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Today I learned that 1/4 of my undergraduate students believe that there is less than a 1 in a million chance that humanity will survive climate change. This makes me much more sympathetic to the conservative concern that the media exaggerates the effects of climate change.
Oh no here come the climate change deniers. Yes, climate change is a great moral issue of our time. Yes, climate change will cause > 76 million excess deaths between 2020 and 2100 in business usual scenarios (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wB5SwcCEnZ3mWb8bc/how-many-people-will-climate-change-kill-video …). No, humanity is not going extinct.
And yes, averting a greater moral catastrophe than World War II is worth paying a damn carbon tax.
And let's not forget that climate change will kill or injure 10^18 - 10^22(!) wild animals too. https://jeffsebodotnet.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/animals-and-climate-change.pdf …
It also seems epistemically overconfident. One should ask them what the probability that they are wrong is: even at 1% that should update them a fair bit towards 50% (to 0.5001%)... not that I expect it to convince them. https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5515
Right, I'm sure most of the effect was bad probabilistic reasoning, but it would have been alarming if their P was 0.5!
Question was, "Is there at least a 1/10^6 chance humans survive into a posthuman age?" (posthuman df≈ great technology far surpassing our own) 1/4 said "no." When I asked why they all said climate change.
It is reassuring to hear that your students are afraid of climate change. We are on track for 4.3 degrees of warming in 60 to 80 years (IPCC Sept 19), which could kill billions of people. My sympathies lie more with those people than with conservatives averse to "exaggeration".
Just by way of counteracting the denialist frenzy your tweet invites. I know you take climate change seriously. ; )
I have a hard time believing that's their considered view.
Me too. I gave them considerations that I hoped would move them but they didn't seem to budge. I wish I'd done a follow-up survey. But I'm almost equally unhappy if it's their tacit, not-well-considered view.
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