The threat to humanity from biodiversity loss is vastly smaller than the threat from climate change. "Ecosystem collapse" is a disingenuous idea; as far as I am aware there is no scientific evidence that an ecosystem that's crucial to humans is likely to "collapse".
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I'm interested in what you say here. Of the many negative consequences of climate change, which do you see as the ones that are vastly more important than biodiversity loss (which could cause food shortages, new spread of diseases, etc.)?
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@anderssandberg from FHI told me that the most dangerous possibility from CC is that the climate does something nasty on a timescale we're not prepared for, and then the effects on *human* systems like supply chains, oil production, wars, etc actually finish us off.1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @RokoMijicUK @wtgowers and
IOW it's not a cascading failure of natural systems we should worry about, it's a cascading failure of human systems (which through globalization have become very fragile with lots of systemic risks)
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Replying to @RokoMijicUK @wtgowers and
What he said. Humans can thrive in very impoverished ecosystems, but our socio-technosystem is too fragile. CC introduces forcings that test its resilience and make systemic risks worse.
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isn't that true of every problem, though? are there any reasons to think CC will be more disruptive to our socio-technosystem than many other phenomena with similar direct GDP impacts?
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No, I don't think so, but CC is one of the few things that we are reasonably confident will have that kind of impact. There are others like wars, AI-disasters, bioterrorism, etc but this is a discussion about CC so we should do it justice here.
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i think there are many problems each of which has direct effects that can be expected to shrink the world economy by a few % over the next century (compared to counterfactual rather than to present)
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The tails of global warming could be much worse than that though, and I think the really risky scenarios are where a tail event like methane clathrate feedback does a lot of damage quite quickly and then a cascading failure ensues. This the actual danger of CC.
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tails sound like a change of topic from your "reasonably confident" and anders's "CC introduces forcings that ... make systemic risks worse" though
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fwiw i think long tails as presented by people like weitzman are somewhat fake, both because we should update on all the evidence https://researchgate.net/publication/237132619_Using_multiple_observationally-based_constraints_to_estimate_climate_sensitivity … and because as i understand it higher equilibrium sensitivity means longer time to equilibrium
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