Comment by ttw44

Comment by ttw44 14 hours ago

3 replies

The risk is a quantifiable 0.0%? I find that hard to believe. I think the current trends suggest there is a risk that continued environmental destruction could annihilate society.

brookst 13 hours ago

Risk can never be zero, just like certainty can never be 100%.

There is a non-zero chance that the ineffable quantum foam will cause a mature hippopotamus to materialize above your bed tonight, and you’ll be crushed. It is incredibly, amazingly, limits-of-math unlikely. Still a non-zero risk.

Better to think of “no risk” as meaning “negligible risk”. But I’m with you that climate change is not a negligible risk; maybe way up in the 20% range IMO. And I wouldn’t be sleeping in my bed tonight if sudden hippos over beds were 20% risks.

  • ttw44 13 hours ago

    Lol, I've always loved that about physics. Some boltzmann brain type stuff.

SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago

It's hard to produce a quantifiable chance of human extinction in the absence of any model by which climate change would lead to it. No climate organization I'm aware of evaluates the end of humanity as even a worst-case risk; the idea simply doesn't exist outside the realm of viral Internet misinformation.