Review of: Dyer, Gwynne. Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats
Review of: Dyer, Gwynne. Climate
Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. Oxford,
England: OneWorld Publications, 2010.
In this book with a dire sounding
title, long-time political and military essayist, Gwynne Dyer,
discusses an aspect of climate change that has not receive due
attention in popular debate. In accepting the fact of climate change
as near-certain, and second, assuming humanity's responsibility for
future environmental catastrophes, Dyer examines the
political-military conflicts that global warming could produce in the
world if humanity cannot stop or reverse climate change.
Loosely using what the strategic
political industry might call “assumption-based planning,” in
providing a narrative of hypothetical examples Dyer does not quite
provide anything beyond a popular, not a scholarly, history of the
future yet to happen. Definitely not a Tom Clancy thriller, and far
short of a well-written and studied analysis, Dyer misses some of the
important points that would otherwise support his appeal to a
thoughtful and serious crowd. That missing crowd in the debate both
believes in climate change and wants political and personalized
solutions, to implement ideas, that work to stop or reverse global
warming, if at all possible.
The book, Climate Wars, falls
between two audiences. Furthermore, it confuses somewhat, as a lack
of starkly clear reference points do not allow readers in some parts
to distinguish whether the author's supporting evidence exists as
facts or hypotheticals in those sections of the book that has future
history as its intent.
Beyond the incredible needs for
anaylsis on the political-military struggles of the subject, Dyer
sometimes swings a huge ax at people's incredible blindness of how
the politics in the international arena will change if a hot and dry
world started wars to feed or safeguard their nations. The ax often
misses its target more than it hits. What he could have accomplished
with this direct and needed approach in Climate Wars, Dyer did
once succeed doing over thirty years ago with a work at the height of
the Cold War, when he wrote of the need for nuclear weapons
disarmament.
Climate Wars, in the other view,
does merit some word for the essentials of the matter, and in this
regard it receives an honorable mention. Again, accepting a reality
of climate change (or global warming, if one prefers that term), and
humanity's responsibility for it, climate change poses a severe
challenge to human behavior and the national interests of every
country on earth. If readers suspend all doubts of the grand
argument, then the future of the world has a hot, dry, and difficult
time providing enough available food and fresh water for the size of
the projected future populations.
If true, climate change portends a
civilizational breakdown, and near collapse heading to partial
extinction, if the extreme projections become reality. Short of the
extreme, a somewhat milder prognosis for climate change would also
result in a complete collapse in democracy and the idea of natural
rights, giving way to more authoritarian governments. This would
create a completely separate, and smaller, portion of “haves” in
the ruling class using the “have nots” in the underclass to
support them.
As asserted here, if one believes in a
future of climate change, the scenarios predicted by Dyer's several
examples culminate in possible extreme geographic changes, refugee
migrations, mass starvation, wars, including nuclear wars, all in a
world unhinged in a quest for survival of the strongest. This does,
however, presuppose what Dyer only assumes: The continued existence
of nation states, which realistically have no such guarantee.
Does Dyer's work solve anything? Does
it solve the problem of climate change? Does he even provide a
viable political solution to the lack of contemporary political
cooperation for controlling the fossil-fuel emissions, claimed to
cause global warming? He does not have any of these solutions.
Dyer only rehashes the same and worn
mantras of an alarmist: It will come. It might destroy humanity or
large portions of it! Governments must do something, including
forcing average people to sacrifice everything for a governmental
answer to climate change—solutions by any means or force
necessary. No plan does he present, just like most of the other
literature, except by implication the use of force and coercion by
nation-states.
Climate Wars makes appeals to
the world for a technological and habitual solution, for what first
needs a political-economic plan to create them, a viable and
sustainable political-economic plan. As the world indeed teeters on
the point of massive change, in political relationships between
government and governed, in the areas of economic systems,
macro-geography, and the culture of our 21st Century
civilization, most climate change activists stand almost as guilty as
the climate deniers in one very important respect: Every person has a
direct and personal interest in the climate change phenomenon, and so
little empowerment to do anything practical about it in their own
lives.
Many activists and all the deniers in
this critical issue of survival neither have the moral high ground
nor the right ideas, whether to change the environment's future or to
dispute the scientific facts and models. The world needs better
ideas to solve the problem. It cannot rely on any government or
transnational governmental organization to fix the problem, or stop
the fix as the climate change deniers would like to do.
Two thoughts: First, better solutions
than authoritarian measures and coercion must get formulated to
alleviate a post-diluvian world of climate change. Second, these
hopefully more tangible tools of solving climate change, more than
the mere declarations and resolutions of no effect, must allow an
affordable means for individuals to implement those solutions, and
provide the useful those tools for people within their homes and
neighborhoods. I know several friends who already have done some of
this, at great personal expense, in admirable fashion. Climate change
solutions must address most of all the Issues of the cost and the
individual willingness to pay that cost. Without these two conditions
fulfilled, we might need to get ready for a hot, dry, hungry world,
and a contest of wars for survival.
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