Au contraire, climate change will not pose an existential risk within the next 30 years. The chance of that happening is pretty much nil and no one serious argues otherwise.
That's not true. Arctic methane release has the potential to become devastating within a small number of decades. From [1]: Shakhova et al. ... conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. That would be catastrophic by anyone's measure.
Also: In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.
[2] is a video from the Lima UN Climate Change Conference discussing this. The people talking about this are certainly not "no-one serious". See 34:23 for Ira Leifer, an Atmospheric Scientist at the University of California, saying that 4 degrees of warming means the Earth can probably sustain "a few thousand people, clustered at the poles".
I see 4 degrees of warming being bandied about a lot these days, but very little discussion of how catastrophic that would be. It also seems a lot more likely than AGI becoming a problem, to me at least. Sure, we should fund research into both but only one of them has me worried about the world my daughter will inherit - one is basically purely hypothetical right now.
That's not true. Arctic methane release has the potential to become devastating within a small number of decades. From [1]: Shakhova et al. ... conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. That would be catastrophic by anyone's measure.
Also: In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.
[2] is a video from the Lima UN Climate Change Conference discussing this. The people talking about this are certainly not "no-one serious". See 34:23 for Ira Leifer, an Atmospheric Scientist at the University of California, saying that 4 degrees of warming means the Earth can probably sustain "a few thousand people, clustered at the poles".
I see 4 degrees of warming being bandied about a lot these days, but very little discussion of how catastrophic that would be. It also seems a lot more likely than AGI becoming a problem, to me at least. Sure, we should fund research into both but only one of them has me worried about the world my daughter will inherit - one is basically purely hypothetical right now.