AFF

Probability – warming specific

Warming is the most likely existential threat – scientific consensus should be preferred over hypothetical impacts

Daily Times, 2014

(Daily Times Pakistan, “Climate Change: An Existential Threat,” 19 Nov 2014,

Let us face it: climate change is easily the most dangerous existential crisis for humanityand we are still not seized of it, as we should be. The vast body of scientific literature andthe periodic reports of the UN’s panel on climate change, including the latest one, has warned that without effective action to slow down, at the very least, the rise in carbon emissions, the world is inexorably heading towards an unimaginable disaster for the only planet that is known to support life. It is feared that any rise in global warming beyond two percent Celsius will hit the danger button. But the projections that it might reach four degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century will be catastrophic. As one leading climate change scientist, John Schellnhuber, reportedly said, “The difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.”¶ What would that mean? As Paul Kingsnorth, reviewing two books on climate change in the London Review of Books, writes, “Four degrees (of warming) guarantees the total melting of the Greenland ice sheet and probably the western Antarctic ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by more than 30 feet.” Furthermore: “Two-thirds of the world’s major cities would end up under water.” And it will, even before it reaches the four degrees level, create waves of environmental refugees moving all over the world to find safe places to live. The movement of people everywhere and the struggle for scarce and depleting resources will create national security scenarios all over the world. It is an unimaginable and incomprehensible situation, which is probably one reason why people cannot get their heads around it.”¶ In his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall writes, “Scientists, who are, as a group, extremely wary of exaggeration, nonetheless keep using the same word: catastrophe.” Without a sense of urgency about a prospective calamity, we simply are not preparedfor a global action plan that might mitigate the situation. But, at the same time, as Marshall puts it, “The science around four degrees (of warming) keeps moving usually in the direction of greater pessimism.” And he would not be wrong considering that not much progress has been made since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where the need for some action to deal with climate change was first canvassed. The way things are, next year’s Paris Summit might not prove any more productive than previous efforts like the Kyoto Conference in 1997 and the more recent (2009) Copenhagen Conclave.

Evaluate warming differently that the possibility of other threats - even if they are existential – because some countries are already experiencing advanced effects of warming while their impacts are hypothetical

Chatterjee, 2015

(Keya- executive director of US Climate Action Network, “This Existential Threat is not a Hollywood Fantasy,” 18 September 2015,

Imagine for a moment that the United States faced an existential threat. An attack was anticipated that would be of such a scale that the U.S. would have to lower its flag from in front of the UN and would simply cease to exist. Variations of this scenario happen in summertime action movies all the time.¶ Sadly,this scale is not only seen in movies. Climate change is already an existential threat for many nations. The scale of threat we are used to only seeing in action movies in the U.S. is a reality for Small Island Developing Nationsand others dependent on rain-fed agriculture, and exposed to increasingly severe disasters tied to sea-level rise and warming seas.¶ For these nations, it has been clear for a long time that the solutions for sustainable development and climate change are deeply intertwined. Sustainable Development Goal 13 is critically important for these nations and for all nations. If we are to tackle poverty, climate action needs to become a core part of the sustainable-development agenda, and not put in a silo.¶ That vision of integration is exactly what SDG 13 brings us. The specific language of SDG 13 includes a call to keep global-average surface temperatures from increasing more than 1.5/2 degrees C, and a call for more ambition in the near-term, before 2020. The increased action now is a critical call, since greenhouse-gas emissions add up in the air the way that compound interest can add up in a bank. Action now is critical.¶ Climate change influences many of the core parameters for development — fresh water availability, food availability, and public health. Climate action also enables access to energy for millions who can take advantage of plummeting costs of solar to electrify remote locations that are far from the electrical grid.¶ If they are always considered together, we have a chance of tackling the two greatest threats of our time: poverty and climate change. Distributed solar deployment, for example, has already begun to meet the objective of tackling poverty and climate change at once, and showing the potential for a renewable energy future. In remote regions like the mangrove forests of India and Bangladesh, villagers, tourist hotels, and farmers all are able to use solar energy to power their buildings and increase tourism. At the same time, solar power helps villages get quick access to electricity immediately after a storm event, without having to wait long periods of time for electrical-grid repairs. Solar prices have plummeted so much in recent years that these solutions are spreading around the world faster than ever.¶ Leadership on climate change is also spreading. The faith community, including the Pope and the Muslim community, have spoken eloquently about the threat of climate change to the least among us. The Climate Action Network has expanded to include faith, development, justice and labor voices who come together to push for a just transition to renewable energy at all scales. In response, dozens of countries have already come forward with climate actions, and more will come in New York next week. In December, governments are expected to reach a new universal climate agreement at COP21 in Paris. The nations of the world are coming together to pronounce that we will not stand idly by while some nations face an existential threat and the least among us in all nations are threatened. Our action is not yet at the scale that it needs to be, but it is scalable and can be ratcheted up to meet the ambitious global goals in the coming decade. The action being taken by cities, regions, companies, and non profits, must be met by an equal scale of action by countries. After all, no country is immune to the ravages of climate change. Our joint action, and our solidarity will protect all of our peoples and all of our flags.

No wars

Economic interdependence, socio-economic conditions, and nuclear deterrence are all irreversible checks on conflict escalation

Fettweis, 2006

(Christopher J., National Security Decision Making Department, US Naval War College International Studies Review (2006) 8, 677–697)

However, one need not be convinced about the potential for ideas to transform international politics to believe that major war is extremely unlikely to recur. Mueller, Mandelbaum, Ray, and others may give primary credit for the end of major war to ideational evolution akin to that which made slavery and dueling obsolete, but others have interpreted the causal chain quite differently. Neoliberal institutionalists have long argued that complex economic interdependencecan have a pacifying effect upon state behavior (Keohane and Nye 1977, 1987). Richard Rosecrance (1986, 1999) has contended that evolution in socio-economic organization has altered the shortest, most rational route to state prosperity in ways that make war unlikely. Finally, many others have argued that credit for great power peace can be given to the existence of nuclear weapons, which make aggression irrational ( Jervis 1989; Kagan et al. 1999). With so many overlapping and mutually reinforcing explanations, at times the end of major war may seem to be overdetermined ( Jervis 2002:8–9). For purposes of the present discussion, successful identification of the exact cause of this fundamental change in state behavior is probably not as important as belief in its existence. In other words, the outcome is far more important than the mechanism. The importance of Mueller’s argument for the field of IR is ultimately not dependent upon why major war has become obsolete, only that it has. Almost as significant, all these proposed explanations have one important point in common: they all imply that change will be permanent. Normative/ideational evolution is typically unidirectionalFfew would argue that it is likely, for instance, for slavery or dueling to return in this century. The complexity of economic interdependence is deepening as time goes on and going at a quicker pace. And, obviously, nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented and (at least at this point) no foolproof defense against their use seems to be on the horizon. The combination of forces that may have brought major war to an end seems to be unlikely to allow its return. The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented pace of evolution in all areas of human endeavor, from science and medicine to philosophy and religion. In such an atmosphere, it is not difficult to imagine that attitudes toward the venerable institution of war may also have experienced rapid evolution and that its obsolescence could become plausible, perhaps even probable, in spite of thousands of years of violent precedent. The burden of proof would seem to be on those who maintain that the ‘‘rules of the game’’ of international politics, including the rules of war, are the lone area of human interaction immune to fundamental evolution and that, due to these immutable and eternal rules, war will always be with us. Rather than ask how major war could have grown obsolete, perhaps scholars should ask why anyone should believe that it could not.

No nuclear extinction

No extinction from nuclear war

Walker, 2016

(Robert – inventor and programmer with degrees in math and philosophy, “Could anything make humans extinct in the near future?” 5 April 2016, arc)

This is one of the questions I get asked most often since I started to cover the topic of asteroid impacts. Will humans will become extinct within a decade, or within a century? And can this happen through natural disasters? For instance if you watch the movies you may think there's a chance of a giant asteroid impact which will make us extinct. But what's the real situation? ¶ I'll look at natural disasters first, and then results of our technology that could happen in the next ten or twenty years. Technology advances so rapidly that you can't look much further than that, as you can see by predictions of the present from thirty or more years ago. It would be nice to look further ahead, but what may seem major issues for the future now may never happen and other things that we haven't even thought of might be the big issues of the day in the 2040s.¶ And this is about whether we can go extinct, not about things like famine or war. Even an all out nuclear war leading to a nuclear winter would not make the tropics as hard to live in as the Arctic - so some humans would surely survive. And the radioactivity could also be dealt with, enough so that some humans would survive it.Of course we must not let that happen. But it wouldn't make us extinct,and that's the topic here. Would anything else do this? What about climate change, or asteroid impacts? I've written this for anyone - so if you have a scientific background, do excuse me when I occasionally venture into the more "wacky" ideas that bother some people though any scientist would see that there is no possibility of them happening.¶ Well, first, we are an extremely adaptable species, able to survive anywhere from the Kalahari desert to the Arctic, with only stone age technology. We had already colonized most of the world by the end of the neolithic period.

No extinction from nuclear war – mass extinction does not mean complete extinction – people would survive and recover

Ayres and Pagel, 2015

(Matt – interviewer & Mark-evolutionary biologist, “We asked an evolution expert what will happen to humanity after the apocalypse,” 16 Nov 2015, arc)

Love Nature: Hi Mark. What do you see as the most likely cause for a complete wipe-out of the human race?¶ Professor Mark Pagel: There are two aspects to this question: one is the probability of the causal event happening, the other is its lethality or potential for complete destruction. The usual main contenders for potentially devastating effects on the human race are climate change, food or energy shortages, nuclear war,antibiotic resistance or a pandemic virus, a global computer shutdown or attacks from rogue AI machines.¶ Each of these could happen and might even be relatively likely, but none is likely to wipe out the human race. By comparison a collision with a large asteroid, although very unlikely in the timeframe of our history as a species, could easily lead to our extinction.¶ ¶ When in the future do you predict that humans will face the threat of mass-extinction?¶ Mass-extinction (as opposed to complete extinction) could occur as a result of any of the causes mentioned above. It is not out of the question that the first of these could happen within 100 years. My own view is that they won’t, but given current trends, they could.¶ The key point is that I don’t think current trends will continue. Regarding a collision with a large asteroid, current models suggest the chances are small but this is a case of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown knowns’. We know that large asteroids exist, but we can never rule out that there is one coming our way that we don’t yet know about.¶ ¶ How likely is it that humans would survive an apocalypse—for example, something similar to the event that wiped out the dinosaurs?¶ Humans would almost certainly survive an event such as the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, but globally billions of people would perish. In the case of an event even more catastrophic than that, even though billions of humans would perish, some of us would survive.¶ Life would become stone age-like but some remnants of humanity would survive. Under some scenarios, the more humans that die, the easier it becomes for the remainder to survive because food will become more plentiful, energy will become less scarce, there will be less strife and the rates of disease transmission will be lower.¶On the other hand, the pool of shared knowledge will dwindle as more humans perish and this will make it more difficult for the survivors.¶ ¶ In the event of almost complete extinction, would humans be able to recover?¶ Yes, we would. We would recover by the slow accumulation of knowledge, technology and skills that raised us from the stone age the first time around. It is a phenomenon known as cumulative cultural evolution. However, this time, there would be some memory of the past that we could benefit from so our progress would be faster. Humans would eventually ‘rediscover’ farming, we would form into towns and cities and slowly recover the technologies of the past.

NEG

Magnitude

Prefer high magnitude impacts, even if the probability is very low

Bostrom, 2013

(Nick, Professor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology University of Oxford, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”)

But even this reflection fails to bring out the seriousness of existential risk. What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is not that they would show up robustly on a plot like the one in Figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in world population or average quality of life. Instead, their significance lies primarily in the fact that they would destroy the future. The philosopher Derek Parfit made a similar point with the following thought experiment: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: 1. Peace. 2. A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population. 3. A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent. 2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 2 and 3 may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second (Parfit, 1984, pp. 453–454). To calculate the loss associated with an existential catastrophe, we must consider how much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns out that the ultimate potential for Earth-originating intelligent life is literally astronomical. One gets a large number even if one confines one’s consideration to the potential for biological human beings living on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain habitable for at least another billion years, and we assume that at least one billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential exist for at least 10^16 human lives of normal duration. These lives could also be considerably better than the average con- temporary human life, which is so often marred by dis- ease, poverty, injustice, and various biological limitations that could be partly overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the relevant figure is not how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower bound of the number of biolog- ical human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current cosmological estimates) is 10^34 years.7 Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in computational hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1071 basic computational operations) (Bostrom, 2003).8 If we make the less conservative assumption that future civilisations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet unimagined technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of computation and mem- ory storage that is achievable and thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be realised.9 Even if we use the most conservative of these esti- mates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonisation and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more tech- nologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human- brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilisation a mere 1 per cent chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ‘ordinary’ good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.10