It's Called a Polycrisis and We're In One

Recently, I read an article by Charlie Angus:  What Keeps Me Up at Night. 

In it he says: 

We are like the three little pigs hanging out in a straw house.

The war in Iran, climate fires across North America and Europe, the political chaos of Trump — would be a serious test of global resilience at the best of times. But now these issues are beginning to lay across each other like terrible ley lines.

So let me lay out four areas where global leaders have left us dangerously vulnerable.

He goes on to discuss four areas of vulnerability in more detail.

• The Strait of Hormuz and the Fertilizer Crisis
• A Planet on Fire
• Regulatory Suicide
• The Marine Super Spreader Event

For more on the El Nino event that Charlie Angus discusses in his article, see this: Okay, These El Niño Forecasts Are Getting Ridiculous.

An analysis published Wednesday by the United Nations’ World Food Programme shows that the strengthening El Niño is on track to significantly worsen food insecurity in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. The record-strong El Niño that occurred between 2015 and 2016 impacted the food security of 60 million to 100 million people, and WFP’s preliminary analysis shows that the 2026-2027 El Niño could push at least 49 million more people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027.

“El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” Carl Skau, WFP’s acting executive director, said in a statement. “The sooner we help families to prepare for these climate shocks, the greater our ability to save lives and protect livelihoods.”

All these events (and more) are part of a larger event: a polycrisis. 

Per Wikipedia:

A polycrisis is a situation where many different and separate crises happen at the same time. These problems mix and make each other worse. The total damage is much bigger than just adding the problems together.

Key Features of a Polycrisis

• Simultaneous timing: Multiple major shocks happen right next to each other or overlap. 

• Interconnection: Systems like the economy, the environment, and politics link together. A failure in one area feeds into another. 

• Amplification: Fixing one problem can accidentally make another problem worse. 

• Overwhelm: Governments and leaders struggle to handle everything at once

Things were bad enough before the current and burgeoning El Nino and the multiple economic and political crises caused by Trump's abysmally stupid attack on Iran. 

But now? There's another term for the situation we find ourselves now, coined by writer William Gibson in his wonderful novel, The Peripheral. The Jackpot. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I am very afraid that I'm not.