Gwynne Dyer Speaks About Climate Wars on Democracy Now

Note from Dorothy: We’ve posted about Gwynne Dyer and a previous editon of his remarkable book “Climate Wars” before, and there’s been excellent coverage in Canada. But with a new edition of his book out, this interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales at Democracy Now should bring even more attention to his important message…As always, I cannot overemphasize the importance of “mitigation” of dangerous climate change as well as “adaptation” to its effects. Without mitigation, most of Dyer’s nightmare scenarios will become the future reality.

Please click on the title below for better quality video and to read the full transcript from Democracy Now.

Gwynne Dyer on “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats”

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Transcript from Democracy Now

JUAN GONZALEZ: A heat wave from Boston to Baghdad to Beijing over the past few days is setting record-breaking temperatures in cities across the world. In Beijing, the mercury level hit a near-record 105 degrees. In Baghdad it was 113 degrees. In Kuwait, 122. Here in the U.S., cities along the East Coast from New York to Charlotte all topped 100 degrees. Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Newark all set new record highs. Indeed 2010 is set to be one of the hottest years on record according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The global average surface temperature for the first time in five months of the year was the warmest on record. Meanwhile, a new analysis says the world is headed for an average temperature rise that far exceeds pledges at the Copenhagen climate conference last year. According to the climate interactive scoreboard, temperatures are expected to rise nearly 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, double the maximum two degrees discussed in Copenhagen. A separate analysis from the Postdam Institute in Germany says there’s virtually no chance current pledges will keep temperatures below two degrees and predicts an increase of 3.5 degrees.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, a new book by geopolitical analyst and columnist Gwynne Dyer imagines what the politics and demographics of the world might look like if temperatures continue to rise. Dyer writes ‘In this world our worries are not just hotter summers, bigger hurricanes, rising sea levels, and polar bears swimming for their lives. We’re trying to avoid megadeaths from mass starvation and quite possibly from nuclear wars and the odds aren’t good,” he writes.The book is called “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.” Author Gwynne Dyer, joins us here freelance journalist and specialist on international affairs and geopolitics. His written several books.

Welcome to “DEMOCRACY NOW!”

GWYNNE DYER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you lay out the scenario, what you could see it happen?

GWYNNE DYER: The military themselves have begun making plans and making provisions for the kind of roles they perceive themselves having in a warming world. Really what drives almost all of their scenarios is that the principal impact of warming on human beings is on the food supply. That the hotter it gets, the less food we can grow. About 1 degree Celsius average global temperature rise, you lose 10% of the supply, global grain production, rule of thumb. And there’s no slack in the system, we are eating all that we grow. And so what they see is a variety of ills arising from absolute shortage of food-–refugees coming up against borders that do not want to let them in, but you’re starving back home, their farm is dried up and blowing away. You are trying to get in some place where there is food and they do not want to let you in. It gets very ugly in that sort of border. Failed States, a government that cannot feed its own people does not survive. Job one, keep people alive. If you cannot do that, you’ve no credibility left. In some cases, real interstate wars. Because in very many parts of the world, several countries share the same river, which is fine when there is enough water to go around. When there is not, the upstream countries got a serious temptation to hold on to enough water for itself and the hell with the down Street countries. Then they have the choice of five or starve. India and Pakistan, Egypt and countries further up the Nile. Iraq vs Turkey. I think there may be a war between Iraq and Turkey today, if Iraq was not flat on its back, because the Turks are holding water back. There’s no water in the Euphrates River this year.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But isn’t the assumption that all this dislocation would be created as the temperature rises based on the existing inequities in society, in the world in general, continuing? The wealthier countries are obviously dominating control of the food supply and also the consumption of the food supply.

GWYNNE DYER: Well that is perfectly true. But what makes the matter considerably worse is that not everybody gets hit as hard by the warming. The countries further away from the equator, temperate zones like most of the United States (bits of it are in the tropics, but most of the United States is in the temperate zone), Europe, Japan, they’re relatively unharmed until we get way deep into climate change. You would have to get to three degrees before they start losing food production. But the tropics and subtropics, which takes in about two-thirds of the world, get hit very hard very early. So that the existing inequities are enormously magnified because it is precisely the poor countries that are losing food production. But so much so there is an absolute global shortage, which means the poorest people start to starve.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s turn to the Pentagon’s view of climate change. Earlier this year the Pentagon highlighted climate concerns in its main public document on military strategy released every four years, the quadrennial defense review or QDR. This is Michele Flournoy, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

MICHELLE FLOURNOY: This is the first QDR to address climate and energy issues, which are both significant factors in the future security environment. Climate change could increase demand for U.S forces and humanitarian response, creating a new operating environment in the Arctic, and requiring adaptation in our own facilities and systems. DOD’s enormous dependence on energy makes its operations vulnerable to disruptions in energy flows and to price fluctuations. DOD aims to be a leader in the government to improve sustainability, resource efficiency, increase of renewable energy supplies, and reduction of energy demand to improve operational effectiveness and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the Pentagon’s view. Now I was really struck Gwynne Dyer, when you described in this book how here was the Bush administration for years denying human caused climate change or that it was going to have any dramatic affect, but behind-the-scenes its own Pentagon is working to deal with dramatic effects of climate change.

GWYNNE DYER: Exactly. Well, that’s their job.—There’s two aspects to this. One, the military are always looking for the next job. I mean like any other organization, we need to justify the budget. And we won’t be in Afghanistan forever, whats next? So there’s sort of self-serving justification. But at the same time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the sort of brains of the Army-–armed forces, have the job of detecting emerging threats to U.S. security. Well, what’s the emerging threat? And the emerging threat is climate change. Even if they’re not supposed to, or it is not good for your career and Mr. Bush to seen publicly to be looking at climate change, in the back room, of course they’re doing it. They would be irresponsible not to. And they were.

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the nightmare scenarios that you lay out in the book has to do with the U.S. and Mexico. Obivously, the Mexican border, the 2,000 mile border, its the only place in the world a developing or third-world country as a continuous land border with an advanced country. Lay out your scenario for what could conceivably happen at the U.S.-Mexico border.

GWYNNE DYER: Well, Mexico and Central America, and most of the Caribbean as well, are going to lose a lot of food production quite early in the warming process. Its all in the subtropics. The subtropics basically get hit by a severe lack of rain and in some places the farms just dry up and blow away. When that happens particularly in Central America and Mexico, the first response of people is you go north, it is a well-established pattern, if you are in trouble, you need money, you can’t feed your family, head north. And the current U.S. borders is organized to allow for that to occur to a certain extent. Its fairly porous, catch some, let some through. And it provides a safety valve for the Mexican state. All of this is fine when what you’re talking about is half a million people a year, you’re getting across the border, many of whom go home after the harvest, that sort of thing. But if you start losing food production and people are seriously hungry in Mexico, Guatemala and so on, their numbers are going to swell. What the United States Army thinks is that at some point in the next 10 or 15 years as those numbers swell, popular demand in the U.S. for something to be done will make the Congress instruct the armed forces to close the Mexican border for real. Which you can do, but only if you’re willing to kill people. That is the dirty little secret about frontiers. We can seal frontiers, two words: Iron curtain. We now have to do this. But you have to be willing to kill people if you want to seal the frontier 2,000 miles long, you can’t do it with good will. The U.S. Army doesn’t want to do that because it can see this would cause the most grievous social divisions in the United States. US Army killing Hispanic people at the Mexican border, but they anticipate they will be ordered to.

AMY GOODMAN: Your book begins to say the least, a nightmare scenario, the year 2045. I was wondering if you could just read us the scenario.?

GWYNNE DYER: Since the final collapse of European Union in 2036 under the stress of mass migration from the southern to northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France, Denmark, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy south of Rome, has largely been overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries, and is no longer part of the organized state. Spain, northern Italy and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of norther Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.—I think that is why there renewing their deterrent, by the way, right now-–. Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change, in terms of food production is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020’s and 2030’s poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders for even the much reduced Chinese population of 800 million is unable to feed itself from the country’s increasingly arid farm land, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain, and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is reemerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, remain swept by famine and anarchy due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges, and Bramaputra rivers. Welcome to 2036.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what geoengineering is?

GWYNNE DYER: It is the whole card, the get out of jail free card, the only one I know of, its the only one I know of frankly. I don’t know a single scientist nor do I know many policymakers, who in their honest moments think we are going to get our emissions down in time to avoid tumbling into potentially runaway climate change. The two degrees Celsius average global temperature, after that we lose control. Natural factors, feedbacks from the permafrost melting and so on, takeover and carry us to really devastating levels of warming 4-5-6 degrees. You’re trapped on this escalator and you can’t get off. So, if that’s where we are heading, what do you do? We’ll do the best to cut the emissions but its not going to happen in time. And the answer is geoengineering. You cheat. You find ways to hold the temperature down while you go on working at the project of getting your emissions down. It is a long-term solution, but if waiting, just getting your emissions down is your only technique, sorry, you’re going to trigger the feedbacks, you’re in run away. So cheat. The phrase we’re all going to know in two years time is SRM, and that stands for Solar Radiation Management. It is a variety of techniques for interrupting enough of the sunlight incoming from space before reaches the surface to keep the temperature somewhat—I am not talking about enough so it gets dark at noon, or something— 1% would do. So, you put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere—I mean we already dump a lot in the lower atmosphere, we put it up in the stratosphere, where it will stay for a couple of years. This is what big volcanoes do when they explode, and actually we get a cooler global temperature the year after a larger volcano explodes. So we could do that, you know we use mid-air refueling aircraft, put some sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere or thicken up the clouds over the oceans, the low-lying clouds. There was even one suggestion—the Energy Secretary Steven Chu bounced it out in March—we could lower average global temperature by one degree Celsius simply by painting all of the roofs and the roads white.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I am still troubled to some degree by this analysis that seems to preclude the possibility of changes in the society that would dramatically begin to help us move away from this nightmare scenario. It seems to some degree the military may be pushing this again as a way to exercise more, as you’re saying, a new frontier for the military. Could this lead—the threat of major calamity—lead to more push for authoritarianism?

GWYNNE DYER: I think so-–

JUAN GONZALEZ:—Or military control over society?

GWYNNE DYER: I think that’s true. I don’t think necessarily the US military wants that, but I think it could well come out of this. The initiative for geoengineering is not coming out of the military, I’ve spent a lot of time on this. It’s coming out of the scientific community, who even a couple of years ago had an absolute taboo on ever-mentioning geoengineering techniques in front of the children, us, because they did not trust us. You know, if we know we can just cheat and hold the heat down, we won’t do the hard yards of getting the emissions down, so do not tell them. What has changed in the scientific community, is that they are so scared, that game is over, yea, there is a moral hazard, here, moral hazard be damned, we’re going to need this stuff so let’s get some research done, understand what the side effects might be. So they’ve gone public.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we are going to break here. We were actually going to end with you and go on to our next guest, but we think it would be interesting to mix it up with our next guest, so we will keep you on with us and bring on our next guest. Gwynne Dyer, author of “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.” He will be joined by Vandana Shiva. I think she has some more critical views of geoengineering. So, it should be very interesting. I know this has been a record heat wave we have been experiencing on the east coast, it will get even hotter in a moment.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/8/gwynne_dyer_on_climate_wars_the