You know, it's not that hard to set up betting markets to pay out for this kind of stuff. For example, the US DARPA tried to create such a market, the Policy Analysis Market for a variety of foreign policy events, including climate change related stuff. They got shot down hard by a couple of political clowns because it was going to cause political assassinations or something.

Punishing people for having the wrong opinions seems all too common in this debate, but if you want sensible argument then throw some securities on a stock market which pay out one way, if climate change predictions come true and pays out a different way if those climate change predictions come out false. I think that will give you the best possible predictions for this sort of thing.

And I can imagine that it won't. After all, those hundreds of millions of people are going to move and rebuild infrastructure several times each over that period of time. Some of those moves will just be uphill.

Overpopulation has been a factor probably since the dawn of humanity. It's not that hard to reproduce to the point where you've reached the carrying capacity of the local environment.

Similarly, we've probably been affected by climate change over that same interval. It's just now that part of that climate change is human induced and maybe a bit faster changing than before. It's not otherwise significantly different.

We made a best possible world. If I'm still alive then, I'll ask in turn, why do they think that a climate fixed at 1850 would somehow be better than the very concrete advances that have been made in the past 50 years. For example, we're in the eleventh year of New Earth, the first time in humanity's millions of years of past, where the population of humanity has declined, year to year via mostly peaceful, prosperous, democratic means rather than via the sword, disease, and death. This trend wouldn't have even started, if we had sacrificed our prosperity for a temporary environmental stability.

Similarly, we're in a situation where less than 100 million people can barely afford to eat. That used to be a billion people 50 years ago. Are you going to tell me that 50 years ago was better?

We were told that we were going to lose a lot of arable land. We sort of did. Some of it is under water and some of it takes more irrigation than it used to. OTOH, we have more arable land than we did back then.

Global trade is another area where things have gotten better. Due to the passage over the Arctic Ocean, those poor, suffering nations of Europe now have two weeks better access to Far East products and the greatest economic engine of the world, than they used to. Just imagine how much worse off they'd be, if we were still shipping products to them via the Panama Canal.

I'd also play a game of "where are we now"? The areas which embraced environmentalism at any cost, such as California or the EU, faced decades of economic disaster and corruption. They're still around, but they're significantly inferior in their economies and even in the actual quality of their environments(!) to the eastern coast of China, which need I add, had pollution so bad that you often couldn't see the sky. That's a pretty big change for 50 years.

I find it amusing at this point 50 years in the future that there are still lots of people throughout the world advocating for radical climate restoration back to that long ago year of 1850 even though we now have 50 more years of evidence that it's simply a very bad idea, both for us and for the environment.

There, you go. That's what I'd tell people 50 years from now. And need I add that if we do the same exercise as the grievance-seeking generation for the past 50 years, we'd be hard pressed to find someone to blame for not making our current world better than it could be. I'd go with the Communists, but aside from that, the results have been pretty damn good.

The two videos you link to are both remarkably stupid and wrong. For example, the first video asserts without thought or evidence that a "global depression" is better than elevated levels of extreme weather. No, you have to actually evaluate those costs to see which is worse. Deliberately inducing a permanent global depression is not necessarily the lower cost - especially if you continue to double down by using that same broken decision making process to make more such dumb decisions. The big missing decision is that we can gather more information and evaluate these actual risks rather than merely listen to what the worst predictors have to claim.

The second video asserts that a variety of disasters due to US mismanagement of resources, poor flood insurance policies which encourage building in flood-prone areas, and a century of aggressive forest fire control is all due to global warming.

Funny, you should mention "meaningless playing with words". You redefine three important concepts: "intelligence", "existence", and "self-awareness" in ways that just aren't relevant.

"Existence" is the most broken concept. I'm currently sitting in a chair. By that observation, I can determine that the chair exists. Since it exists, then it must have in your sense enough "self-awareness", which puts a really, really low threshold on the amount of self awareness and intelligence that a thing needs in order to exist. None seems to be the absolute minimum threshold here.

Similarly, intelligence is not the capacity for self-awareness. Instead, it is:

If we are to speak of the narrow category of the things having to do with learning or understanding aspects of oneself, then I suggest that wisdom is a closer label than intelligence.

And of course, this brings up the obvious point that if we have a machine that can fulfill the definition of intelligence far better than humans can, even if it has absolutely no self awareness (say due to deliberate programming of that blind spot for safety, efficiency, or ethical reasons), then of course, it is more intelligent than we are.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's kind of like someone claiming they know all about human conflict or perhaps making an aircraft carrier just because they play checkers.

Your argument would be reasonable, IF we didn't already have thousands of years of evidence of human technology improving human intelligence. But since we do, well, there's no point to your argument.

Humans don't need to be self aware either. But it happened.

Unless, you know, it isn't. You don't need a module to do heuristics.

Religion doesn't work that way. God's steering development, so the AI is going to be more perfect.

Like driving on one side of the road is a religion?

God faked that to test our faith.

Aside from the near infinite variety of religions where the N+1 copy is the best religion.

The proposed XL extension would almost double the capacity of the pipeline and add access to the pipeline from eastern Montana. So I think the grandparent was correct in asserting that rail accidents would decrease as a result of the pipeline extension.

No, it wasn't.

It's just a good benefit for the US which is the point of trade. Plus that "destruction" is renewable.

I already explained this. Why are you still here?

We already have better, present day economic/political systems than anything the Club of Rome can conceive of. Yet again, this line of argument is pointless because it's so far off actual problems of humanity as to be harmful, if we should ever listen to it.

There's a huge class of huge problems that have known solutions, but neither the will or competence to implement them. It's also not a matter of wealth since developed world societies have nailed down a lot of problems despite starting at deeper levels of poverty.

Sure, it is. Government is absolutely shit at figuring out what is good research. One thing we need to remember here is that there used to be a huge, privately funded science powerhouse in the developed world. That got scrapped because it was easier and more profitable to siphon public funds than to do work that had actual risk to it.

Not really. Welcome to the world of perverse incentives. Your bureaucracy goes away, if you actually solve the problem your bureaucracy was set up to solve.

I think this is the actual future your ideas steer us towards. But fortunately, I have another solution. How about we just get out of the way of the people trying to work and the people trying to hire?

Let's give some examples: Nigeria has a population growth rate of 2.3% (which is a doubling time of just over 30 years). India and Indonesia still have population growth rates of 1.3% (doubling time of roughly 55 years). Pakistan has a population growth rate of 1.8% (doubling time of roughly 39 years). These rates are all due to reproduction and include a bit of emigration.

For example, if we blissfully extrapolate Nigeria's current growth rate and population (127 million today) through the next three centuries, a typical Club of Rome exercise, we get almost three orders of magnitude more people, roughly 110-120 billion people. Even if these people somehow consume only a tenth of the resources of the present global population, that's about half again as much resources consumed just by Nigeria than by the entire world today.

Of course not. If the population of the world were a tenth the present amount, these would not be serious problems.

Sure, they do. Food is an export product of the US and the high demand for food globally helps put more pressure on the US's agriculture resources. Less demand means less land put under the plow.

My view is that this is typical environmental Calvinism that ignores overpopulation, the elephant in the room.