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On 2016-05-01 12:10, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAAc1gFh7YGuQmtUmSV3p1iM4kwSb=zAT3NZhem-8sVYCDs1Tag@mail.gmail.com"
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<div dir="ltr">I came across the following:
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<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://globalprioritiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Global-Catastrophic-Risk-Annual-Report-2016-FINAL.pdf">http://globalprioritiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Global-Catastrophic-Risk-Annual-Report-2016-FINAL.pdf</a><br
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<div>### It lists global warming (renamed "climate change")
right at the top, even ahead of nuclear war. Really? This is
so ridiculous it beggars imagination.</div>
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Heh. I happen to know a fair bit about this report, since it was
partially written by people in my office (GPP is half FHI). There is
a degree of politics involved in what gets listed, even though I
regard it as far more objective than the World Economic Forum global
risk report (which is about risk *perception*). Note that it is not
a list of *existential* risks, but just stuff that could mess up the
lives for a few billion. <br>
<br>
Still, extreme tail climate change is something worth taking more
seriously as a risk than our community normally does. Vanilla
climate change is slow and people tend to overestimate its badness
(at least compared to other GCRs and xrisks) but there is a tail of
extreme possibility that is rarely spoken about - extremely
uncertain, way outside what we know how to model well, potentially
making sizeable regions uninhabitable. Even the greens rarely bring
it up except as a scare story to get people to see vanilla climate
change as something urgent; once the discussion about that starts
they tend to focus on vanilla stuff and become very uneasy when you
start querying them on preparation for saving parts of the current
biosphere. But if you think it is rational to have some preparation
for big asteroids, then you should regard it as rational to have
some preparation for heading off or handling big climate risk. <br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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