A terrifying future of Climate Wars

Gwynne Dyer’s latest book takes a ruthless look at our coming world

Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars

Reading Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars made me think of religious experience. As a boy I was terrified to my core at the realization of Hell: a world of unending, merciless suffering caused by my own actions in this world. It was a fundamental fright that the nonreligious could simply never understand. The same kind of divide exists between those who fully grasp the consequences of climate change and the rest of us, who though we assume ourselves educated, are in reality ignorant to the realization of how deeply it will change our world.

“By the later half of the century if everything goes pear-shaped: the European Union is no more, southern Europe is starving, being overwhelmed by refugees from northern Africa but also producing refugees themselves trying to get further north because Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece can’t feed themselves. At this point the Brits pull up the drawbridge…” Sitting across the table from me, Dyer continues to paint the geopolitical results of the most current models of climate change. His book is terrifying not because this is the most frightening of all possible scenarios, but because it is the most probable if we fail to curb greenhouse emissions over the next 10 to 30 years. And more frightening is that the source is the utterly pragmatic military minds of America and Britain. “In early 2007 the Pentagon… got a think tank in Washington to take the scientific data of climate change, apply it to the real world, and see what blows up. And quite a lot blows up.”

Dyer himself is a globally known international affairs journalist and has spent the better part of the last year travelling the world researching this topic. It’s startling how closely the military and scientific views parallel each other. Both are preparing for a globe that has tipped far further from balance than what the average citizen can stomach.

“We can only take so much reality,” ventures Dyer. “The military have what you might call a professionally pessimistic view of human nature. The scientists have not got an automatically pessimistic point of view but a ruthlessly realistic point of view. The two mesh very well.”

They have in common a beautiful appreciation of how the systems of our world are integrated. For each foot that sea levels rise, large parts of low lying countries are erased. For each degree of global heat, large areas of fertile food production disappear, leaving populations to starve. Governments simply have to respond to these things, and they generally respond militarily when stressed to breaking.

Dyer’s work excels at being, at the same time, breathtaking in scope and horrifying in import. It’s a practical, step-by-step explanation of the coming apocalypse, with an eye especially to points where existing social systems will fracture. As one of his favourite interviewees explained: “Political and security systems in the world actually have environmental niches of their own…have all evolved in the same climatic era… stresses in one place or another do not mean good news for representative democracy.”

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Jan 29, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=16386