Climate Wars [Paperback]

Gwynne Dyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

The core problem with climate change is not sea level rise or biodiversity; it is food supply. We are just barely able to feed the current six-and-a-half billion people on the planet. At 2 degrees hotter, many hundreds of millions are at risk but, with global cooperation and a switch away from meat production (let people eat the grain, not cows), they wouldn't have to starve. At 5 degrees hotter, there are no good options left. What makes this a political and potentially a strategic issue is the fact that the misery will not be equally shared. As rainfall patterns shift, some countries lose most of their best croplands while others come through the change unharmed or even gain new food-growing areas in the sub-Arctic. There is a bitter irony here, for the list of beneficiaries includes most of the countries that industrialised early and caused the problem to grow to its current size. There is also huge scope for conflict, including armed conflict, because nobody will sit quietly and watch their children starve when any alternatives remain, including violent ones. Some of those watching their children starve will have the resources and technology to threaten those who still have food (but just enough food). The only way to avoid this future, if it can be avoided, is to get greenhouse gas emissions down drastically in the next 10-15 years. But making the deal that would mandate and enforce those deep cuts in emissions, especially the part of the deal that brings the 'new' industrialising countries into the effort, is ferociously difficult politically, and there is no guarantee that it will happen in time. If it doesn't, the next few generations are in for a wild ride.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Civil war in China and the collapse of the European Union by 2045; nuclear strikes between India and Pakistan in 2036; people being blown up by land mines and machine-gunned by automatic weapons at a sealed U.S./Mexican border in 2029—these are just some of the terrifying climate change scenarios forecast by journalist and geopolitical analyst Dyer (The Mess They Made). His apocalyptic predictions are drawn from unimpeachable sources: climate experts like NASA scientist James Hanson and Angela Merkel's climate change adviser, Dr. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; military and political sources including former CIA head James Woolsey. Even Dyer's most optimistic scenario is barely cause for celebration: humanity manages to curb global warming enough to save itself, but only after several million deaths and countless disasters. The multitude of sources and the political perspective on global warming make the book scarier and more convincing than the usual predictions limited to climate and weather. Environmentalists will likely be horrified and even more depressed than they are already, but we can hope that Dyer's sources are impressive enough to convince policy makers to take serious action. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Terrifying is just one of the words to leap off the page." --Bookseller

"Gwynne Dyer is one of the few who are both courageous enough to tell the unvarnished truth, and have the background to understand, not misrepresent the inputs. This book does a superb job of detailing the emerging realities of Climate/Energy. These realities are not pretty." --Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA

"This is a truly important and timely book. Gwynne Dyer has made the best and most plausible set of guesses I have yet seen about the human consequences of climate change, of how drought and heat may ignite wars, even nuclear wars, around the globe." --James Lovelock, award-winning scientist, inventor, and originator of the "Gaia" hypothesis

"The current debate on climate change is mostly on its future effects, but few are brave enough to work out what they might be. Here is a lively, alarming and even entertaining attempt to look ahead. Water and war have always been associated. We need hope as well as good sense in looking at the future. Here it is." --Sir Crispin Tickell, former Chairman of both the Board of the Climate Institute of Washington DC and the International Institute for Environment and Development

"Anyone still complacent about climate change will find Climate Wars instructive and disturbing. These articulate insights into climate geopolitics by Gwynne Dyer are an important tool for understanding why the climate challenge is big, hard, and vital to human survival -- yet soluble if we pay attention now." --Amory B. Lovins, Time magazine's Hero of the Environment, author of Capitalism as if the World Matters, and Chairman & Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute

"Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats has been called 'a truly important and timely book,' but I'd go further. I'll say this may be the most important book you'll read this year." --Mickey Z, planet green

"[Dyer] eloquently explores the `grim detail' of how governments will grapple with a challenge unprecedented since before there were governments. You won't find this stuff in any IPCC report... It makes for a good read." -- New Scientist

"Frightening yet essential reading." -- Library Journal

"Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats has been called 'a truly important and timely book,' but I'd go further. I'll say this may be the most important book you'll read this year." -- Mickey Z on Planet Green --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribe Publications (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1921372222
• ISBN-13: 978-1921372223
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,623,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book talks to military about projected geopolitical effects - view of CCS for coal seems accurate February 7, 2009

By J. Waugh

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Outstanding book. This offers a perspective that isn't available for the most part to people. The author talks about the effects not focused on in the media (the media often focuses on rising sea levels which are later happenings and will be the least of our problems for many decades), he talks about the move of the very dry sub tropic atmospheric regions northward (already occurring) and what it means for the worlds farm areas - not good and is impacting areas already. Then he talks about possible geo-political impacts of these. Mr. Dwyer talked with Military planners as well as scientists to find projected effects of Global Warming, long before we have to worry about rising sea levels. And in particular with the Military planners (US and foreign) what projected geopolitical effects they see - big destabilizing ones. The US military under President Bush sees this as real and the biggest threat to the US in the decades ahead, because of what it does to stability of other countries. He touches on where we are in relation to actually dealing with the problem (not good) and touches on whether he thinks the world's political establishments can actually deal with this in a timely way.

He also analyzes ways of dealing with the problem, both from a phasing out CO2 emissions perspective, but he also analyzes proposed geo-engineering stop gaps - which would be possibly used when we blow the deadlines (as we're on track to) and face disastrous consequences. He analyzes how this scientific based problem became enmeshed into ideological struggles in the US, Australia and Canada and not other parts of the World (for the most part) - fascinating analysis.

Regarding the previous reviewers opinion on the authors analysis of Coal CCS - I have to disagree with what the reviewer said. The author analyzes it, just as he analyzes all the other solutions (or proposed solutions), dispassionately and with an even hand - the main issue he saw with CCS (besides the fact that a true CCS plant hasn't been built yet) was that it will result in very expensive electricity (as a good portion of the power and construction investment costs from the plant would have to be used for CCS) and looking at it from a market perspective, it won't be very successful because of that (cause it will be very expensive electricity). (i.e. you could put CCS on your car, but it would be complicated and expensive and there are other cheaper solutions available to get to the same end goal of eliminating/reducing CO2 emissions).

Mr. Dwyer's own opinion is that we won't be able to get our act together enough to prevent the big feedback's from kicking in and taking control of climate change away from just CO2 emissions reduction - and that we'll eventually (probably) have to entertain some of the geo-engineering solutions (he doesn't actually like that conclusion) and that it would be smart to have researched/tested them and have them available to us before they're needed - these things might prevent ice caps from totally melting (Antarctica and Greenland), but wouldn't keep the oceans from becoming too acidic and dying for the most part.

This is a phenomenal work, obviously compiled with great effort and care. The extensive interviews he conducted were done in 2008 and included the latest opinions of scientists and military planners at that point. It provides a well reasoned opinion on things and possible geo-political outcomes based on projected effects that isn't available in most publications on climate change or in the political debate relating to it. Its a work to get, but its worth it - best climate change book I've read in years.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The Geopolitics of Climate Change September 8, 2009

By Randy A. Stadt

Format:Paperback

The title "Climate Wars" hints at Dyer's contention that global warming will not be a benign phenomenon where things will continue as before. Rather like the human body, where a fever of only three and a half degrees Celcius is potentially fatal, an increase of only a few degrees can potentially cause massive changes in the earth's climate. The earth's biosphere appears to be more fine-tuned and fragile than we thought, and we have unknowingly pushed it far toward making the earth a far less habitable place for humans to live.

He believes that irreversible changes are coming at a rate higher than even recent generally accepted predictions, so that the goal, for example, of the U.S. and British governments to achieve 80 percent cuts to emissions by 2050, is not enough. To illustrate what may be coming, then, he creates a number of fictitious scenarios, set at various times in the relatively near future. These scenarios are possible futures he imagines in a world increasingly under stress from the effects of climate change. They illustrate his point that global warming is not the relatively easy problem that, for example, CFC's and the ozone layer was, where the world could simply rally together and deal effectively with it.

Though there are technological hurdles to be overcome, they are not insurmountable, and could largely be dealt with in the next couple of decades if the international community, with a single mind, made a decision to move away from oil and coal energy sources and develop alternatives. Of course that would include, among other projects, building five million wind turbines around the world in the next five years - quite an undertaking, but certainly doable, especially if you consider that the world builds 65 million cars a year. He believes that we could achieve 80 percent cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, if the political will were there. And politics is the arena where the game will be decided. It is political will, not technological solutions, that that will limit our response to the coming crisis.

As the effects of climate change manifest themselves it will become clear why the international community will not be of a single mind. Developing nations, such as India and China, will not agree to curb their emissions to the same degree as the old, fully industrialized nations, at least not at first. They will consider it a matter of basic justice that they be allowed to catch up in economic development before making their cuts, and that the West will have to take the initiative and actually accept deeper cuts initially than if everything were across-the-board. This is going to be an extremely hard sell with voters in the developed countries, who will certainly object to paying for benefits that will be spread to countries that not only are not paying for them but are continuing to belch out greenhouse gases.

Another feature of climate change that can lull policy makers to inactivity is the huge amount of latency between cause and effect. There is roughly a 40 year lag in seeing the effects of current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. So at the time when we need to act (now), climate effects are only beginning to be felt, and we don't feel the sense of urgency that we ought. And to make it worse, thirty years from now when we're really working hard to address the problem, it will seem that it isn't helping, because things will actually be getting worse, even though we would then be mitigating the effects for a future generation. So the difficulty is not only in getting started, but in staying the course.

This forty-year lag in climate effect means that regardless of what we do now, there will be at least some negative changes felt in mid-century. These changes, including drought and sea-level rise, will cause some countries to suffer a lot more than others. The one critical, indispensable, sine qua non of reducing and then eliminating greenhouse gas emissions is international cooperation. And we see that even today, when things are relatively good, that is hard to achieve. But when climate change starts causing food shortages and mass displacement of people, any chance of international cooperation will vanish. Climate treaties will not be much of a priority for especially the developing countries as all their efforts will be focussed on maintaining order and feeding their people. Conflict over dwindling resources and access to food will intensify as, after all, Dyer notes grimly, "people always raid before they starve."

There is general agreement that we need to keep warming below 2 degrees Celcius so that feedbacks don't kick in that would make warming a self-sustaining process. Dyer thinks we won't make emissions-reducing deadlines to prevent that. So it will be necessary, today, to begin preparing, for future use, geo-engineering strategies which would produce a cooling effect, allowing us the time to stop carbon dioxide emissions and then bring atmospheric concentrations back to a safe level, while keeping the temperature from rising more than 2 degrees. One such technique, mimicking the action of volcanoes, could be the release of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, producing a temporary "global dimming."

Dyer's dark forecast is more extreme than the views held by most policy makers and climate scientists, but it is not implausible. Plausibility factors much into of our lives, for example our decision to buy fire insurance even though it is not likely that we will ever experience a house fire. As so much is at stake in the uncertain predictions of climate change, to err on the side of caution can hardly be called foolish. And as worldwide oil resources dwindle and prices skyrocket, we are going to have to make massive changes away from oil-based economies anyways. We ought to consider ourselves fortunate that we are only now facing this coming crisis, and not fifty years ago when we had no alternatives to fossil fuels.

39 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars great addition to the climate change literature, but inaccurate on carbon capture December 3, 2008

By David Lewis

This book should be required reading for anyone interested in climate change.

Dyer got up to speed on this issue in part by interviewing many of the senior scientists personally. He has been mostly interested in military issues until now. Read this book, and you'll discover that climate change is a military issue. Perhaps the dire scenarios Dyer calmly discusses here will help more people understand that this issue must be faced at some point. Maybe, beyond hope or expectation, we'll be able to do more in the way of changing the way we use energy to support our way of life now rather than waiting to be overcome by events, such as increased international tension leading to war, later.

My main caveat with Dyer's analysis comes over his assessment of carbon capture and storage. It seems to me he's just buying into the widespread rejection of what Big Coal has done over the last number of years as they touted carbon capture while not building a single full scale plant anywhere in the world. People are rejecting the technology rather than the politics Big Coal employed, and Dyer has fallen into this trap. He says people "believe" in carbon capture but are "delusional" as if the IPCC itself wasn't the foundation for the interest. But this is a minor point: he's only devoted a few pages to carbon capture in this book.

Otherwise, everything else in this book indicates Dyer is thinking for himself after careful study. Dyer is a good writer who has looked deeply into the subject. He has a unique perspective, he writes what he thinks, and what he thinks is worth paying attention to.