Stewart Brand and Climate Wars

Posted on June 27, 2010 in Attended

Stewart Brand hosts Climate Wars Q&A at The Green Arcade

A plug: The Green Arcade is the first San Francisco bookshop to sell my new book, Runaway! Buy it from them, to encourage the others.

Climate Wars is an exciting new book by Gwynne Dyer, journalist and author. Climate Wars describes potential military conflicts as climate change “heats up” issues of water sharing, food security, and border control for countries worldwide. The book also, though, offers a snapshot of the current understanding of climate change and our future in top military, government, and scientific circles worldwide. It’s not a pretty picture.

Stewart Brand, famous for the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s and 70s, is head of Global Business Network (GBN) and the Long Now Foundation. Dyer provides analysis and consulting for GBN. So Brand hosted Dyer’s Q&A and book signing at The Green Arcade, the famous green and sustainability bookshop on the central part of Market Street, southwest of the Civic Center.

Dyer dialed into climate change about 3 years ago because he started hearing about it as an issue through Pentagon contacts. The world’s militaries are pretty much over terrorism as a major threat and see climate change as their next big focus. In the short term, there will be loss of food production in the tropics and subtropics, where two thirds of the world’s population is.

Today, we live in a historically peaceful world, but that will change. Loss of food production will cause hunger, possibly famine, and lead to great floods of refugees. India has built a fence around Bangladesh to trap potential refugees inside. Turkey has taken advantage of the Iraq war to dam the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, using it to water Anatolia, not central Iraq. Dyer anticipates the US-Mexico border being closed, hard, in 10-15 years, and unrest around the world.

He sees loss of control of warming at the widely described 2C barrier (we are at 0.8C already, with a further 0.6C of warming inevitable as of today.) Dyer sees emissions as out of control, and unable to be cut enough to stay under the barrier. The world got surprisingly close to agreement at Copenhagen, but must act before climate impacts make international cooperation impossible. Geoengineering will be needed to keep warming below 2C while emissions are cut.

Dyer sees the military as humanists and broad thinkers when they hang up their uniforms. He speculates that military influence is helping sell governments on the importance of holding warming to 2C.

Brand tends to emphasize positive scenarios. On nuclear power, they disagree, Dyer against and Brand for it.

While Dyer is a smart guy, as a journalist and analyst he will tend not get too far ahead of his sources. So it’s impressive, and depressing, that current top-level opinion seems to agree on the need to stay below 2C of warming, the unlikelihood of doing so without geoengineering, and the imminent dangers of both global instability and runaway climate change.

In my next posts I’ll review Climate Wars, which is a surprisingly (and frighteningly) right-on analysis of where the environment and the world political situation are today, and are likely to be tomorrow.

PS Monday, June 28th at The Green Arcade is a signing for Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan. Sounds fascinating!