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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New 80k problem profile - Climate change, published by Benjamin Hilton on May 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a cross-post of 80,000 Hours' new problem profile on climate change. We're cross posting the first section, which is our research into the question of the extent to which climate change is a direct extinction risk. For more, including the indirect impacts of climate change, and career recommendations, see the full profile. Could climate change lead to the end of civilisation? Across the world, over half of young people believe that, as a result of climate change, humanity is doomed.And it’s common for media reports to suggest that climate change will plausibly destroy civilisation or even make Earth uninhabitable. But this isn’t true. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report is, to our knowledge, the most authoritative and comprehensive source on climate change. The report is clear: climate change will be hugely destructive. We’ll see floods, famines, fires, and droughts — and the world’s poorest people will be affected the most. But even when we try to account for unknown unknowns, nothing in the IPCC’s report suggests that civilisation will be destroyed. Instead, the scientific consensus is that it’s pretty much impossible for climate change to directly cause the end of civilisation or the extinction of humanity. We’ll look at why this is in more detail, and why if your concern is the collapse of civilisation, there are bigger and even more neglected risks, such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war. This isn’t to say society shouldn’t do far more to tackle climate change. If you want to make climate change the focus of your career, we include some thoughts below on the most effective ways to help tackle it. Climate change makes people feel angry, powerless, and — above all — afraid. If society doesn’t act more decisively, climate change will affect all our lives and gravely damage livelihoods around the world. So it’s no wonder people are scared, and angry at our failure to do more. But we’re not powerless. And we’re far from doomed. Summary Climate change is going to significantly and negatively impact the world. Its impacts on the poorest people in our society and our planet’s biodiversity are cause for particular concern. Looking at the worst possible scenarios, while it looks extremely unlikely that climate change could directly make the Earth uninhabitable, it could be an important factor that increases existential threats from other sources, like great power conflicts, nuclear war, or pandemics. That said, we think most readers are likely to have a greater impact working directly on one of these other risks. We think worrying about your personal carbon footprint is largely a distraction, and that some ways of making a difference on climate change are likely to be much more effective than others. In particular, you could use your career to help develop technology or advocate for policy that would reduce our current emissions, or research technology that could remove carbon from the atmosphere in the future. Our overall view Sometimes recommended We’d love to see more people working on this issue, but — given our general worldview — all else equal we’d be even more excited for someone to work on one of our top priority problem areas. Scale We think work to materially reduce the probability of the worst outcomes of climate change would have a large positive impact. However, climate change seems hundreds of times less likely to directly cause human extinction than other risks we’re concerned about, like catastrophic pandemics. As a result, if climate change does have catastrophic and potentially long-lasting consequences for human civilisation, this will likely be through aggravating ...