than on the scale of a 0.1% impact on the GDP growth rate.
I think you've drawn some false equivalence about the risks of misinformation on climate change from the right and left in the preamble here.
One should not judge political beliefs purely on their rationality, but also by their political impact. In your preamble this difference is clearly revealed by the coexistence of alarmist climate change views with political preferences for other things.
For example, the impact of Biden's views of climate change as an existential threat resulted in investment programmes into renewable energy in the US and a commitment to regulate air and water pollution, while still overseeing US gas production at record highs.
By comparison, the impact of Donald Trump's view that climate change is probably not man-made (if it exist at all) has resulted in a legal rollback which effectively allows companies to cause major negative externalities as long as a company makes money in the process.
False beliefs can prove socially useful as well as socially harmful. Harm doesn't emerge directly from the falsehood, but rather the actions that falsehood leads us to take.
For those who found this as interesting and eye-opening as did I, I strongly recommend following the author here (@johnhalstead2). He has a number of similarly well-thought-out pieces regarding humanity that tend to cut across the grain (including several related to this topic), yet startlingly has very few subscribers or article-likes/comments
What's the argument for fighting climate change then? IEA estimates an annual investment of 4-5% of current GDP is required to reach net zero by 2050 and IPCC estimates 1-2% to limit total warming to 2 degrees. Let's take the median estimate of 3% and suppose (counterfactually) that this investment mitigates the entire economic loss in 2100. Also suppose we get to stop fighting climate change completely in 2100.
At a 6% rate of return, the 2100-value of this investment is 43.5x 2025-GDP or 4.35x 2100-GDP (using the median 1000% growth estimate). The 2100-value of economic damages of 5% of 2100-GDP annually due to climate change is 0.83x 2100-GDP. So investing in climate change is an 80% loss.
All of this assumes that consumption today isn't more valuable than consumption tomorrow, which is almost certainly false (I'm happy to say the social discount rate over utilities should be zero, but the marginal utility of consumption declines with consumption, and future people should be richer).
*Note: I'm missing the pre-2100 costs of climate change that weren't estimated in the report, so the loss isn't quite as bad. But I'm also assuming the 5% of 2100-GDP loss persists forever.
I thought the value of the lives lost was included in the 5% of 2100-GDP estimate of the costs of climate change. If not, suppose 1 million people die per year because of climate change. At a 10 million value of a statistical life, if they die as babies that's 10 trillion dollars per year, which is another 1% of 2100-GDP; the estimated annual cost increases to 6% of 2100-GDP, for a total loss of 1x 2100-GDP at a 6% discount rate.
“Sea level will probably rise by about .75 meters in the next century. Now, while richer countries can generally mitigate against this—and around 30 million people live below sea level—poorer countries cannot.”
Countries that are “poor” today will be rich by modern standards after decades of growth. Get economic growth right, nothing else matters. This article is correct.
Though I do think it's important to consider whether there will indeed be any economic growth in sub Saharan Africa, regardless of climate change. For sea level rise specifically the most at risk are in Asia where I would expect growth to reduce risk a lot. Managing business as usual sea level rise is just not that technically difficult or expensive. That is also what I say in the report fwiw
I mostly agree with this. This is also why it is so unfortunate that many economists, activists, the world bank and IMF now doesn't prioritise economic growth in poor countries or indeed actively aim to reduce it for the sake of climate change
Even in such a great essay like this, you can't help but make the dumbest point ever about natural ecosystems being bad because more insects = more suffering. The most anti-life, anti-nature conclusion ever. Not to mention it's based on so many highly questionable assumptions, impossible hedonic calculus, assumptions that most animal life is hedonically net-negative (questionable, impossible to say), and based on some abstract idea of total suffering which is not real:
"There is no entity that experiences “the total sum” of pain across individuals. Without a collective consciousness, there's no meaningful sense in [collective pain] is experienced as a total pain.
No one out there experiences some cumulative total suffering. It is not a level of suffering ever actually experienced by anyone. It does not exist."
Yes, the point is no one actually experiences that amount of sleep. So factoring it in to decisions for individuals, and weighing it against actually subjectively experienced states, is not appropriate. For example, it would be silly to say that it is best for a hypothetical billion people to sleep 1 minute a night, than for a few people to get full sleep because the total amount of refreshment is greater. No one is actually sleeping that billion minutes sleep, it is experienced by no one. No one is actually being refreshed in that situation, so factoring it into wellbeing decisions and tradeoffs is not relevant.
Of course you can count the amount of total sleep, but it’s not a morally relevant number.
I worded that pretty badly but I was trying to work with your sleep example
As I wrote to Heath, Roger Pielke Jr., Justin Richie and others deserve a ton of credit for undermining *the* greatest climate-related piece of misinformation over the last decade or so…
You are conflating the arguments of the scientists with those of the politician. Also on the FactCheck website, it states that the scientist is ‘The…‘ wiping out humanity by 2022’ is a total distortion of what I said, implied, or meant at the University of Chicago colloquium in 2018,” Anderson told us in an email on June 23. “I would never make such a statement.”. No one is claiming the world is going to end.
I also have issues with the survey because the parameters of "devastating the planet" are quite vague. Assigning a probability to the extinction of humanity is a straw man for what the climate scientists are concerned about, which is damage to humanity and suffering to humans, not necessarily extinction. The fact that most don't have it high on their political priorities reflects that people are both somewhat short-sighted and also that they have a different definition of "destruction," which might not mean extinction.
"probably kill many millions of people," but you don't consider it an existential threat, or at least don't think that Democrat politicians should call it an existential threat.
> Climate change will likely cause a few hundred thousand extra people to relocate annually, by raising the frequency of extreme heat.
The linked paper (https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001965) is about sea level rise. From skimming, I don't think it said anything about displacement due to extreme heat.
> Halstead estimates that at the highest end, warming-related conflicts will cause roughly an extra 40,000 deaths by 2100.
Where are you getting this? The closest claim I see is page 389:
> This suggests that battle deaths [in Africa] will increase to 40,000 by 2100, other things equal.
Really appreciate this article. It’s been a number of years since I’ve really been caught up with the latest predictions and data; it’s nice and convenient to have the latest stuff compiled into one piece.
Starting to realize summaries of academic studies are my favorite (somewhat niche) genre of Substack article, lol
Thanks!
One sign for me that left-leaning journalists have lost the thread in catastrophizing climate change is in the literature attacking pro-natalism. Outlets like the New York Times, NPR, Slate, and the Atlantic always list climate change as one of the reasons against having kids. It’s bonkers.
Great article… except… You paint quite a straw man. “Existential” doesn’t mean “everyone” will die. It seems reasonable to interpret “climate change is an existential risk” to mean “many people worldwide are at increased risk of dying due to the effects of climate change”. Plausibly, many people do not rank “climate change” high on their worries list because a) they think it is unlikely they are one of the “many”, and b) they care more about their own “taxes and healthcare” than the deaths of others from climate change.
That’s just not what existential means. An existential threat is a threat to continued human existence.
“Jumping of a cliff is an existential risk”. To me, not to humanity.
People wouldn't say jumping off a cliff is an existential risk.
That’s quite a claim! I say it, and I am a member of the set “people”. At any rate, a quick google search shows usages spanning your extreme (“death of all humanity”) to middle (“curtailment of human potential”) to my extreme (“one’s individual existence”).
I would also generally interpret "existential threat" as meaning it is posing a threat to the world as we currently know it. A full-scale nuclear war is unlikely to kill literally all humans either, but if 10% survive then they are still going to be living in a world that is unfathomably different from the one that existed before.
When people say they think it is irresponsible to have children because of climate change, they clearly seem to think that the bad effects of climate change are on the scale of nuclear war, rather than on the scale of a 0.1% impact on the GDP growth rate.
My substack is here if people are interested https://nosology.substack.com/
I think you've drawn some false equivalence about the risks of misinformation on climate change from the right and left in the preamble here.
One should not judge political beliefs purely on their rationality, but also by their political impact. In your preamble this difference is clearly revealed by the coexistence of alarmist climate change views with political preferences for other things.
For example, the impact of Biden's views of climate change as an existential threat resulted in investment programmes into renewable energy in the US and a commitment to regulate air and water pollution, while still overseeing US gas production at record highs.
By comparison, the impact of Donald Trump's view that climate change is probably not man-made (if it exist at all) has resulted in a legal rollback which effectively allows companies to cause major negative externalities as long as a company makes money in the process.
False beliefs can prove socially useful as well as socially harmful. Harm doesn't emerge directly from the falsehood, but rather the actions that falsehood leads us to take.
We got a beautiful clean coal hater here
For those who found this as interesting and eye-opening as did I, I strongly recommend following the author here (@johnhalstead2). He has a number of similarly well-thought-out pieces regarding humanity that tend to cut across the grain (including several related to this topic), yet startlingly has very few subscribers or article-likes/comments
What's the argument for fighting climate change then? IEA estimates an annual investment of 4-5% of current GDP is required to reach net zero by 2050 and IPCC estimates 1-2% to limit total warming to 2 degrees. Let's take the median estimate of 3% and suppose (counterfactually) that this investment mitigates the entire economic loss in 2100. Also suppose we get to stop fighting climate change completely in 2100.
At a 6% rate of return, the 2100-value of this investment is 43.5x 2025-GDP or 4.35x 2100-GDP (using the median 1000% growth estimate). The 2100-value of economic damages of 5% of 2100-GDP annually due to climate change is 0.83x 2100-GDP. So investing in climate change is an 80% loss.
All of this assumes that consumption today isn't more valuable than consumption tomorrow, which is almost certainly false (I'm happy to say the social discount rate over utilities should be zero, but the marginal utility of consumption declines with consumption, and future people should be richer).
*Note: I'm missing the pre-2100 costs of climate change that weren't estimated in the report, so the loss isn't quite as bad. But I'm also assuming the 5% of 2100-GDP loss persists forever.
I'll have a longer essay about this, but in short:
1) Killing millions of people is bad.
2) I expect climate change will make wild-animal suffering a lot worse.
Aren't the millions of people inside the 5% of 2100-GDP though? Using the Takakura et al. "bottom-up" approach for example.
Huh? There's a difference between killing people and shirnking GDP!
I thought the value of the lives lost was included in the 5% of 2100-GDP estimate of the costs of climate change. If not, suppose 1 million people die per year because of climate change. At a 10 million value of a statistical life, if they die as babies that's 10 trillion dollars per year, which is another 1% of 2100-GDP; the estimated annual cost increases to 6% of 2100-GDP, for a total loss of 1x 2100-GDP at a 6% discount rate.
I don't think it is counted. Those GDP studies just look at how much lower aggregate wealth will be.
“Sea level will probably rise by about .75 meters in the next century. Now, while richer countries can generally mitigate against this—and around 30 million people live below sea level—poorer countries cannot.”
Countries that are “poor” today will be rich by modern standards after decades of growth. Get economic growth right, nothing else matters. This article is correct.
Though I do think it's important to consider whether there will indeed be any economic growth in sub Saharan Africa, regardless of climate change. For sea level rise specifically the most at risk are in Asia where I would expect growth to reduce risk a lot. Managing business as usual sea level rise is just not that technically difficult or expensive. That is also what I say in the report fwiw
I mostly agree with this. This is also why it is so unfortunate that many economists, activists, the world bank and IMF now doesn't prioritise economic growth in poor countries or indeed actively aim to reduce it for the sake of climate change
Good news! [Insert wildcard] Is Not an Existential Risk! You'll probably survive!
Wild cards: enslavement, kidnapping, imprisonment, quadriplegia, ...
While I do think it is pernicious, inexactitude in language is far from “denialism.”
Wait, forest cover has been increasing?! That seems completely implausible
Yeah, but still net standing timber loss. It’s not always the best species that are arising naturally.
Even in such a great essay like this, you can't help but make the dumbest point ever about natural ecosystems being bad because more insects = more suffering. The most anti-life, anti-nature conclusion ever. Not to mention it's based on so many highly questionable assumptions, impossible hedonic calculus, assumptions that most animal life is hedonically net-negative (questionable, impossible to say), and based on some abstract idea of total suffering which is not real:
"There is no entity that experiences “the total sum” of pain across individuals. Without a collective consciousness, there's no meaningful sense in [collective pain] is experienced as a total pain.
No one out there experiences some cumulative total suffering. It is not a level of suffering ever actually experienced by anyone. It does not exist."
https://backcountrypsych.substack.com/p/total-suffering-is-not-real
No one out there sleeps all the sleep slept by humans, so the total amount of sleep doesn't exist.
Yes, the point is no one actually experiences that amount of sleep. So factoring it in to decisions for individuals, and weighing it against actually subjectively experienced states, is not appropriate. For example, it would be silly to say that it is best for a hypothetical billion people to sleep 1 minute a night, than for a few people to get full sleep because the total amount of refreshment is greater. No one is actually sleeping that billion minutes sleep, it is experienced by no one. No one is actually being refreshed in that situation, so factoring it into wellbeing decisions and tradeoffs is not relevant.
Of course you can count the amount of total sleep, but it’s not a morally relevant number.
I worded that pretty badly but I was trying to work with your sleep example
As I wrote to Heath, Roger Pielke Jr., Justin Richie and others deserve a ton of credit for undermining *the* greatest climate-related piece of misinformation over the last decade or so…
https://substack.com/@jason780860/note/c-127837049
You are conflating the arguments of the scientists with those of the politician. Also on the FactCheck website, it states that the scientist is ‘The…‘ wiping out humanity by 2022’ is a total distortion of what I said, implied, or meant at the University of Chicago colloquium in 2018,” Anderson told us in an email on June 23. “I would never make such a statement.”. No one is claiming the world is going to end.
I also have issues with the survey because the parameters of "devastating the planet" are quite vague. Assigning a probability to the extinction of humanity is a straw man for what the climate scientists are concerned about, which is damage to humanity and suffering to humans, not necessarily extinction. The fact that most don't have it high on their political priorities reflects that people are both somewhat short-sighted and also that they have a different definition of "destruction," which might not mean extinction.
"probably kill many millions of people," but you don't consider it an existential threat, or at least don't think that Democrat politicians should call it an existential threat.
Some minor notes
> Forest cover has been increasing for decades.
From Figure 1 in the linked paper (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/f211ed7b-81fe-44c1-8875-517debe8f356/gbc20521-fig-0001-m.jpg), it looks like the rate of deforestation has decreased since ~2000, but it's still positive.
> Climate change will likely cause a few hundred thousand extra people to relocate annually, by raising the frequency of extreme heat.
The linked paper (https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001965) is about sea level rise. From skimming, I don't think it said anything about displacement due to extreme heat.
> Halstead estimates that at the highest end, warming-related conflicts will cause roughly an extra 40,000 deaths by 2100.
Where are you getting this? The closest claim I see is page 389:
> This suggests that battle deaths [in Africa] will increase to 40,000 by 2100, other things equal.
Which is not the same claim.
Sure, sure, those Democrats are soooo unreasonable, while “drill baby drill” is great policy on the Republican side. 🙄