Dear readers,
I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer. That sounds like a tall order – and it is!
If you would like to get the updates directly in your inbox, do subscribe!
That the climate emergency is dire for humanity is no longer a subject of serious debate among scientists. In the public sphere though, there remains a fair amount of climate denialism and climate skepticism, by which I mean refusal to accept that changes in climatic patterns are primarily anthropogenic. Part of this is ideological resistance to the idea, part of it is just being uninformed.
Indeed, in the emerging markets that I frequent – ground zero for the effects of climate change visited upon them by the energy-guzzling developed world – the uninformed population numerically vastly outstrips the informed, and many of the informed feel it’s not their place to repair the damage caused by the developed world.
Some data are useful. Yale climate opinion maps say that just over half of Americans think global warming is mostly anthropogenic, while a third think it is mostly due to natural causes. The Pew survey shows that the ideological divide is real and widening amidst social and political polarization in the US and, dare I say, it’s probably the case elsewhere as well.
As I immersed myself in research and teaching about climate change — especially adaptation to it in the developing world — I found myself accumulating efforts to educate, the first prerogative of an academic. In this simple ‘list,’ if you will, I’m concerned with how we can get the message out to those who are uninformed or unpersuaded.
Here's a catchy video produced by my colleague Narayan Devanthan at the National Foundation for India in Delhi, along with collaborators in a range of organizations including some affiliated with Harvard’s Mittal Institute. It’s a musical video ‘short’ explaining the consequences of heat stress after sustained heat waves swept the northern Indian plains most recently in the summer of 2023. It’s catchy, almost amusing, and replete with color and panache. It fires the imagination.
To interpret this, it's not just exposure to heat that matters. Humidity affects whether the body can cool through perspiration, so we must monitor exposure to heat along with exposure to humidity, captured in so-called wet bulb temperature readings. Even though the body’s internal temperature is about 37°C (98°F), sustained exposure to wet bulb temperatures even below this can trigger long term excess heat retention that ultimately results in human system malfunction, organ damage and ultimately death. Sadly, large swathes of the (especially developing) world are exposed to dangerous and increasingly extremely humid heat.
I suspect that this kind of jingle or video can spread a lot faster than tables and memos and PowerPoint presentations.
The one other effective communication of the effects of excess heat is the introductory chapter in Kim Robinson’s celebrated futuristic novel, Ministry of the Future, which he bases on imaginary eyewitness accounts of an apoplectic heat wave sweeping through north India, where all systems fail to prevent enormous mortality.
But there is also a way to make conventional data sexy as well. Sophisticated analyses have to connect to real experiences and narratives to which ordinary people can relate. For most people, the gobbledygook coming out of COP like confabs is exactly that - gibberish. For example, the Paris agreement of 2015 was supposed to get folks in all countries to agree to limit carbon usage, adjusted for their circumstances, in a way that raised the odds that temperature rise above pre-industrial levels was limited to 1.5° C. These days, one hears that humanity has blown past that threshold already, and if we’re able to show much determination we might just be able to limit warming to 2° C.
But what does that mean? Can I walk outside? Will the vegetation die? Do I vacation in different places? Do I have to change my occupation depending on how much it requires being outdoors? Will I have to leave my home, or will others leave their homes and come to my neighborhood? It’s easy to list several practical questions which the average person cannot relate to goalposts like temperature rise of 1.5°or 2° C.
As my colleague, Satchit Balsari, an emergency room physician, says, "Saying 2°is like asking a physician on morning rounds: How is the entire hospital feeling today? It's an unhelpful number that does not communicate the reality of billions of people most at risk." To be more granular, so as to understand the microenvironments of the working poor around the world, the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) - a group of 2.5million women working in India's informal sector, tells the story of their lived experiences with heat using this interactive storyboard.
Probable Futures is a non-profit climate-literacy organization that tries to make data and modeling more accessible. Its interactive maps and stories help folks imagine what, say,1.5 and 2 deg C might actually mean. I can zero in on my place of birth (New Delhi) or residence (Boston) and check out how many days will be untenably hot and humid in a 2°C scenario for example. One can see the underlying models’ predictions on maps of how likely drought is and what areas will flood, among other relatable catastrophes.
And what about art in all its glorious manifestation? Those of us whose reason leads us to ignore climate change, can we be made to ‘feel’? I’m a big believer in art triggering changes in social attitudes. Starting in 2014 in Copenhagen, as one memorable example, some artists physically carved out blocks of ice from the melting polar ice caps and transported them into evocative sculptures in city centers that were hosting climate conferences. You may not care about polar ice caps melting – even though the logical conclusion of that tragedy is rising sea levels pretty much everywhere – but if you see polar ice melting around your subway stops, maybe it gives you pause? And from my own backyard in relatively peaceful Boston, where affluent folks tend to think of climate change as an intellectual abstraction, one artist tried to communicate that as water levels rise, as they will, our drainage can’t deal with stormwater than has nowhere to go, and your luxury dwelling might just end up being submerged. A sculpture of the top of a house floating atop a water body catches the eye!
Whether it’s movie shorts, musical jingles, sculptures, or storytelling and narratives, I daresay we need a multi-pronged approach to expose and educate.