politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: Twin catastrophes converge, a Monday like no other

Monday, 28 February 2022

Twin catastrophes converge, a Monday like no other

February 28, 2022

Good afternoon. Global catastrophe is never fun to mull, but I hope you'll give me a little leeway to devote this newsletter to the concept, given recent events.

This week started off with two reminders of what academics rather dryly deem "existential risk": First, Vladimir Putin ordered that Russia's nuclear forces be placed in a state of "special combat readiness." Second, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report that reads even more like a Mad Max script than previous entries.

Let's start with nuclear war. The most common and sensible-seeming read of Putin's move is that it's just hot air from one of the largest balloons on the international stage. The Biden administration has indicated to reporters that it doesn't view Putin's remarks as a serious nuclear threat. It does seem to show, however, that Putin is willing to escalate the rhetoric around nuclear weapons to serve his foreign policy ends. And whenever heads of state around the world eagerly invoke the prospect of nuclear conflict, the world becomes a darker and more dangerous place, especially given the fact that the history of nuclear deterrence is full of near misses and misunderstandings that brought us shockingly close to a full-on thermonuclear meltdown.

Meanwhile, the world continues to warm, sea levels continue to rise, and corporations continue to belch carbon into the atmosphere.

I guess my overarching question is this: People (of whom I am one) are having a difficult enough time conceptualizing one form of existential risk (climate change). How do we come to terms with the prospect of facing two at once?

—Noah Y. Kim