…in which McNutt recaps Gwynne Dyer’s lecture on global heating

…in which McNutt recaps Gwynne Dyer’s lecture on global heating

March 8, 2007, 7:23 am
Filed under: News and politics

The sky is falling…

For the first time, I am genuinely and deeply terrified about the dangers of climate change. Not just “worried” or “concerned,” as I was before; anyone with half a brain in the Western world fits into those categories. No, after attending a provocative lecture by Newfoundland-born but globally-educated academic-turned-journalist Gwynne Dyer on Monday night, I am shitting-my-pants terrified about what the future might hold.

Speaking in front of a 3/4-full auditorium at Dalhousie University without his trademark spectacles, Dyer looked something like Jack Nicholson as he paced the stage and spoke passionate and declaratively. I’ve been a big fan of his for a few years now, following his internationally-published column on a regular basis and reading a few of his books. I think part of his appeal for me is that he’s a hardened geopolitical realist but his foreign policy views still lie somewhat slightly to the left of the political spectrum (to be a bit reductionist). I also think that his chapter in his book War about nuclear strategy ranks as one of the best analyses I’ve read of Cold War policy. So I was interested when a co-worker pointed out that he was going to be speaking at Dal, and incredibly curious when learning that his topic of conversation was going to be climate change. How on earth did this connect to his expertise in foreign policy?

This is a fairly long recap, but it’s a testament as to how memorable Dyer’s speech was that I can recall this much of it even though I forgot to bring my notepad. I’m posting this summary not necessarily because I agree with all of it – I’m not nearly knowledgeable enough on some of these issues right now to challenge it as much as I would like to – but because Dyer’s lecture was provocative and thought-inspiring and terrifying enough that its content deserves to be shared with those who missed out.

Nuclear deterrence

Dyer began his presentation by answering my question about how climate change connects to foreign policy, describing an article he wrote a couple of years ago criticizing the British government for senselessly upgrading its nuclear arsenal several years before it was necessary to do so. A few months after writing the article he was talking to his wife about a new report on global heating (Dyer finds the term ‘global warming’ to be too mundane to describe what’s taking place) and a light bulb went off in his head. Since then, Dyer claims that several of his sources within the British Ministry of Defence have confirmed to him that the upgrades to the military arsenal were part of intensive ‘scenario preparation’ due to climate change.

How do nukes relate to climate change? Here’s the scenario that Dyer painted for us: forget the polar bears, the ice caps and the other clichéd pitfalls of global warming – the real threat is to our global food supply. A global temperature increase in the range that is being discussed now – not just 2 degrees but maybe 5 or more in the next 50-60 years – would radically alter the earth’s weather patterns, expanding the desert belt that lies north and south of the equator even further north and south into some of the most agriculturally-productive lands in the world. Dyer’s suggests that such a scenario could cut global food production by 25% or more – and we’re barely feeding the world as it is.

Nations that are further north or south – Australia, Russia, all of Scandinavia, Britain and, yes, Canada – would fare reasonably well under this scenario; that is, until they’re faced with millions upon millions of refugees at their borders, displaced people who no longer have the agricultural land to sustain themselves. Dyer creepily joked about Canada facing an influx of almost 200 million American refugees – who, in a retread of manifest destiny, will probably think that the land rightfully belongs to them anyways. So in a scenario such as this, it’s not far-fetched to foresee the well-off countries, such as Britain, closing their borders, and other nation-states or rogue groups doing everything in their power – including nuclear persuasion – to try and get their people through them.

Apocalyptic fearmongering? Perhaps. But captivating and terrifying nonetheless.

End of the golden age

Dyer then moved onto the topic that took up much of his discussion: current geopolitical realities and how they relate to our chances at confronting global heating. Dyer believes that we’re in a sort of “golden age” in terms of conflict on this planet where – despite all the shit going down – 90 per cent of the people on earth have never had a hostile shot fired at them and where none of the great military powers are at war with one another (a rarity in global history). Given that any pact to combat climate change needs to be international, and needs to involve complicated negotiations between the current industrialized powers (mainly the US, but also Europe and Russia) and the rapidly-industrializing countries (China, India, Brazil, etc.), Dyer believes that maintaining this relative global peace is essential to getting concrete action in place as soon as possible.

But he fears that we’re losing this peace and losing it quickly. Drawing extensively from his upcoming book, Fighting Decline: American Power and the Rise of Asia, Dyer discussed how the relationship between the U.S. and China is on tenuous ground as the latter prepares to surpass the former economically within 30-50 years (and with economic power comes political/military power – and India isn’t far behind either). While much of the world (Dyer included) might come to see a multi-polar great power scenario as all fine and dandy, this scares the crap out of Washington, in particular the neoconservative think tanks and bureaucrats who have dominated the Defence Department since the Reagan era. So while American policy in the Middle East has gotten most of the media attention over the past 15 or so years, Dyer believes that American policy towards China is far more significant.

(One of the most memorable lines from Dyer’s presentation was his confession that “I don’t care about the Middle East anymore,” explaining that while instability in the region is a problem, it’s something of a footnote to the larger global trends occurring at present. This, and his assertion that the primary motivation for the Iraq War was to secure a military presence in the Middle East in the interest of China containment – more control over China’s oil supply and something of a warning shot – ranked among the most provocative parts of his lecture, and probably the points that I had the most issue with. Great food for thought, though.)

20th Century Comeback

Dyer drew a direct parallel from the situation that the United States faces to that which Britain faced a century ago: the world’s greatest power witnessing other nations about to overtake it. Seeking to buy time, Britain targeted who it thought was its biggest economic threat – Germany – and formed a series of alliances, economic arrangements and military pacts with surrounding countries in an attempt to contain it. This, of course, eventually steamrolled into the global clusterfuck known as World War I. But this strategy did succeed in leaving Britain as a significant global power for another 40 years or so.

And so we come to today, where the United States has targeted China as its primary economic threat and is making a series of agreements with its neighbours (“Nobody calls these ‘alliances’ anymore, but that’s what they are” noted Dyer). The U.S./Japan relationship has a long history, but the Americans are currently pushing the Japanese to rewrite its constitution and remilitarize. They’ve been making significant inroads into Mongolia and Indochina – Dyer says to expect a formal announcement of a U.S./Vietnam agreement sometime in the next year or two. And most important of all is the American relationship with India, which over the past two years has seen the U.S. forgive and forget India’s violation of international nuclear treaties and starting to provide the developing country with increased military and economic aid.

Now, Dyer doesn’t seem to think that this situation is necessarily going to lead to another World War or anything. Right now, the Chinese view on the situation is that it’s all just showboating from the Americans that really won’t matter as the Chinese economy grows and grows. But Dyer is concerned that as the Chinese population becomes more educated and aware of the American containment, they’ll push their government into taking more provocative action and then we could be on the verge of another Cold War. Even putting aside the economic and military implications of replaying the 20th century over again, Dyer believes that the biggest casualty of all will be any concrete global action on climate change – and with that goes the neighbourhood.

Drastic measures

So after confessing his fears about the collapsing of the current global order, Dyer closed his presentation by explaining how he saw climate change policy playing out should cooler heads prevail in the American/Chinese relationship (and Dyer thinks that how the Americans respond to the loss in Iraq – and it is a loss – will play a big part in how international foreign policy will develop over the next five years).

In many ways, this was the most sobering part of Dyer’s analysis, as he made it very clear that although our efforts on an individual level make a difference – changing light bulbs, driving less, turning down the thermostat – it’s so far from enough that it’s scary. We are going to have to have significant initiatives at the governmental level to achieve the kind of dramatic, short-term reversal in carbon emissions that we need to begin to turn this ship around (and given their track record thus far, the idea that we NEED our government to take action on this is a scary thought). Dyer talked about a time in the not-too-distant future where vehicle rationing is national policy, where governments make increased use of wind and tidal power but, mostly, where nuclear power is in widespread use, in spite of its environmental implications, as “the lesser of two evils” (this last point was criticized profusely by an audience member, but Dyer made it clear that he’s less an endorser of the idea and more of an observer of where things are headed).

But Dyer doesn’t believe that even this will be enough. And as he reached this point in his presentation and as the tone in his voice shifted, the blood drained from my face and I moved ever-closer to the edge of my seat. I knew exactly where he was headed with this, but it still struck me cold as the words came out of his mouth: that humanity will be forced to experiment with and engineer our own climate in an attempt to buy us time to invent new energy technologies that will be sustainable (be it nuclear fusion or what have you).

I was first exposed to the prospect of climate engineering by an article in Rolling Stone last autumn titled “Can Dr. Evil save the world?” It describes the work of Lowell Wood, an old Cold War scientist who openly advocates flooding the atmosphere with sulfur or other chemicals in an attempt to block the sun’s radiation and contain global heating. While the article features several genuine scientists who discuss the implications of climate engineering – some for it, some against it – so much of the text focuses on Wood’s personality and the ‘cost-saving’ aspect of his measures that the whole thing came across as a bit nutty and sensationalistic to me.

But here was hardened realist Gwynne Dyer, hardly a right-wing crazy scientist guy, suggesting that a full-scale “intervention” into the global ecosystem might not just be a possible solution, but the ONLY solution. Dyer’s entrypoint for a discussion of climate engineering was James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, an ecological theory that supposes that the living and nonliving parts of the earth constitute a complex interacting, self-regulating system that is akin almost to an organism (Dyer confessed to the crowd that he feels that Lovelock is “our Darwin.”) Dyer described how Lovelock’s work shows that despite massive increases in the sun’s radiation over the past several thousand years, the global temperature on earth has stayed relatively the same, the ecosystems maintaining the temperature range needed to sustain life.

When Lovelock first wrote of the Gaia hypothesis in the late 1970s, he was concerned that human pollution and waste could so radically alter the earth’s ecological balance that we may reach a point where the only way we can keep it going is through our own intervention. He now believes that we have reached that point, an idea that he outlines in his scary-sounding new book The Revenge of Gaia. And Dyer believes him. So as disturbing as it sounds, and as dangerous as the implications of failure are, Dyer thinks that conscious and planned climate engineering might be the only true solution we have ahead of us to buy us time to reverse the unconscious and unplanned climate engineering that we have been doing for centuries.

It was inevitable

It says something about how sobering the entire evening was that the closest thing to a ‘positive’ ending that Dyer could conjure up was this: that it was inevitable that we would reach this point. Well, maybe not THIS exact point – surely we could have started to turn things around sooner – but from the moment when the first shovel dug up the first bit of soil, the human idea of progress was bound to take us to a place where we would face this challenge. We just happen to be the generation that is around at this moment to deal with it.

And with that – and after a Q&A session that didn’t really shed much light on anything that wasn’t already discussed – Dyer sent us out into the cold March night, which somehow seemed both colder and warmer than it was when I had left it for the comfort of the auditorium.

Now three days removed from the presentation, I find myself pondering whether I have truly been given a window into a terrifying future or if I’ve been duped into an unwarranted bit of fearmongering. I know quite well the perils of predicting the future, or trying to figure out how fast the sky is going to fall and how hard it’s going to hit us. But there’s no question that the sky is falling, and its velocity is only going to increase as we continue to pay it lip service and token gestures.

…how exactly does one go about holding up the sky?

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