New report: Is climate change the biggest problem in the world?

By · Published May 11th, 2016

We’ve released a new ‘problem profile’ on the risks posed by extreme climate change.

There is a small but non-negligible chance that unmitigated greenhouse emissions will lead to very large increases in global temperatures, which would likely have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth.

Though the chance of catastrophic outcomes is relatively low, the degree of harm that would result from large temperature increases is very high, meaning that the expected value of working on this problem may also be very high.

Options for working on this problem include academic research into the extreme risks of climate change or whether they might be mitigated by geoengineering. One can also advocate for reduced greenhouse emissions through careers in politics, think-tanks or journalism, and work on developing lower emissions technology as an engineer or scientist.

In the profile we cover:

  • The main reasons for and against thinking that the ‘tail risks’ of climate change are a highly pressing problem to work on.
  • How climate change scores on our assessment rubric for ranking the biggest problems in the world
  • How to use your career to lower the risk posed by climate change.

Read our full profile on the most extreme risks from climate change..