Hot times at
the apocalypse

Author Gwynne Dyer examines
the coming catastrophes as the planet
warms in his new book Climate Wars

A QUESTION OF DEGREES: Dyer

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

For the last 30 years, Canadian-born and London-based author and journalist Gwynne Dyer has been writing about the crises of the day around the globe. But in his new book, Climate Wars, he addresses the security threats—and potential solutions—facing the planet as a whole, due to catastrophic though entirely avoidable climate change.

With vivid, speculative scenarios interspersing chapters based on interviews with high-level scientists, researchers and activists, and drawing on his own experience and expertise as a military specialist, Dyer paints a grim though evocative picture. His premise: that if we don’t immediately and drastically de-carbonize our societies—and he does not think we will, at least not in enough time to escape some kind of disaster—the planet will be wracked by upheaval the likes of which have been unseen in history.

Industrialized modern states will fail, institutions like the European Union will collapse, millions of refugees will flood prosperous northern countries, nuclear war will be unleashed over water rights, and famine, drought, hurricanes and death on a massive scale will follow. And, as the situation worsens and governments become ever more desperate to feed their populations, global cooperation on climate change will break down, further worsening the problem.

One solution he does consider plausible, though hardly ideal, is geo-engineering: manipulating the environment to offset global warming. The method du jour is releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, simulating a giant volcanic explosion, which would reflect sunlight back into space. Sulfur dioxide being hazardous to human health, millions would die from respiratory illness, without guaranteeing success.

Now more read in Canadian alternative weeklies than CanWest-owned dailies—thanks, he says, to his unpopular criticisms of Israel—Dyer sat down with the Mirror last week at Paragraphe bookstore.

Mirror: What made you want to start investigating the question of the environment in the first place?

Gwynne Dyer: I began to realize that the military were taking an interest in it. First of all in Britain and then the U.S., though they had to be quieter about it because they were working for Mr. Bush, but they were. They were drawing up their scenarios and they were taking it very seriously and seeing a role for themselves, so I thought, “Okay, that’s interesting. I hadn’t been hearing about that!” And that is sort of my bailiwick, so I started looking at that sort of stuff.

And in the process of doing that, you have to talk to an awful lot of scientists as well, so it was a fairly steep learning curve. But the generals are right. There are going to be very large strategic and military consequences if we get even one degree of warming beyond what we have now. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but you just have to think like when you’re taking your kid’s temperature: one degree is a fever, three degrees is a killing fever.

And you’re bound to get one degree. We’ve got one degree of warming locked in, it’s up there now. Greenhouse gases are up there, you just haven’t felt their full effect yet. And that’s going to dry some areas right out, you aren’t going to be able to feed yourself. The rain stops falling here, so what do people do when they can’t feed themselves? They move. So you’re talking refugees, you’re talking failed states, governments that lose all credibility because they can’t feed their own people and, in some cases, you’re probably talking wars.

M: What kind of conflicts are we talking about? There are a lot of scenarios, anything from increased terrorism to low level insurgencies to full-scale war, in the case of India and Pakistan.

GD: I think we’re talking about the full spectrum. It depends on what part of the world you’re looking at and phase of the process you’re in. But you can start with things like the borders, which are already being fortified or will be fortified.

Then you can move on to the kinds of internal upheavals that are going to hit countries when they either can’t feed themselves because it’s a failed state, or in the case of the European Union, when some of the countries are suffering desperately, and others are okay. If you look at what’s happening for example in the Mediterranean, it’s not just North Africa that dries out. The northern side of the Mediterranean gets hit equally hard. You’ve got big, relatively developed countries like Spain and Italy and Turkey and Greece, which are basically no longer able to feed their populations. Now those countries, with the exception of Turkey, are in the European Union—there is freedom of movement. Anybody living in Greece or Spain can move to England or Sweden. So, what happens when they all want to move? I think that’s the end of the European Union, if it happens.

Nukes for water

M: You think [the northern European countries] will say, “Enough is enough…”?

GD: They’ll say enough is enough, we can’t support all these people, and we don’t want freedom of movement. Sorry about that, guys.

And at the high end, in terms of conflict, you get actual wars. Basically, the scenario for wars in most cases has to do with the upstream country keeping the water for itself. So you can very easily generate an India-Pakistani war, because almost all of Pakistan’s water flows through India first, and there is a deal on dividing the water between India and Pakistan. India gets to keep so much and lets the rest flow through, signed in 1960. So it stood the test of time, but the point is, it assumes the rivers are full. When the glaciers melt, all the water runs off in the winter, and the rivers are essentially very low in the summer, when you need the water because that’s what you’re irrigating with. Pakistan is basically a river in the desert. But the Indians have a deal where they get to keep so much of the water. Now, that deal is actually written in terms of the Indians being entitled to taking a fixed volume of water out of the river. And so they’d be perfectly within their rights, as the deal is written, going out and taking the water even if the river only has a quarter of the water in it. They’ll be in enough trouble feeding their population themselves that the temptation will be very powerful. If they do that, there will be very little left for Pakistan and they’ll start to starve. Now, reasonable people or saintly people can work this out, and maybe they will. But maybe they won’t.

M: You emphasize a lot on the “maybes” in the book.

GD: Well, you’re talking about the future, you can’t be definitive about it. But that’s a fairly large maybe. And these countries have got nuclear weapons. This could get really ugly.

M: When you do have these kinds of wars or upheavals that are really between populations—

GD: Yeah, survival stuff.

M: —how do you manage that? Is it a zero-sum game at that point?

GD: It’s very hard to manage because it does turn into zero-sum games. You can hardly accuse people of being unreasonable when they’re acting to avoid starvation, whatever they do. And governments under stress don’t behave responsibly all the time. They’re panicky, they’re desperate, they’re willing to gamble, so you can get really ugly situations out of this. Lots of them.

Flooding the border

M: I found your scenario about the machine guns and the land mines and the moats along the U.S.-Mexican border very interesting, and when, two years ago, CNN’s Lou Dobbs was raising middle America’s collective hackles about the influx of illegal immigrants—

GD: What a piece of shit he is, but yes?

M: Well, what does that say to you about a country like Mexico, where governments are looking at these problems now?

GD: It’s interesting. In the United States, it is mostly the military who are talking about this, and they’re very concerned because they reckon they will be given the job of keeping the border closed, and really closed. And really closing it means, yes, really serious obstacles, like the kind of fence I described—which is actually exactly the kind of fence you use when you really want to stop people. Saudi Arabia is building one all along the Iraqi border right now, that’s where I got the specs from.

But you do have to be willing to kill people to stop them from coming across. If you’re not willing to kill people, they’ll come through anything. If the United States starts killing desperate Mexicans and Central Americans who are trying to make it across that border because there’s no food down there anymore, and the land’s dried up, how do all the people in the U.S. who are of Mexican or Central American descent feel about this? They’re a sixth of the population now, they’ll be a quarter by the time we really get into this deeply, I expect.

[U.S. military planners] are also drawing up a scenario having to relocate significant parts of the population—south Florida, the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, in the low-lying areas. The whole Mississippi delta from New Orleans out to the sea is about one metre above sea level, so eventually you’re going to have to evacuate that. They’re looking at a sort of staged retreat.

So they are quite good at drawing scenarios, and quite realistic about them because they do deal with stuff. These are realistic guys, and they don’t like what they see. I think Obama’s going to get a lot of stuff on his desk in January of this sort. “Here are some scenarios we think you should see, Mr. President.”

The new guy and old numbers

M: You didn’t know who was going to be winning the White House when you were writing this…

GD: No, although I’d made my bets long ago.

M: What are your impressions of Obama, in this context?

GD: He’s on the right side. He does seem to grasp how important the issue is, though he can’t actually give it his full attention at the moment [due to the economic crisis]. When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you came to drain the swamp.

And also he’s working with old numbers [based on the data and projections used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report]. He said the U.S. will get back to 1990 emission levels by 2020 and achieve 80 per cent cuts below them by 2050. Neither of those numbers is realistic. They are not going to do the job. The numbers he’s working with are the numbers that come out of the IPCC, and if you believe their predictions, it’s probably safe that you get your emissions down by 80 per cent by 2050. But those numbers are way below what the scientists that I talked to think are real. The IPCC’s estimates are all biased very low.

M: They had to be vetted by their governments.

GD: They had to be vetted by their governments, but also, all the committees work by consensus, which means the most conservative person in each committee is the one who determines what is acceptable to all of us. And the data are very old by the time the IPCC gets to them. The data that is in the report that we got last year that we’ll be using as our guideline for the next five years, none of it is more recent than 2002. And so, if you base your promises to cut emissions on those predictions, you’re missing the point. It’s moving faster than that.

M: How do you impress upon politicians, especially—George Bush we can write off, but Stephen Harper, for instance—how do you impress upon him that sense of urgency?

GD: Well, I don’t know if you can get Stephen Harper’s attention. George Bush is a write-off, you can’t get his attention, he’s not going to listen now. Harper was in that position two years ago, but he’s shifted. So clearly, whether it’s tactical or whether he has been convinced, he has shifted. He’s no longer in full denial, he just refuses to do anything about it. Which is the next step.

M: Which is what I was getting at—if they say, “Oh yes, climate change is a real problem,” okay, but how does that translate into real work?

GD: Well, for Mr. Harper, it translates into protecting tar sands oil in Alberta, which is not a helpful response. So I don’t think he’s really serious about climate change yet, in the sense that he thinks it’s an issue that’s so important that it overrides the interests of Albertan voters, as he perceives them. So he’s not there yet. He will be dragged along, if not necessarily kicking and screaming, then certainly whimpering. Because the Americans are going to move, and he’s going to have to move at least some distance with them.

Cheat or die

M: There’s also the case made in the book [by the Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown] for a large-scale transference of manufacturing in the U.S. from auto to things like wind turbines. How realistic do you think that is?

GD: I think Lester Brown is a saintly person who is not entirely of this world, as saintly people often are not. And while it makes a great rhetorical point, those factories would not just have to be re-opened, they’d have to be hugely re-tooled. So, I quoted Lester Brown and then I immediately argued with him. I like that man, but I don’t really think he’s my guide on these matters.

M: But there is a kernel of truth there.

GD: There’s certainly more than a kernel of truth in it. This is not a hard problem to solve. This is a straightforward problem. You’ve got to get out of fossil fuels. We have the alternatives. Go. If the political will is there, that will happen. I think, therefore, it will happen, sooner or later. The problem is, it’ll probably be later.

M: Do you think it will be too late?

GD: I think it may be, in which case you need some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, to win yourself a couple of more decades to get your emissions down. So you don’t want to go beyond two degrees Celsius, you’ve got too much carbon dioxide in the air which will take you past two degrees Celsius, and you still haven’t got your emissions down as far as you should. What do you do?

M: Blast sulfur dioxide into the air?

GD: That’s right, that sort of thing. Just to win time. You’re not solving the problem, you shouldn’t imagine you’re solving the problem. You’re winning yourself time to solve the problem, the right way. So when I include that in the picture, there is a way to cheat, then I can feel more optimistic about the future.

CLIMATE WARS, BY GWYNNE DYER,
RANDOM HOUSE, HC, 264 PP, $34.95