In Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer forecasts a none-too-rosy future for our warming planet: nations go to nuclear war over shrinking water supplies; famine is widespread; anarchy reigns. Dyer likens this moment in history to a “final exam, with the whole environment that our civilisation depends on at stake,” and assembles a battery of sources—including military officers, scientists, and policy makers—to back up his argument that either the fossil-fuel status quo goes or we do.
Right. Even under Bush, the Pentagon was looking at climate change—it just wasn’t politically wise to talk about in public if you were a federal employee. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were doing this research and not publishing it. They could see that this was where their future business was going to come from. I cast my net wider and discovered that military people all over the world were looking at the issue. It’s their job to detect emerging threats, and, by God, they were doing their job. So now I had a live one for a book—a subject worth devoting some time to, because no one else was chasing it.
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The chapter about the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009?
Both the military and the governments and also some scientists agree that we don’t want to scare the children. So not everything they think may or could happen is in public. But governments are really up to speed. In the U.S. or even British media, it still looks like there’s a debate going on, but there’s no debate going on in the governments. There’s no doubt. They’ve all signed up.
The propaganda machine is self-sustaining. One one hand, you have Exxon Mobil no longer pouring money into discrediting climate science but actually producing ways to get us off fossil fuels. On the other, many people are still making a living off the denial industry. It’s remarkably emotional in the U.S. It’s been lifted out of its scientific context and become a kind of badge of membership: if you deny the climate scientists then you’re one of us. And being one of us is a big emotional thing. It’s a whole deck of cards—you’re against abortion and gay rights and climate change.
I’ve watched quite a few things in my life turn out OK that I thought wouldn’t. I knew the old USSR—I used to work there, and I would’ve bet you my house that the situation there wouldn’t crack without violence. But it did. You look at a couple of things like that and you realize that people can actually turn things around once they get the idea, and things can happen that you never expected. So I haven’t cut my throat yet.
Thu 6/10, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.
