World-renown military commentator, Gwynne Dyer, visited Campbell River and the Comox Valley on December 4th, promoting his new book, Climate Wars, and speculating on possible political instability should global warming continue to alter the planet's environment.

Dyer is dire. Military conflicts are inherently a dark subject anyway. But Dyer's style of supporting glib editorial comment with incessant statistics, creates a chilling effect of the near-inevitability of climate wars. This is our doing, he implies; we got ourselves into this mess and we are only going to get out with rational calm, very focused effort and huge amounts of extremely adroit diplomacy.

Dyer's attention was first drawn to global warming issues, he said, when about two years ago he noticed that "the military was beginning to take an interest in climate change — Americans, British, French and others." He noticed that they were running security and military scenarios relating to "refugees" and "regional disputes" triggered by environmental causes. Two years of extensive research, many interviews and his own experienced consideration produced Climate Wars. He has done his homework and come to four principal conclusions.

First, scientists are not only correct about human-caused climate change but they are virtually unanimous that the warming is proceeding faster than predicted by models used for the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report's rigorous requirement of using only peer-reviewed studies committed it to be at least five years out of date the moment it was made public. And the stipulation for consensus meant that its predictions were inherently conservative. Dyer is convinced that we are already committed to an average global temperature increase in the range of 2°C to 6.4°C. The lower estimate he describes as "serious"; the upper end as "calamity squared".

Second, he says, "the generals are right". Regional conflicts will flare as crops fail. Even at 2°C, global food shortages will result as the "wet gets wetter and the dry gets dryer". Many tropical food crops are very heat sensitive — if rice is subjected to 10 days or more above 32°C during germination, it will not set seed. And the expanding dry belt above and below the equator will mean that extended droughts will plague the great grain producing areas of the world located in a narrow band along its edges. The "new normal" for Australia will be drought, eliminating it as a major exporter of grain. And in 20 to 30 years, the high plateau area west of the Mississippi in the US will be too dry to produce grain. Dried rivers and emptied aquifers in the American southwest will bring an end to the Central Valley as the country's primary vegetable producing region. Because "eating is a non-negotiable activity," said Dyer, "food will become a political and military issue."

Meanwhile, as Central America "dries up for 200 million people", huge unsettling pressures will build in that region. The same will occur in Pakistan — which, Dyer says, is mostly a desert of 175 million people with a river running through it — as the Indus loses summer volume from the melted Himalayan glaciers. India's control of the headwaters of the Indus will elevate stress between those two countries, already in a tense state. Just a 2°C increase in temperature will reduce India's food production by 25%. "The Chinese will take a huge beating" with climate change, forcing it to covet its northern boundary with Russia. The growing importance of irrigation will make any international river a possible political flashpoint.

Dyer's third conclusion is that we may already have reached the "point of no return" in global warming — a 2°C increase gives us a 50% chance of triggering uncontrollable feedback loops in climate change. Melting Arctic sea ice is one example of such a loop already in motion. But the "two big ones are permafrost and oceans," says Dyer. The one million square kilometres of northern permafrost contain 950 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, almost as much as our industries have historically added to the atmosphere — some northern lakes, he says, already have enough methane bubbling out of them that they can be lit afire and will burn throughout the summer. Meanwhile, oceans are warming so they hold less dissolved gases. This means less oxygen for marine animals. And they are also acidifying from carbon dioxide, a condition that could threaten the whole marine food chain — "the North Pacific is the most acidified and vulnerable," Dyer says.

Dyer's fourth conclusion is that we may be able to avert "calamity squared" by holding down the global temperature with geo-engineering. Adding sulphur dioxide to jet fuel, for example, would have a cooling effect by seeding the atmosphere with tiny reflective particles — unfortunately the chemical would also cause acid rain, damaging vegetation and further acidifying oceans. Or we might be able to spray enough vaporized seawater into the atmosphere to create a protective cloud cover.

We currently have workable solutions at our disposal, says Dyer. But we probably won't use them because countries that try would place themselves at an economic disadvantage — this is why the Bush administration in the US withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and Canada continues to blame its stalling on the economic cost. The only option, in Dyer's view, is for rich countries to unilaterally reduce emissions 80% by 2030, with the proviso that emerging economies must end any increases in their carbon dioxide output. Thereafter, wealthy economies will have to subsidize all global CO2 reductions to 95% by 2050.

The task is huge. And Dyer's trust in human nature may be tainted by too many years of studying too many wars. But, as he glibly noted with his unique blend of cynicism and dismissal, at least the future will provide lots of work for the generals.