[Vision2020] Military Scholar Gwynne Dyer's CBC Radio One Series on "Climate Wars" Audio Online

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Sun Apr 25 15:55:02 PDT 2010


*CBC Radio One website regarding Gwynne Dyer's "Climate Wars" series audio
online:*
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*http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/climate-wars/index.html*
**
*Gwynne Dyer's website:*
**
http://www.gwynnedyer.com/
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*Gwynne Dyer comments on this radio series:*
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*Program Excerpt *

About 2 years ago I noticed that the military in various countries, and
especially in the Pentagon, were beginning to take climate change seriously.
Now, it's the business of the military to find new security threats. It's
also in their own self-interest, since they need a constant supply of
threats in order to justify their demands on the taxpayers' money, so you
should always take the new threats that the soldiers discover with a grain
of salt. You know, never ask the barber whether you need a haircut.

But I did start to look into this idea that global warming could lead to
wars. It turned into a year-long trek talking to scientists, soldiers and
politicians in a dozen different countries. I have come back from that trip
seriously worried, and there are four things I learned that I think you
ought to know.

The first is that a lot of the scientists who study climate change are in a
state of suppressed panic these days. Things seem to be moving much faster
than their models predicted.

The second thing is that the military strategists are right. Global warming
*is* going to cause wars, because some countries will suffer a lot more than
others. That will make dealing with the global problem of climate change a
lot harder.

The third is that we are probably not going to meet the deadlines. The
world's countries will probably not cut their greenhouse gas emissions
enough, in time, to keep the warming from going past 2 degrees celsius. That
is very serious.

And the fourth thing is that it may be possible to cheat on the deadlines. I
think we will need a way to cheat, at least for a while, in order to avoid a
global disaster.

That's what this series is going to deal with, and we'll be lucky if we get
through it all in 3 episodes. But I’m going to start by giving you an
example of what that global disaster might look like, and the best way to do
that is with a scenario. This is NOT a prediction of what the future will
look like, because there are far too many variables and sheer unknowns to
predict the world of, say, 2046. It’s just a plausible example of what 2046
could look like if we get it wrong over the next ten or fifteen years.
- *Gwynne Dyer*
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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