In a piece for The Independent this month, Helen Coffey argued that people should be more concerned about climate change than Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Coffey’s remarks come on the heels of Evan Hubinger’s X posts indicating that there’s a greater than 10 per cent chance artificial intelligence “could kill all humans” within the next decade. Hubinger is a leading safety researcher at Anthropic.
But there’s a big problem with all of our attention being commandeered by the potential extinction risk posed by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest. We’re in very real danger of forgetting about the much greater threat to all life on Earth, the one that we’ve known about for well over a century and that’s already happening right before our eyes on every continent and in every country: climate breakdown.
Anyone previously sceptical about global warming fundamentally changing our planet and how we live should have had those doubts firmly quashed this summer. Extreme temperatures and weather events have seen countries blighted by drought and famine, fatal flooding, landslides and wildfires. These are all concrete, quantifiable and very real threats to human life – unlike the murky risks of large language models.
There’s a reason the climate deniers have gone very quiet of late. Even those of us living in northern and western Europe, privileged enough to be buffered from the harshest consequences by a naturally mild climate, have not escaped unscathed this year. As much of Europe burned, an estimated 2,877 heat-associated excess deaths were recorded in England during the heatwaves of May and June 2026 – almost double the number recorded during the previous summer in its entirety.
Read the full piece in The Independent.
