Climate Wars

In the decades ahead, runaway climate change could push the world toward conflict, Gwynne Dyer argues. He sets out the pressures he expects: shrinking resources, drought, epidemics, natural disasters, population shifts, rising seas, failing harvests, collapsing economies and political extremism. Dyer treats the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast of a 2 to 6.4 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature by the end of the century as conservative, since it rests on a lowest-common-denominator scientific consensus, is diluted by governments and ignores feedback effects. For him the central danger is food, not sea levels or biodiversity: a World Bank study in India suggested that 2 degrees of warming would cut the country's food production by a quarter.

Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute praised it as an instructive and disturbing look at climate geopolitics, showing the challenge is big and hard but solvable if addressed now. NASA Langley chief scientist Dennis Bushnell endorsed its account of the merging realities of climate and energy.