From the University of Bristol UK, scientist Dann Mitchell points to cumulative risks no one is counting. Can extreme climate-driven disasters change minds – even in right-leaning people? California business school marketing expert Rafay Siddiqui reveals how they get you to buy more stuff. Answering the Polycrisis: what Prof. Adam Tooze tells the rich at Davos.
“If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.”
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
“Polycrisis for me describes the production, through the radical process of development itself, of an expanding zone of new unknowns. Radical uncertainty is not just a given, it is produced. It is a radicalization of modernity that we are facing.”
That is British historian and Columbia Professor Adam Tooze speaking at the Overseas Development Institute Conference 2023. More from Adam Tooze later in the program, but is “polycrisis’ the right framework to understand these times?
Also in this program: our health is damaged by climate change in more ways than we know. From the University of Bristol UK, scientist Dann Mitchell points to cumulative risks no one is counting.
First, can extreme climate-driven disasters change minds – even in right-leaning people? California business school marketing expert Rafay Siddiqui answers, and reveals how they get you to buy more stuff. Knowing is the door to resistance.
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DISASTER VULNERABILITY & SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
RAFAY SIDDIQUI
Do extreme events from hurricanes to wildfires wake people up about climate change? A new study out of California finds right-leaning people may change their views if hyper-disasters hit their state. This could be an opening to move away from the culture of high consumption toward more Earth-friendly ways.
Our guest is Rafay Siddiqui, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Santa Clara University’s [LEEVEE] Leavey School of Business. Rafay got his Doctorate in Marketing. He specializes in what makes people buy things – or not.
Listen to or download this 25 minute interview with Raffay Siddiqui in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
There is a lot of debate on whether climate-induced disasters will change people’s minds, including those who don’t believe in climate change. So far, climate disruption has not been enough to prevent people voting for climate deniers. But this paper is not about votes, but buying habits. The authors found a relationship between feeling like we live in a possible disaster zone, and whether we decide to buy a lot of stuff we don’t really need.
Strangely, this new study found people who lean toward Conservative politics are more likely to be changed by disaster than those who favor more Left or progressive views. Also fascinating in the November 2024 study, led by Rebecca Chaea: the way people react to extreme disasters also depends on regional circumstances. While Conservative-leaning people in North America or Europe may reconsider consumption after a disaster, in Central and Eastern Europe that shift was not found. Rafay speculates that may be an artifact passed on by developing from communist government, during the Soviet era.
Here is a good summary, taken from the paper Abstract:
“We find that as vulnerability to natural disasters increases, sustainable consumption intentions significantly increase among rightists in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States. Environmental motives, rather than economic or trend motives, are found to drive this effect. This suggests that, for rightists, the expectation of being directly impacted by climate change can override their established attitudes and foster more sustainable behavior with the goal of helping the environment. In contrast, the same increase in sustainable consumption intentions is weaker among leftists, who already embrace sustainable behavior. “
TIME FOR THE “PROSUMER”
Personally, I hate being labeled a “consumer”. Using “pro’s and con’s”, maybe the opposite would be “prosumers”. The “prosumer” actively does not consume. They don’t buy much, and if possible, they don’t buy anything.
SIDE RANT: It just seems so much of humanity is lost when well-funded corporations categorize a multi-dimensional conscious being as a “consumer” who can be further categorized and manipulated. We are an item in a data profile, a thin digital representation of ourselves. That is then mirrored back to us, partly through advertising and media, until we accept that is who we are. We become our avatars. Daily, it seems, more millions of people become their digital selves, measuring their value by clicks of attention. Success is going viral, not a personal experience in the physical world.
Getting back to consumer studies, this field of expert business marketing seems a bit scary. Marketing companies hire experts to read this research and work it into advertising and sales. It is far less likely the rest of us learn about it. Maybe our minds can be manipulated to consume more, and so produce more carbon or damage to wildlife habitat, rivers, etc. Can academic work like this be used for good?
A paper published November 2024 in Nature is titled “How natural disasters and environmental fears shape American climate attitudes across political orientation”. They have similar findings as the work of Siddiqui and co-authors, but that Nature paper is not about changes in consumption, but beliefs about climate change. They say: “…results support hypotheses that conservatives demonstrate lower climate concern and that fear of natural and environmental disasters increases climate concern.” Maybe humans have to learn the hard way, but given what California just went through, this could be the real hard way.
Do climate disasters, like Hurricanes and wildfires, change the minds of those who doubt or downplay climate science? Here are some papers…
Changing climate, changing minds? The effects of natural disasters on public perceptions of climate change
Matthew R Sloggy et al
Christopher R. H. Garneau et al. Article Open access Published: 05 November 2024
“Utilizing data from a 2023 online survey, results support hypotheses that conservatives demonstrate lower climate concern and that fear of natural and environmental disasters increases climate concern. Interaction results show that fear of anthropogenic environmental disasters elicits greater climate concern amongst conservatives.”
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THE LONG TOLL
CLIMATE DISRUPTION ON HUMAN HEALTH
DANN MITCHELL
Over 1300 people died in extreme heat during the Hajj in Mecca, 2024. But experts can only guess how many people die each year from climate-driven extremes. We do not know the cumulative, longer-term toll of repeated attacks on our health due to climate change. That is a big knowledge gap. Professor Dann Mitchell just published: “Why we still don’t know the mounting health risks of climate change”. Dann is Professor of Climate Science at the Cabot Institute for the Environment at University of Bristol, UK. Dann was previously a research scientist at the University of Oxford. His PhD in Climate Dynamics comes from the University of Reading.
Listen to or download this 21 minute interview with Dann Mitchell in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Dann co-authored a study finding scorching heat over 50 degrees C is increasing rapidly in parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East – due to human influence. That was published a year before Greece hit 44 C in June 2024, The Acropolis had to close and tourists, including British tourists died in the heat, like British TV presenter Michael Mosley. Several places in the Middle East, including parts of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates experienced temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) during the 2024 summer.
Here is news of another study finding climate change is linked to worsening brain diseases. In June, a big team of medical professionals published a study on “Climate change and disorders of the nervous system”. in The Lancet Neurology. They say: “evidence suggests that the incidence, prevalence, and severity of many nervous system conditions (eg, stroke, neurological infections, and some mental health disorders) can be affected by climate change.”
So we can add brain damage and mental health problems to climate change.
In his article for Nature, Dann Mitchell writes:
“But there’s a cumulative, longer-term toll, and this needs to be studied more.
For example, years of regular exposure to heatwaves and droughts can lead to kidney disease through successive bouts of dehydration and electrolyte imbalances. Poor-quality sleep, which is common on hot nights, is linked to decreased physical and mental health, cognitive decline and compromised immune function, all of which can accumulate over time. The development of fetuses is affected by the conditions that they and their mothers are exposed to and will have an impact on their future health.
At the fundamental level, gene expression can be altered by environmental stressors. For example, studies show that people who were exposed to bouts of hot, dry weather while in the womb have an increased likelihood of high blood pressure as adults, decades on. There are many consequences of a warming global climate that researchers are yet to understand, and more we do not even know about.”
ALEX THINKS:
THIS IS A NEW DISEASE
For me, the new concept in Dann Mitchell’s Nature article – and this probably applies to a lot of living things beyond humans: repeated trauma from on-going climate disasters may add up to significant toll on our health. That sounds important for medical practitioners but also governments trying to plan responses.
This is a new disease or condition, born out of increasing climate-induced disasters striking all over the world. This condition we might call a “climate burden” in the body. It is like“Cumulative Trauma Disorder” but an entirely new type, becoming more visible in more of the population as the climate with all it’s systems in oceans and atmosphere becomes destabilized. This cumulative climate trauma would not have been visible in the early 1900’s before the big spike in greenhouse gas emissions.
Doctors, including mental health workers, need to learn to ask not just about the health history, but the patients’ environmental history. Have they suffered heat stress before or making hospital visits within a few weeks of a catastrophe? Do they have the after-effects of famine? Are they afraid to remember, or afraid of the future?
It is a field with little study so far. Isolating problems from climate stress or injury over years could be difficult. It sounds possible with consistent long-term funding, perhaps building on existing databases. Just because it is difficult does not mean cumulative climate damage is not real or is not significant. My guess: it’s worse than we realize.
CHECK OUT SOME OF DANN’S PREVIOUS PAPERS
Detecting Rising Wildfire Risks for South East England
Thompson, V., Mitchell, D., Melia, N., Bloomfield, H., Dunstone, N. & Kay, G., 9 Jan 2025, In: Climate Resilience and Sustainability.
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Compound mortality impacts from extreme temperatures and the COVID-19 pandemic
Lo, Y. T. E., Mitchell, D. M. & Gasparrini, A., 23 May 2024, In: Nature Communications.
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DANN WAS ALSO INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT LAST YEAR
UNSEEN heatwave mortality
Shapland, C. Y. (Principal Investigator), Lo, E. (Co-Investigator), Tilling, K. M. (Co-Investigator) & Mitchell, D. M. (Co-Investigator)
Description
To estimate ‘plausible’ heat-related mortality that could have been in the 2022 record-breaking UK heatwave had the weather pattern been different. Project funded by Elizabeth Blackwell Institute and Cabot Institute for the Environment: Joint call on Climate Change and Health.
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AND THIS STUDY
Rapidly increasing likelihood of exceeding 50 °C in parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East due to human influence
Nikolaos Christidis*, Dann Mitchell, Peter A Stott
Abstract
“As the world warms, extremely hot days are becoming more frequent and intense, reaching unprecedented temperatures associated with excess mortality. Here, we assess how anthropogenic forcings affect the likelihood of maximum daily temperatures above 50 °C at 12 selected locations around the Mediterranean and the Middle East. We adopt a risk-based attribution methodology that utilises climate model simulations with and without human influence to estimate the probability of extremes.
We find that at all locations, temperatures above 50 °C would have been extremely rare or impossible in the pre-industrial world, but under human-induced climate change their likelihood is rapidly increasing. At the hottest locations we estimate the likelihood has increased by a factor of 10–103, whereas by the end of the century such extremes could occur every year. All selected locations may see 1–2 additional months with excess thermal deaths by 2100, which stresses the need for effective adaptation planning.”
TO DIG DEEPER INTO PAPERS ON CLIMATE AND HEALTH
SEE ALSO: “Imperatives and co-benefits of research into climate change and neurological disease” Medine I. Gulcebi et al Jan 20, 2025 in Nature Reviews Neurology (paywall)
Here is the Conversation piece that summarizes the paper.
AND FINALLY THIS:
Climate change and disorders of the nervous system
Prof Sanjay M Sisodiya et al. The Lancet June 2024
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ANSWERING THE POLYCRISIS
ADAM TOOZE
A stun grenade, also called a “flashbang” suddenly overloads our senses. We cannot react. That is the state of both human affairs and the natural world. Load up a continuing pandemic, unbearable heat, city-burning wildfires, vandals in government, fearful markets, worried people. We are stunned.
There is a name for that: “polycrisis”. It is not temporary. It is a bi-product of super-industrializing in over-drive. As Adam Tooze, the British historian and Professor at Columbia University explains. a “polycrisis” doesn’t just happen. It is made. Tooze says:
“Polycrisis for me describes the production, through the radical process of development itself, of an expanding zone of new unknowns. Radical uncertainty is not just a given, it is produced. It is a radicalization of modernity that we are facing.
Mark Blyth my friend puts it brilliantly in an article in The Guardian two years ago as he described the climate breakdown, of course induced by human economic development – is a giant non-linear outcome-generated with Wicked convectives.
In plain English, there’s no mean there’s no average there’s no return to normal. It is one-way traffic into the unknown so this is produced. And uncertainty – it is not a given, it is not a fact about the world. This is what I think the polycrisis term is trying to capture.”
– Adam Tooze was delivering a Keynote speech at Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Conference, September 26, 2023.
Tooze refers to this piece in the Guardian: ”There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown” Mark Blyth August 11, 2021.
ALEX: For me, Adam Tooze is not suggesting a carefully planned conspiracy to create this pack of converging threats. While there may be actors able to temporarily capitalize on civilizational threats, the total package is produced by all of us, in a system which is destabilizing due to unplanned and somewhat unforeseen consequences. The cabal at the top struggles in the whirlwind, blown even harder than the peasants below.
Here is Adam Tooze describing the origins of the word “Polycrisis”. He is speaking to the assembled wealthy of the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2023.
“Economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. That’s why I think the poly crisis term has a real utility. And then it was picked up by Jean Claude Juncker, the president of European Commission in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen to describe the experience of trying to govern Europe when you had to deal with the Greek debt crisis, Putin’s first aggression against Ukraine, and the the sort of rumblings of Brexit in the background and the refugee crisis in Syria spilling over into Europe. And I think what he was trying to get at and why I think the term is still useful is this experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic. The financial crisis, and it’s about mortgage backed securities and they’re blowing up.
But this coming together at a single moment of things which on the face of it, and really when you even dig into it, don’t have anything to do with each other. But nevertheless seem to pile on to each other to create a situation in the minds of policymakers, business people, families, individuals, when we’re thinking about the COVID crisis for instance, that is overwhelming. And that that that leaves us unable to cope and, you know, questioning our identity and finding it very difficult to decide what the ground is that we stand on because it’s being destabilized from so many different directions at once. And there are different versions of, I think, this experience, especially if you live in North America, if you live in The United States, Americans have been experienced, certainly liberal Americans. I think conservatives feel it too, a kind of sense of national crisis that’s quite comprehensive, but they read it as the experience of the American dream coming apart.
Whereas, I think the poly crisis concept captures this as a much more general experience. And I think in the last I wouldn’t confine it to the last couple of years. Juncker said it started in 1516. I think you could make a good case that really the unfolding of this current moment starts in 02/2008, which is simultaneously not just the financial crisis, which we all remember, but also Putin’s first aggression against Georgia. It is also the breakdown of the WTO in the Doha round.
It is setting the stage for the disappointment of the Copenhagen climate talks. And then on top of everything else, there was a swine flu epidemic in 02/1989. And so in a sense, you already see there many of the elements of the current moment coming together. And the key things for me are finance, politics, if you like, the disruptions of American democratic politics with Sarah Palin being put on the, GOP ticket in o eight. So economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us.
And those four things, they don’t reduce to a single common denominator. Right? They don’t reduce to a single factor. And that’s why I think the poly crisis term has a real utility descriptively as much as anything else because it’s kind of hand waving. Of course, it’s kind of arm waving.
It’s going, ‘look, there’s a lot of stuff happening here all at once”. And that precisely is what we’re trying to get our wrap our minds around. And as the Club of Rome report and and various types of epidemiological expertise were saying at the time, the dawning awareness that the miracle of economic growth, which had been, you know, really taken off in a dramatic scale after World War two, has a downside. So that a series of really very dramatic risks are not just merely exogenous anymore, but are being generated by the very success of our economic growth story. And that awareness really comes quite sharply into focus both on the, shall we say, resource environmental envelope side, but also on the pandemic disease or anotic mutation side in the nineteen seventies.
And so that for me would be the moment where the modern polycrisis mode becomes visible, this first beginning to be articulated. And if you take Edgard Morant, so the French theorist who first coined the term, if you take his intellectual biography back, he’s a classic nineteen seventies environmental alarmist. With the work of the Columbia University historian Adam Tooze, the concept’s been getting a lot of airtime in his blogs and Substack blogs and, also a lot of conversation at the World Economic Forum. That’s just kind of a general label for the fact that the world is seems to be incredibly chaotic and we’re being, as you suggested, hit by one shock after another. A lot of them related, of course, to climate change, but then we had the pandemic and the financial and economic consequences of the pandemic, food crisis that was aggravated by the pandemic and also by the Ukraine Russia war and the war itself, of course.
And it seems like all of this stuff is happening. I think a lot of the commentators, including those at the World Economic Forum, think that this is just, in a sense, bad luck. You know, just a lot of stuff happens to be going wrong simultaneously, and we’ll weather it. We’ll move beyond it, and life will get back to something like normal. We’re arguing in our work that actually the coincidence of crises is not a coincidence.
In other words, there are there are underlying mechanisms that are driving the synchronization of a lot of these crises that we don’t fully understand. So we haven’t unpacked the causal dynamics entirely. But it’s not just chance that a whole bunch of things are going wrong simultaneously.”
[END TOOZE SELECTION]
Speaking to the wealthy movers and shaker at Davos, Adam Tooze claims the inventor of the polycrisis concept was a “classic 1970’s alarmist”. Actually, it’s too bad we did not listen enough to the French theorist of complexity Edgar Morin. At the time of this broadcast, Edgar is still alive at age 103 in Paris. He is the author of over 60 books, a polymath who contributed to everything from media studies to ecology and systems biology. Morin is recognized as a pioneer in complexity and complex thought. He is a founder of transdisciplinarity. Bring me more such “alarmists” please!
Edgar Morin, founder of many fields, “environmental alarmist”
We covered the Polycrisis extensively on Radio Ecoshock. I recommend our program “Coping in the Polycrisis” broadcast in March 2023 with systems and security expert Homer-Dixon. Homer Dixon is Director and Founder of the Cascade Institute in British Columbia, and operates this helpful site at polycrisis.org
But is the convenient catch-all label of “the polycrisis” – beloved at Davos, COP27, and all the elite functions – really a distraction from the fundamental ecological mega-crisis? Doesn’t it make “climate change” or “species extinction” just one of many concurrent problems, like migration or inflation, or other human-only issues?
In his 2023 discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Adam Tooze says he is a “Keynesian”. He refers to economic theory developed by John Maynard Keynes, the architect of democratic economies, including ways to survive the Great Depression of the 1930’s with government intervention. Bail-outs and Green New Deals ever since draw on Keynes’ work.
Tooze describes the Keynesian technique of breaking down the polycrisis into a series of sub-thought called a “black box”. Can we really pull out connected pieces from complex interactive systems to apply a technical fix? Can we take COVID or climate change “off the table” to focus on other things? Doesn’t that make them both more dangerous, and anyway all parts of the polycrisis interact and then morph into other states. Some Greens tend to put the environment in a black box leaving out things like inequality of wealth or racial injustice, because those aren’t “our issues”. We just want to solve global warming, get clear air, clean water. But can that ever happen in a dictatorship or fascist state? Beware of black boxes.
Tooze may take comfort in psychoanalysis, and promote liberal Keynesian economics, but it is worse than too little, too late. He offers us a comforting formula, as though we can control ourselves or our fate, now that the Grand Experiment has been launched on Earth. Keynesian thinking and even the “Green New Deal” are archaic thought systems from the time before the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration. Before artificial intelligence and global communication. Before human systems began their flight into the Sun, with waxed wings.
Call us “doomers” or “realists”, natural systems and our own madness will most likely force massive degrowth and depopulation upon us, one way or another, sooner or later. Nothing can grow forever on a finite planet. The horrible-but-required reset may be already underway. Real choices, such as they are, assuming we survive as a species with some knowledge, will be made AFTER, and likely not by most of us sharing these thoughts today.
That is where “post-doom” thought and belief begin.
LANDING IN THE FOG
We began with “radical uncertainty”. Imagine landing a large passenger plane in dense fog. You have instruments and radar, all provided by science as guides. We need to land this crazy heat engine despite the fog of uncertainty, and unknowable consequences. Destablized life requires radical action to decelerate, to reach terra firma safely again.
In coming shows, we explore a plausible driver of current human failures: “brain rot.” We always presume humans are getting more intelligent. The news suggests otherwise. Are we getting stupider? Stay tuned to Radio Ecoshock.
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I’m Alex Smith. This is a climate emergency. Thank you for listening and caring about this world.
The research behind this article is clear, and I can see the effort put into making sure the facts are accurate. It’s definitely a reliable source!