Arthur Snell

speaker

54 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Arthur Snell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Politics · The Secret Security Threat The Government Don’t Want Us To Know · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

Thank you.

Yeah, well, Caroline, I think you've used that word perfectly, catalyst.

And that was really how I alighted on this after researching this for some time and working on the book, that if we think about our sort of science lessons at school, a catalyst isn't part of a chemical reaction, but it's something that makes it more intense, perhaps more powerful.

And in that sense, it seems to me that this is quite a good analogy for what the climate is doing.

There are wars and conflicts.

There are

instability situations across the world, it would be odd and probably slightly dishonest to say that they're solely caused by the climate crisis.

But we can see the role of climate making these things much more intense, and there are lots of case studies of that.

Sure.

I think one that we've probably all heard a bit about is the Arab Spring.

A quite influential paper was written which proposed that the Arab Spring had been as a result of climate change.

Again, that's far too simplistic.

It wasn't climate change that forced

dictators across the arab world to mistreat people and you know and to oppress those people that then sort of boiled over in into protests and so on but let's think about the triggering event of the the original arab spring in tunisia the young man who's selling vegetables in a market and had his stools sort of smashed up by the police well why was he doing this partly because

it was a desperately poor part of central chinesia where people involved in farming had struggled with rising food prices struggled with unemployment similarly in syria where of course the arab spring really took off in a big way and and turned into a very devastating civil war as everyone knows there decades of shifting climate forced people out of rural areas into cities increasing all kinds of tensions and difficulties within the societies

So that's two good examples where we can see that climate's playing a big role, but of course it's not the only factor.

As the rules-based international order breaks down, at the same time, we're seeing, because of the climate, increased flux, certainly in terms of population dynamics, but also geography itself.

So one of the biggest changes probably in the 2030s will be the ice-free Arctic in the summer.

So, one of the areas of the planet which used to have a fairly settled idea of geopolitical space was the Arctic.

It was literally and metaphorically frozen, whereas if you see it unfrozen, then that becomes a zone of contestation.

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