The Nonlinear Library EA - Probably Good has a new section on climate change by Probably Good
Nov 27, 2023
11:29
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Probably Good has a new section on climate change, published by Probably Good on November 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We're excited to share a new addition to our site: a section dedicated to climate change in our
new-look cause areas page!
Needless to say, many people worldwide are passionate about tackling climate change as a path to improving the world. We believe there's a need for accessible, scale-sensitive advice that helps people direct their efforts in this space. We want to help meet this need, alongside our continued work in several other cause areas.
To this end, we've been diving into climate change over the course of this year, and we're really excited to finally share what we've been working on - starting with three new articles:
Climate change: An impact-focused introduction
What are the biggest priorities in climate change?
What are the best jobs to fight climate change?
Below, we'll give a quick overview of each of the articles.
Climate change: An impact-focused introduction
This article aims to provide an accessible and relatively brief introduction to climate change from a scale-sensitive perspective. Similar to our
overviews of other cause areas, it assesses climate change using the ITN framework, addressing some of the key considerations for prioritizing climate change relative to other cause areas.
Here's a short excerpt from our section on the scale of harm caused by climate change:
Climate change has and will continue to
increase the frequency and severity of many risks, including heat stress, forced migration, poverty, water stress and droughts, natural disasters, food insecurity, and the spread of many diseases.
However, the extent to which these risks increase will depend on how well we're able to mitigate the amount of climate change that occurs. An often-cited target is to keep warming to below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, something most of the world's countries agreed to target
in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
At 1.5C of warming, we would avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, though the harm would still be huge. For instance, nearly 14% of the world's population
could experience severe heatwaves at least every five years, and over
132 million people could be exposed to severe droughts. Environmental damage and biodiversity loss will also occur, including damage to coral reefs, the vast majority of which
may not even survive 1.5C of warming.
However, it now
looks likely that we'll surpass 1.5C relatively soon, despite these international targets. This makes higher levels of warming, and therefore increased harm, even more likely by the end of this century.
At 2C of warming, for example,
between 800 million and 3 billion people may suffer from chronic water scarcity, and
nearly 200 million may experience severe droughts. Three times the number of people
will experience severe heatwaves at least every 5 years at 2C compared to 1.5C - an additional 1.7 billion people. This will take a significant toll on human life; recent research estimates that at slightly over 2C of warming,
nearly 600,000 additional people could lose their lives every year by 2050 due to heat stress compared to current levels.
At higher levels, the picture looks even more extreme. At 3C, we could see
a five-times increase in extreme events relative to current levels by 2100 (as opposed to a four-fold increase at 1.5C of warming), and at 4C,
up to four billion people will experience chronic water scarcity. This is one billion people more than would experience chronic water shortages at 2C of warming. Other effects of climate change would also considerably ramp up as warming increases.
Fortunately, thanks to the work of climate activists who have increased the amount of global attention focused on climate change, we'll likely avert some of thes...
We're excited to share a new addition to our site: a section dedicated to climate change in our
new-look cause areas page!
Needless to say, many people worldwide are passionate about tackling climate change as a path to improving the world. We believe there's a need for accessible, scale-sensitive advice that helps people direct their efforts in this space. We want to help meet this need, alongside our continued work in several other cause areas.
To this end, we've been diving into climate change over the course of this year, and we're really excited to finally share what we've been working on - starting with three new articles:
Climate change: An impact-focused introduction
What are the biggest priorities in climate change?
What are the best jobs to fight climate change?
Below, we'll give a quick overview of each of the articles.
Climate change: An impact-focused introduction
This article aims to provide an accessible and relatively brief introduction to climate change from a scale-sensitive perspective. Similar to our
overviews of other cause areas, it assesses climate change using the ITN framework, addressing some of the key considerations for prioritizing climate change relative to other cause areas.
Here's a short excerpt from our section on the scale of harm caused by climate change:
Climate change has and will continue to
increase the frequency and severity of many risks, including heat stress, forced migration, poverty, water stress and droughts, natural disasters, food insecurity, and the spread of many diseases.
However, the extent to which these risks increase will depend on how well we're able to mitigate the amount of climate change that occurs. An often-cited target is to keep warming to below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, something most of the world's countries agreed to target
in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
At 1.5C of warming, we would avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, though the harm would still be huge. For instance, nearly 14% of the world's population
could experience severe heatwaves at least every five years, and over
132 million people could be exposed to severe droughts. Environmental damage and biodiversity loss will also occur, including damage to coral reefs, the vast majority of which
may not even survive 1.5C of warming.
However, it now
looks likely that we'll surpass 1.5C relatively soon, despite these international targets. This makes higher levels of warming, and therefore increased harm, even more likely by the end of this century.
At 2C of warming, for example,
between 800 million and 3 billion people may suffer from chronic water scarcity, and
nearly 200 million may experience severe droughts. Three times the number of people
will experience severe heatwaves at least every 5 years at 2C compared to 1.5C - an additional 1.7 billion people. This will take a significant toll on human life; recent research estimates that at slightly over 2C of warming,
nearly 600,000 additional people could lose their lives every year by 2050 due to heat stress compared to current levels.
At higher levels, the picture looks even more extreme. At 3C, we could see
a five-times increase in extreme events relative to current levels by 2100 (as opposed to a four-fold increase at 1.5C of warming), and at 4C,
up to four billion people will experience chronic water scarcity. This is one billion people more than would experience chronic water shortages at 2C of warming. Other effects of climate change would also considerably ramp up as warming increases.
Fortunately, thanks to the work of climate activists who have increased the amount of global attention focused on climate change, we'll likely avert some of thes...