FiveThirtyEight’s “Science Questions from a Toddler” used a three-year old’s question about why balloon’s pop as a jumping off point for a general discussion of catastrophic risks. The article mentions GCRI, along with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), and the Future of Life Institute (FLI). In an interview, GCRI associate Kaitlin Butler told FiveThirtyEight that awareness of catastrophic risks is making scientists and governments take into account to a greater extent “issues like public health, social justice and indirect risks that play out over long periods of time”.
Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk
Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? This paper, published in the journal Futures, addresses the question by examining the definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. The paper concludes that yes, climate change is a global catastrophic risk, and potentially a significant one.
