Gwynne Dyer spoke in Vancouver yesterday about his recent book “Climate Wars”. He has written extensively on foreign affairs and war, but his curiosity soared about climate change when he found some information about the British military’s preparation for climate change related scenarios in the future. He secured a book deal that gave him 18 months of research around the world interviewing politicians, military officials, and scientists, then stringing it together with some bold predictions. Generally the science is bang on and consistent with my own research, the environmental implications based on the science are quite accurate and consistent with the current consensus; the predictions he shares about how humans will handle the situation are somewhat bold and even controversial. Below is a summery of his lecture…

“Scientists are scared”, Dyer proclaimed near the beginning of his talk. The most recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report in 2007 gives a range of climate change scenarios; for instance the one on temperature suggest an average warming of between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2100. Some of the most recent data suggests that even the high-end estimates in the 2007 report are on the low side. For instance artic sea ice coverage is down from 7 million square km’s to 4.3 million. Some predictions have gone as far to say that we could have an ice free artic by 2013.

Dyer explained that the problem with the IPCC is that it is a consensus, thus all scientists involved must agree on the numbers; this inherently biases the numbers toward the lowest common denominator. Also the reports used to base these predictions on are old. The cut off for official documents used by the panel for the latest ‘07 report was the end of ‘05. For the reports to be peer reviewed and published they would have had to be written by the end of ‘03; that means the data must have been from 2002 or earlier. This means our political action today is based on out of date information. This is bad news because climate change is happening at an alarming rate, much faster than even the IPCC had predicted. Dyers research on military forecasts show that they’ll have lots of work, and much of the concern is based on food supply, “eating is a non negotiable activity, without it your carbon footprint will be zero within 6 weeks”.

One scenario of conflict he suggested was between Mexico and the US. American farms will be hit hard because of changes in how Hadley cells distribute heat and moisture from the equator. Mexico will unfortunately lose much of their growing capacity, and will thus look north to America; but with the yanks own domestic shortages, the US may close the border in a militaristic way, which could cause anger amongst the America’s Mexican population which by 2030 could be as much as ¼. Leading to a divided country rivaling that of the civil war.

He suggests similar situation may arise in many parts of the world. Pakistan and India will have conflict on water usage from the Indus River once the glaciers in the Himalayas have melted. Without the water, India could lose approximately 25% of it’s food production; because India has 4 of the 5 tributaries running through it before the water reaches Pakistan, there won’t be much left, if any. So if human nature follows  course, Pakistan will raid its neighbor before letting their children starve. Because he is well versed in the field of war, having written about eight books on the subject, it is hard to discount some of his predictions.

He told us that Australia has conceded that their current drought is actually climate change, because droughts end and this one isn’t….The EU could face hardships when mass immigration northward begins due to loss of growing area in the south…. Negotiating Climate Change treaties such as the Kyoto will become difficult due to countries in peril.

He then talks about the point-of-no-return, which happens when global temperature rise reaches two degrees warmer than 1990 levels. We are already committed to 1.3, and Dyer, along with most scientists, believe we are going to sail right past this point despite the fact that the technology is available to prevent this. Once the point is past, we’ll lose control, meaning that no matter what we do, even if we cut our emissions to zero, the planet will warm dramatically toward the six-degree warmer mark, and perhaps beyond. Reasons for this uncontrollable feedback is due to oceans becoming carbon emitters rather than sinks, and because of the melting of permafrost. As the permafrost melts, large stores of methane will be released into the atmosphere and will act as a heating agent that is 20 times more powerful than CO2.

He is briefly optimistic when talking about solutions such as creating bio fuel out of pond scum (algae) and about the potential for clean energy by combining hydrogen and carbon. Along with the standard solutions such as photovoltaic, wind power, wave energy, and geothermal, he concludes that we have the answers. He then states that he doesn’t believe we’ll implement them fast enough. Bottom line, he concludes, is that we are going hit 400 or 500 or more p.p.m. of carbon in the atmosphere. “So are we doomed?” he asks, his suggestion is no, because human ingenuity may have a couple more tricks to play in the form of geoengineering (the cooling kind of human produced climate change, not the warming kind which we’re already successful at).

The two leading geoengineering propositions he shares are first, to mimic the action of volcanoes, which can cool the atmosphere slightly as Pinatubo did in ‘91. This can be accomplished simply by mixing jet fuel with sulfur dioxide. Whew! The second is to send automated ships out in the ocean that pump up mist from the ocean to thicken the marine strato cumulous cloud coverage, bouncing the excess heat away from the oceans. Dyer believes these measures may be acted on within five or ten years. He claims these (far-fetched) ideas will win us ten to twenty years which will give us time to reduce emissions to where we need them. This is a very controversial conclusion, and a dangerous one to bank on. It can lead toward lax climate change actions based on the thought that science will solve the problem without us having to change our lifestyles. Dyer certainly wasn’t claiming that we can all relax now, he is more alarmed than ever, but at the same time he concludes that his optimism is much higher than when he began his research, and is glad that there is a vision for a way through this mess.