Climate Change Concerns: ‘Climate Wars’ - a book for everyone Pt 3

Not only will Gwynne Dyer’s latest book raise the level of discussion re climate change but his four conclusions mentioned in the introduction (reached ‘after a year of trailing around the world of climate change...’) will propel you quickly into the book as a whole.


Click here to read his first conclusion for context.

Click here to read his second conclusion for context.

Mr. Dyer also concluded the following:

Third, it is unrealistic to believe that we are really going to make those deadlines. Maybe if we had got serious about climate change fifteen years ago, or even ten, we might have had a chance, but it’s too late now.

Global greenhouse gas emissions were rising at about one per cent a year when the original climate change treaty was signed in 1992; now they are growing at three percent a year, and most of Asia, home to half of the human race, is rapidly moving into industrialized consumer societies.

To keep the global average temperature low enough to avoid hitting some really ugly feedbacks, we need greenhouse gas emissions to be falling by four percent NOW, and you just can’t turn the super-tanker around that fast.

So we are going to need geo-engineering solutions as stopgaps to hold the temperature down while we work at getting our emissions down, and we should be urgently examining our options in this area now. There is a very broad consensus that we should not even discuss geo- engineering techniques because of the “moral hazard” they represent - because we might choose geo-engineering methods INSTEAD OF emissions reductions - but we only get one shot at solving this problem, and we will probably fail without geo-engineering.

I don’t know what geo-engineering methods have been first and foremost in the minds of qualified scientists (space umbrellas... seeding oceans with iron... ?), but I have been able to get my head around what an ugly feedback means.

For example, just as a cake will grow stale faster once it has been sliced up (the icing seal is penetrated, the surface of the cake is exposed, so moisture is lost more rapidly than when the cake is whole), an ocean e.g., the Arctic, will warm more quickly once the ice has melted because ice reflects the sun’s rays, whereas open water absorbs the sun’s warmth.

If you are interested in more information about Climate Wars and wish to hear CBC Radio One audio files related to the author and text, click here now.

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Please click here to read Part 4.

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