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Notes -
Mash on the Monet, and the appropriate framing of climate tipping points.
Yesterday I was discussing with some smart friends, who take climate change very seriously but are sceptical of the bigger more alarmist claims. They thought that the messaging from climate activists who have been throwing stuff on paintings was good, as they are framing the issue as minor damage to painting frames vs "not being able to feed our children by 2050". Having just read Factfulness by Hans Rosling, I was sceptical that we would be in a worse position on world hunger by 2050. Low and behold, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00322-9, it looks like under all SSPs, undernourishment is projected to fall by 2050. Score one for me.
However, the immediate response to this (after accepting that I'd made a strong point) was that this doesn't seem to take great consideration of the risk of tipping points. Once you take the extreme risk of those into account, the possibility of massive increases in global hunger is right back on the table. So the question for me is twofold:
How seriously should we take the risk of tipping points? What's the best resource for mapping their probability and impact?
Why doesn't the serious climate debate talk about these as much? It seems like all predictions in the IPCC effectively remove tipping points from the equation and consider a relatively smooth increase in temperatures, and a smooth-ish impact on social relations vis a vis the SPSS.
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Convincing people to take a ill-defined, extreme response to a ill-measured, extreme risk is called a Pascal's Mugging, and everything that has been said on the axioms and implications of Pascal's Mugging is available with a quick google search... Except for one thing I want to elaborate on.
Pascal's Muggings arguments often fail to consider that muggings go both ways. In the case of climate change, environmentalists often overlook the equally existential, equally ill-defined risks of an over-enthusiastic reaction to climate change. Just as there are tipping points in the climate, there may be tipping points in human welfare beyond which pursuing environmentalism causes a catastrophe. For instance, European energy prices spiralling to infinity as European governments increasingly refuse to produce energy, so to deflect mounting public anger at declining living standards, they blame Putin, and then the populace decides to take these claims of it being Putin's fault way too seriously, leading to a chain of events culminating in a pointless nuclear exchange. Yes, this risk is very ill-defined, but it's not zero, so that puts it in the same category of risk as the climate change tipping points. It's another mugging. You're getting mugged by two people at once. Who do you hand your money to?
In public policy contexts, I believe Pascal's Mugging is similar to the Precautionary Principle, and it has the same flaws you point out.
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Its possible that even smooth transition graphs are actually just a bunch of micro tipping points lumped together. Maybe that is a more accurate way of modeling the climate?
There can also be tipping points for costs to fight climate change. Once you burden the economy enough that it is no longer growing then you could actually run into some pretty serious political upheaval.
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