Transcribed mostly by hand with assistance from YouTube’s vocal-recognition automatic transcription. This is intended to assist with comprehension of the speech given in the linked video.

The talk can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY

The question and answer segment, due to audio issues, has been removed from the transcription.

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Dr. Gwynne Dyer at the University of British Columbia – September, 2010

 

[MODERATOR:]
It’s my pleasure and honor to introduce tonight’s featured speaker, Dr. Gwynne Dyer.

Dr. Dyer was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland and you will see his educational background in the program and on the screen.

After graduating with his PhD in military and Middle Eastern history at King’s College London, and after serving on the naval reserves of Canada and the UK, he lectured on military history and war studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto and then at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

In the late 1970’s he left his job as a lecturer to produce a seven-part radio series called “Seven Faces of Communism (1978)” for the CBC. This led to another radio series called “War (1985)” which was then turned into a television series for the National Film Board–and hopefully many of you have seen that–where it was telecast in 45 countries in the mid eighties and one episode was nominated for an Academy Award. He has continued to produce critically acclaimed work for radio and TV such as “The Defence of Canada (1986)”, “The Gorbachev Revolution (1988-90)” and “The Human Race (1994).”

Dr. Dyer’s print journalism has been equally well-received; his column on international affairs is published in over 175 papers and he has published several books including “Ignorant Armies: Sliding Into War in Iraq (2003)”, “Future: Tense: The Coming World Order (2004)” and most recently “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (2008)” which was also a radio documentary for the CBC. Like many great journalists, he is not only a storyteller, but a deeply engaged citizen whose work inspires readers, listeners, and viewers to be more alert, to ask more questions, and become more active participants in society.

This year Dr. Dyer was appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of his talents and service to Canada. The motto of the Order, translated, means “They Desire a Better Country.”

It is my pleasure to present Gwynne Dyer, who exemplifies this motto. Thank you.

[DR. GWYNNE DYER:]

Thank you, Mary.

I think that annoyed a lot of people, that last thing… Good.

I’m going to talk tonight about, you might say, the intersection between climate change and politics; not domestic politics, but international politics. Because it seems to me that that’s probably the piece of…the largest piece of the equation that simply isn’t on the table–and I first became aware of it about three years ago now.

I was in Washington. I often go there because you’ve got to go there to figure out what they’re up to, you know, and when I go I usually stay with an old friend who has spent his career–well, he actually did his PhD in British policy on the north-west frontier, you know, up by Afghanistan–so shortly after that, he got hired by the intelligence services and he’s done a whole career, right, in the intelligence services–and we’re sitting around his flat one evening and he dropped into the conversation the fact that the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be precise, was getting interested in climate change. So I said, “Why?” and he said, “I don’t know!”

But he gave me a couple of names and they were actually people who worked for… I think it’s called J5. Anyway, it’s the cell within the Joint Chiefs of Staff which is, if you’ll pardon the hyperbole, the “Brains of the Army”.

And these are sort of the long-range scenario mongers, the planning stuff, and yeah, they were working on this. They were working on this under the administration of Mr. Bush! It was a career killer to be known to be interested in this in public, so they were doing it very quietly in the back room–but they were doing it.

“Hmm, that’s interesting.” So I went back to London and I began asking around in London circles, in military circles, Defence, Ministry of Defence circles I know–about the Brits; and by God they’re doing it too! In fact, that’s where I first heard the phrase “Lifeboat Britain.”

And I’ll skip ahead a long way and explain that phrase because I think it’s what hooked me.

What’s being discussed quietly in Whitehall and the British Military is this: if – and I would say when – the warming proceeds to the point where there are very serious global food shortages; and where the refugees are flowing north out of Africa–and they’re beginning to flow north out of the Mediterranean as well–because the temperatures are intolerable and there are food shortages there, which are probably too great for the northern members of the European Union to cover…

“We don’t want to be swamped.”

Because the British Isles, probably flat-out farming every single piece of land that isn’t actually vertical, and eating not much meat, could just about feed themselves if they don’t let a lot of people in.

Lifeboats get swamped if they let too many people aboard, and this phrase was–this was the shorthand for a whole line of thinking that is beginning to occur within the British Government, within the Ministry of Defence.

You’re dealing here with a government that thinks long term, right? We’re not talking about Ottawa. And I can’t detect any discussion of this matter at all in Ottawa. But yeah, so that phrase, I think, more than anything else got me going, “Oh? there’s something up here!” And it’s sort of ‘up my alley’ now. So I began interviewing people (military people, particularly recently-retired, senior military people) because they’re they’re so grateful if somebody remembers they’re still there…You know, you’ve had a driver for 20 years and then suddenly, not only are you taking your own car for a spin, but nobody phones and asks your opinion! So they’re grateful if you do. And they will talk; but also talking to the scientists.

I visited the Hadley Centre, which is the big British climate-type research centre; in Boulder, Colorado, The National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the States; and the Potsdam Institute; and I must have talked to a couple dozen scientists whose names you might recognize.

And as I traveled around the world–cuz you know, it’s going to have a little 18-month round where you have to get to all the major capitals at least–I put some people on the list to interview: generals and policymakers and and scientists and basically, what I’m going to do this evening is tell you what I learned–what I know now–that I didn’t know in the start, and it will come in four packages.

The first conclusion is that this is moving much faster than the public debate acknowledges.

The public numbers which we were all–are all–still using are the numbers that were generated by the end of the inter-governmental panel on climate change in 2007. The IPCC, every four or five years, they get a couple thousand scientists together (it’s a UN affiliated…well, some organization) and these scientists go review all the scientific peer-reviewed research that’s been published since the last time they all met.

It’s an annual, sort of a year-long process. All the committees meet for a long time and then they publish a report which is written for governments. People don’t understand, these are not freelancers–this is paid for by governments, run by the UN–governments which actually don’t want to hear very bad news.

So there’s this arm-wrestle at the end, because between what the scientists want to say and what the governments are willing to let into the executive summary of the report–which is of course, all the journalists ever read–so these are the numbers that we’re working on.

These numbers which were, for example, the numbers used at the Copenhagen Summit (that train wreck we had last December) are universally regarded by the scientists themselves: low. They are numbers that say that we’re likely to see between 1.8 and 5.8 degrees Celsius higher average global temperature by the end of this century.

“Well, hell, you know it might only be 2 degrees and we got 90 years to play with, I don’t have to rush.”

Those are the public numbers. I don’t think a single scientist I talked to believed those numbers, partly because they know what the process was, of basically haggling down the forecasts by government; and also the fact that all these committees work by consensus, the IPCC committees–so therefore, basically the lowest common denominator is what gets into the report.

But also because, really, the data in the IPCC report are very old. Published in 2007 (the committees met through 2006), none of the data, none of these peer-reviewed, scientific reports is more recent than the end of 2005. That’s when they imposed the cutoff date; they didn’t want more stuff falling on the table every day as they worked through the process, so none of the data is newer than the end of 2005.

But actually if you think about it, we’re talking published scientific research, right? So first of all it had to go through a peer-review process–which those of you who do this sort of thing for a living will be aware is not exactly “rapid”–followed (unless you’ve got dynamite news) by a year’s queue or more to get into the damn journal that you’re publishing it in.

So now, we’re back to 2003–and the question you now have to ask is “How old is the datum?” Because when they wrote the research up, they’ve already finished gathering their data set–so the data we’re working with are eight, nine, ten years old…the “latest data” in that published report, which is the basis of our public conversation. You look at what’s been happening in the real world since 2006 – for example, to Arctic ice cover, which crashed in 2006 to almost half of its previous minimum – and you come to different conclusions.

And the real forecasts that people are working with, the ones that they draw up the scenarios for, are much more serious than this. The one that I found both most credible and most frightening was one that was produced by the Hadley Centre, just before that conference in December of last year. Hadley Centre–it’s in South Westing, that–it was opened, by the way, by Margaret Thatcher.

(It is only in North America that “people who take on climate change seriously are on the left” and “people who doubt it are on the right;” in the rest of the world, it’s not a left-right issue any more than gravity is. Margaret Thatcher was to the right of Attila the Hun, but she was a scientist!)

So the Hadley Centre–just before December, there, the big Copenhagen “We’re Going To Fix Everything” summit–published a forecast of where they thought climate change warming would be in 2060. That is, to say, 50 years down the road. Not 90, 50.

And they said “Higher average global temperature rise: 4 degrees Celcius average.” Think about that for a minute. Where are we by the end of the century? Almost certainly way past the 6 degrees which was the IPCC’s end-of-century estimate. And then they published (together with that) a map of the world, in which they showed what 4 degrees average global temperature means in terms of local temperature. Because of course, two-thirds of the planet is covered with ocean, and the oceans are much cooler than the land surfaces of the planet.

So that average isn’t about what it feels like in Canada, particularly in central Canada; the map showed Britain getting off rather easily, actually. 4 degrees higher average global temperatures; only 3 degrees higher in England!–because it’s surrounded by ocean. It’s rather a long way from the equator; the closer you are to the equator, the more seriously impact… so not necess- well, that’s too complicated to get into.

Central Canada; Quebec; Ontario; The Pairies; 7 degrees celsius in 2060. On the coast here, 5, five-and-a-half. Are we still growing grain? I don’t know, you’re pushing it. The Russians had 35 degrees all this summer and they lost almost half their grain crop.

So…much deeper water, and flowing quite fast, than we are discussing in public.

Why would the number be so much higher?

Because the Hadley Centre, in drawing up these numbers, did not just deal with the assumption that they all make: which is that we will continue to reduce our emissions at a rate that is inadequate to the problem. We will reduce our emissions; there will be electric cars or some kind of cars that don’t run on petroleum fuel within 20 years and, you know, large numbers. Sure, there will (and that’s a bit late guys) and likewise you know, we… well, they aren’t building–

Not one new coal-fired power station’s been built in the United States in the last two years–congratulations, Sierra Club–but there’s hundreds of the things and they’ll be running for 30 years or so because that’s their lifespan. No one is going to tear them down and replace them; so yes, we’ll cut our emissions, but we won’t do it in time to prevent huge harm being done.

So the assumption is that we will pass through The Point Of No Return: the point of no return is 2 degrees Celsius higher; 450 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to put it in a more scientific phrasing. Everybody in the business reckons we’re going to 500, 550, if we’re lucky, before we stop the rise. We’re 390 now; we were at about 280 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so you know, it’s kind of hard to stop this. It’s a juggernaut.

So, there’s that assumption–we are going past 250. When I say “450/2 degrees”; when I say that it’s a point of no return, it’s the point of no return in the specific sense that we lose control around 2 degrees hotter. Until then, it’s our emissions that are causing the warming so we can “turn ’em off!” – at least in theory, if we choose – and thereby stop the warming. There is about a 20-year lag before… before turning them off stops the warming; but you can do it until you reach around 2 degrees.

All of these numbers are fairly fuzzy, but what happens around 2 degrees is that the natural–the consequences of the warming trigger natural processes that contribute further to the warming (positive feedbacks as they are called) in which the permafrost melts and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; in which the surface waters of the oceans become so warm they can no longer contain all of the carbon dioxide they absorbed earlier–high school physics, right? Warmer water can contain less dissolved gas. Buy yourself a beer and you’ll see what I mean: if you don’t drink it, it goes flat as it warms up.

So, all of those feedbacks kick in around 2 degrees and then you’ve lost control, to the point where you may not be able to stop the warming process, even if you stop all of your own emissions.

So you’re trapped on this escalator that’s taking you up through 3, 4, 5, to 6 degrees; 6 degrees is mass death; higher average global temperature. Because, of course, it translates into a great deal more than that on the surface of the–on the land surface of the planet. Mass death: mainly from starvation, not from heat stroke; but mass death is mass death.

So when the Hadley Centre put these numbers out they were incorporating (which the IPCC does not) the early impacts of positive feedbacks, as well as just how much carbon dioxide will we put into the air by 2060. First time that had been done, but it gives you a really frightening number…and then they did the map. Which is again, something that’s not normally done, and the consequence is we don’t have a lot of time. We’re in deep trouble. And the military know this; the military know this everywhere.

Well–except here.

I mean–the people whose names you would recognize if you’ve been reading the literature of people like Jim Lovelock and Jim Hansen, the very serious scientist John Schellnhuber in Germany, people like that–they are flown in to the Pentagon to talk to people all the time. John Holdren, who is now Obama’s science advisor, they talk to the Pentagon all the time. The Pentagon takes this very seriously.

So we have a problem, Houston, and the reason the military become involved is because…because of the geopolitics of it. The damage does not occur equally across the planet. Countries closer to the equator are much harder hit than countries further away from the equator because the major impact is on the food supply; and it is in the tropics and the subtropics that we lose a lot of food production. I had no idea how much until I started looking into it but–it’s really–the rule of thumb is that you lose 10% of global food production for every 1 degree Celsius higher average global temperature. The relationship may break down in the higher orders but at 1, 2, 3, 4, that’s what happens.

That’s a bit of a problem when you are pretty well stretched on feeding the existing almost-7-billion people and you got another billion and a half or so coming before the population of the planet plateaus. And consumption is going up faster than population–as people get money in their jeans, they’ll be eating more meat–even in India, they’re eating more meat.

And watch what happens to the prices of grain this fall as a result of half of the Russian grain crop being lost to heat, peat fires and so on; well, I think thirty percent is the number; fifty percent is being bandied about. I mean we we had this three years ago: we’re likely to have it again. Grain prices may double right around the bend; of course that means the poor starve right? The rich never starve in food shortages; we ration by price.

So food supply gets hit. If you want a thumbnail explanation of why it is in the tropics and subtropics that the food supply gets hit, it’s this: In the tropics most of the major food crops (like rice) are not native to the tropics; they were domesticated in more temperate areas and then introduced into the tropics. They are very near the top of their temperature tolerance range in the tropics now, in normal times: rice, corn, things like that.

So give it just a couple of degrees warmer–which isn’t asking a lot, you know you’re going to get there–and frankly you lose huge amounts of the crop in the tropics. The tropics actually, you know, aren’t going to see the kind of huge numbers in warming that are going to happen further away from the equator. But that only 2 degrees up, rice, for example, will not germinate. Standard patty, lowland rice will not germinate if the temperature is above 35 degrees Celsius, for even 24 hours during the key three-week period when the grains of rice are fertilized–you know, the little flowers are fertilized and form the grains of rice. Well, you know, we’re talking–look at Birma, or Indonesia or something like that, it’s 32, 33 all the time–so that’s what happens in the tropics; in the subtropics, it’s more a question of rainfall.

The Subtropics are a very rainfall-short area anyway. You can usually get enough rain for one harvest a year, but nobody in the subtropics gets two or three harvests a year, and in the subtropics the rain fails. By fifty percent it falls, or seventy five percent–we’re talking about the Mediterranean, both sides of it here. We’re talking about Central America, Mexico, and the southern United States. We’re talking–southern United States is the subtropics; Florida is the subtropics; South Texas is the subtropics; and of course almost all of Australia, all of southern Africa, a significant part of South America: all closer to the equator.

And so you’re going to face major local food shortages and a global food shortage as a consequence of that. If you knock half the major rice exporters out of the equation, which this will do, then you have global food shortages as well. Lots of countries in the further north and further south parts of the planet can still feed themselves but they are not exporting wheat anymore.

Take, for example, Australia–which has just stopped. Second-largest wheat exporter on the planet 10 years ago, but it is the canary in the coal mine: it’s the driest continent–it’s almost all in the subtropics except the southern fringe and they’ve just gone through what they thought was a drought. Not a drought. It’s climate change and it ain’t never going back: this is the new normal, guys. And as a result, Australia has exported almost no wheat for the last three years; they can still feed themselves–there’s only 20 million of the buggers–but they aren’t exporting wheat that can be used to fill in the gaps elsewhere and this will happen a lot of places.

So food becomes the critical issue and the countries most impacted are tropical and subtropical and this is where the geopolitics comes from.

So now we’re getting into the second conclusion. The problems, the geopolitical problems that attract the attention of the military are: refugees, failed states, and wars–all driven by food shortages.

We haven’t lived in a food scarcity world for 200 years; we have no idea what it’s like.

There’s an anthropologist friend of mine, a guy called Steve LeBlanc–he runs the Peabody Museum in Harvard–who wrote a book once called “Constant Battles” about pre-civilized human beings and how they actually lived. Not the fantasy version, where they lived in, you know, the Garden of Eden and wore flowers in their hair, but the real ancient world where food shortages, including ones that you could die from, were a regular occasion. And his rule of thumb is “people always raid before they starve.”

“Raid the neighbours.”

Now, it doesn’t automatically/inevitably follow that large civilized society will do the same as small hunter-gatherer bands, but it’s the same people, you know. So the military think that there’s going to be a lot of work for them. I mean I can’t discern, and I don’t see how you would separate their motives into the ‘good ones’–they just want to be ready to deal with trouble–and the ‘bad ones’–they’re looking for a justification for their existing budget and the present justifications are getting a bit thread-worn so we need some new ones…I can be quite cynical about this on occasion; but I have taken my pills today.

But they’re right. That–I mean, you talk to the US military for example, their, I’d say, obsession in the planning. I mean, not your average grunt or his, you know, the “2nd platoon officer” but in the thinking parts of the military: the obsession with Mexico. Because there’s a 2,000 mile/3,000 kilometers (I’m in Canada) 3,000 kilometer border between Mexico and the United States. There are a hundred million people in Mexico, another 50 million south of them in Central America; the farms there are going to dry up and blow away.

There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north. There is an existing arrangement on the US border which might be described as “catch some, let some go.” I mean it’s–it’s not really fortified. It looks pretty impressive in the cities where people can see it, but if you drive 10, 15 kilometres out of town east or west along the border, you’re down to three strands of barbed wire and a dirt patrol track with a vehicle down it every 4 hours. It is actually meant to allow lots of people to get through because cheap illegal labor is what keeps American agro-business profitable, and the reason that it’s cheap is because the workers are illegal and they can’t bargain. So there is a reason for all this–though not one we can speak of in front of the children. This provides a safety valve for Mexicans, the Mexican state. It provides cheap labor for American farmers and, you know, the flow is maybe half a million a year, a million a year, and half of them go home again after the harvest. We can deal with that–there’s 300 million people in the United States; drop in the bucket. But try 5 million a year, because things have fallen apart and there’s no food in Mexico.

What do you do at 5 million a year? Well, the US Army’s convinced that the Congress will tell them to close that border–really close it–and they can do that! It’s absolute nonsense–though you’ll hear it often enough in the States, they go: “Ooh, I dunno…2,000 miles of border; we could never shut that–”

Bullshit.

Iron Curtain! You remember the Iron Curtain?

But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.

An “exemplary few hundred” will generally do, but you actually have to be willing to kill people. And, you know, I reckon the US Army is probably willing to do that because, you know, they don’t have an ingrained philosophical objection, certainly, to killing people…

But–they do understand that actions have consequences. I mean these are serious people, and they do understand, as several of them said to me, that if we are killing people on the border–killing Mexicans, killing Central Americans on the border who’re trying to get through–that will get…everybody’s got cameras now, including video cameras (even if it’s just the phone one) and so this is going to be up on the web and maybe up on the evening news and twenty percent of the resident US population, most of them perfectly legal citizens, will be of recently-arrived Mexican or Central American descent when this happens. And how are they going to feel about us shooting their distant relatives at the border? One officer said to me, “I reckon this could cause the gravest social divisions in the United States since the American Civil War.”

So, it does get complicated. That’s what they’re thinking: refugees is the major issue that obsesses the Americans and obsesses the Europeans and I sort of trailed out a little bit with the “Lifeboat Britain” idea. The European Union is quite interesting: you go to Brussels, the capital of the European Union such as it is, and there’s one particular kind of conversation which can only occur when the Spanish and the Italians and the Greeks and the Portuguese aren’t present. So it takes place in the corridors or in the pubs and it is this rather desultory conversation at this point in the proceedings, but people kicking ideas around about what do we do when these are all not just “food deficit” areas–but areas that we can’t even supply with enough food to keep going? You’re talking about a lot of people here, right? A hundred million plus. I mean, everybody knows this is coming.

I was in the Netherlands recently and they’re planning to raise the level of that sort of inland sea they’ve got–the Zuiderzee–by a meter and a half. And there’s various reasons, hydrological reasons for doing that. But they figured out what to do with the extra water: they’re going to sell it to Spain. Serious! This is part of the Delta Commission’s–the Dutch Delta Commission’s planning.

So everybody knows bad things are going to happen in southern Europe, and the problem is that at the moment there is freedom of movement within the European Union. You’re Italian, you want to move to Sweden, and open up a plant or shop or whatever, you can do it–nobody can tell you not to. A few forms to fill out, but no permissions required. You want to just travel there? Nobody even looks at a passport! There aren’t any passports/passport checks, any checkpoints at all at most internal European borders anymore! So at the moment, all those people could move north.

But you know, while Northern Europeans quite like Italians, and it’s nice to have a million or a half a million around, who wants five million…or ten? And the answer is: nobody. I mean you know, if the shoe were on the other foot, the Italians wouldn’t want them either – in fact, the Italians don’t want the Africans that are coming in at the bottom end – and so that means that at some point down the road (and this is the conversation you can’t have when the subjects are present): we’re going to have to stop free movement in Europe. We’re going to have to stop the freedom of Southern Europeans to move to Northern Europe.

Does this mean we have to divide into, sort of, “What Used To Be The European Union” north of the Alps and something else below it? Don’t know, but that’s the kind of conversation that’s going on.

Yes, the Australians have just doubled the size of the Navy they deploy off their north coast because they anticipate refugee flows south, out of Indochina; Indonesia; the Philippines. I keep talking to the South Africans about this, but they’ve got so much on their minds. But the same issue–the only industrialized country, and the only country with some temperate zone in all of Africa–has open borders at the moment. And five million foreigners living in a country of 45 million people. That–that could go to 45 million [foreigners] if things get really rough further north, so that’s the sort of thing that’s going through people’s minds. Refugees is a fear–refugees who may have to be stopped by force.

So there’s that. Then, what happens to the governments of the places they’re trying to get away from?

No government that cannot feed its population survives. Not for long. So we’re talking failed states; we’re talking a proliferation of failed states, particularly across Africa and large parts of the Middle East–which is where it will be worst. Africa gets absolutely hammered by this, because almost all of Africa, except the Western Cape, actually, is either in the tropics or the subtropics. There is no other temp–there’s, you know, apart from the Western Cape, there’s no temperate zone. Well, very high bits of Kenya and so on–there’s no temperate zone! So you know you can expect failed states as well as the refugee flows and then – Jackpot! – on river systems shared by numbers of countries, war is virtually inevitable at some point because the upriver states will keep more than their agreed share, or will demand a larger share, if that’s not what they already have.

When there’s not enough water to go around, if you have a way of diverting it into your irrigation system, you do it.

It’s starting up on the Nile now. The old agreements on the Nile have been repudiated by the upstream states and they’re setting up on a sort of alternative Nile Valley organization that excludes Egypt and Sudan, the major downstream beneficiaries now.

I think Turkey and Iraq would be at war today if Iraq wasn’t flat on its back and incapable of fighting anybody, because the Turks have built 12 huge dams in eastern Turkey and they are using those dams to irrigate eastern Turkey. The rivers in question are the Tigris and the Euphrates; the two rivers that define Mesopotamia. There’s virtually no water in the Euphrates–it’s not reaching the point where the rivers used to join just north of Basra. It hasn’t done all of this summer. Agriculture is basically shut down in western Iraq this summer. Now you know, at the moment, they’re still in the international grain market and Iraq’s got a lot of money because it’s got oil, but in a time when the Iraqi state was not flat on its back I think there’d be a war over this.

There will at some point, almost certainly, be a war between India and Pakistan over it.

Works like this: Pakistan is Egypt to three times the scale. It depends almost entirely on the waters of the Indus. It’s the largest irrigated area in the world–eighty-five percent of Pakistan’s food comes from the Indus river and the land irrigated from the Indus River, which of course doesn’t reach the sea anymore: they take all the water out of it.

But five of the six tributaries of the Indus river flow through India (or Indian-controlled Kashmir) before they reach Pakistan. Now, there is a treaty–it’s 50 years old this year–on the division of the waters between the two countries (Pakistanis always figure they got gored by it) but at the moment they actually do get about seventy percent of the total flow. India only gets thirty percent. It gets all of the flow in the three Eastern tributaries, which are much smaller, and it gets an allotted share of the flow, which you can take out upstream itself, of the flow in two of the three tributaries that Pakistan owns. But that share is defined not as a share, a proportion of what’s there, but as a fixed volume of water.

Now, it turns out to be about thirty percent of current flow, but those rivers, certainly the Pakistani ones, are glacier-fed and the glaciers are melting–they’re going (according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences) at seven percent a year. So they’ll all be gone in 20 years and what you can look forward to is 20 years of flooding (you’ll notice it has been flooding rather in Pakistan at the moment and that’s largely to do with the monsoon) but it’s also more flow than you wanted…so 20 years of flooding and then after that when the glaciers are all gone, the rivers are half-empty in the summer, because that’s what keeps them full in the summer–it doesn’t rain in the summer up there; the headwaters.

So, not enough water to go around–not enough water for anybody–but the problem is, India is still entitled to take a fixed volume of water out of the rivers who belong to Pakistan! And do you think it’s going to go “Aw, shucks. This isn’t fair. We should take less and only take, you know, the equivalent proportion to what we used to take when the river was full–so it was thirty percent then–we’ll go down to thirty percent of what’s left now.” Sure they will say that.

India is a democracy but that means it’s answerable to the public.

No Indian politician could say that and survive. I mean, India’s going to have its own problems–I was in New Delhi not that long ago, and I was interviewing the head of a think tank there (it’s run by a woman whose husband is the head of the Planning Commission, which is a super-powerful body in New Delhi–they’re kind of a tag team, and they play very rough) but she dropped into the conversation almost by, you know, “by the way” that she just finished doing a contract for the World Bank which had asked her to figure out how much agricultural production India lost to 2 degrees Celsius higher average global temperature.

So, you figure out average local and then, you know, how much rainfall you got left and come back and tell me how close you are feeding yourself at 2 degrees higher average global temperature.

So she put her people on it, they did all the due diligence and they went back and reported that India lose twenty five percent of its food production at 2 degrees higher. So is India going to be in the mood to cut a little slack to poor old Pakistan? Doubt it. Pakistanis are starting to starve; both of these countries have nuclear weapons; and people always raid before they starve.

That’s the sort of thing that we’re looking at here–the longer, the deeper into this process we go, the higher the likelihood that this sort of event will become commonplace. So it’s not just a deadline – “you mustn’t pass 450 parts per million” – it’s a deadline “you mustn’t get so deep into the process that countries are fighting each other or not talking to each other or falling into failed state status” because after that, no deals are possible–you’re not even talking to each other anymore.

Conclusion 3: We’re going to go through the point of no return (and probably a good deal further) in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost certain. We are at 395 actually, at the moment, parts per million, and before the current recession cut the growth rates a little bit, we were growing at 3 parts per million a year in our emissions, mainly now due to the rapidly industrializing countries in the third world who are having to increase their power generation capacity by ten, twelve percent a year. We’re not doing that here; we are replacing old generating capacity with new generating capacity on a 40-year turnover basis, but it’s there that all the new stuff’s going in. Don’t blame them: we put our stuff in earlier. We did the same job, but now it’s them, so do the maths.

We’re at 395, mustn’t go past 450, 55 divided by 3 tells you when you’ve passed the point of no return. Hm? Not a happy thought, is it? And can you really believe that we’re going to get the politics of this right enough to bring that down steeply in the next 20 years? Get ahead of the curve?

I don’t know anybody who believes it, which is why there is this undercurrent of panic in a lot of the conversations–in fact most of the conversations–that you have with the scientists, they cannot see how we are going to avoid going past the point of no return. Where we lose control. Where the feedbacks kick in. Which is what (of course) Hadley Centre was talking about–or partly what it was talking about–when it gave us that 4-degrees-in-2060 forecast. I have children; I have grandchildren; I am not tremendously pleased by this news.

And there is maybe a way to cheat: and that is geoengineering.

Which could get you lynched if you mentioned it in scientific circles three or four years ago. It was absolutely taboo to talk about geoengineering: direct interference in the climate system in order to hold temperature down and not go through that 2 degree Celsius point-of-no-return. It was regarded as absolutely grounds for expulsion from the community to talk about that in public before; in front of the children; us, the great unwashed; on the grounds that we were bound to get the wrong end into the stick here and say “Oh, so we don’t have to cut our emissions: we can just hold the temperature down!”

Well, no, of course you can’t do that: you’ve got to get your emissions down. The acidification of the oceans continues; all sorts of other nasty effects of large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane going into the atmosphere continue; and of course, with every year that passes, the difference between whatever temperature you’ve engineered and the real temperature you will immediately inherit if you stop engineering gets bigger and bigger.

So you have to cut your emissions–but you could win another 20 or 30 years to get your emissions down without paying the penalties–horrendous penalties–you will pay by going through 2 degrees–if you can geoengineer. And somewhere around two years ago it began to turn in scientific circles and people who previously would not talk in public about this stuff began to talk about it in public, on the grounds that this is the only way we have any chance of getting through this without taking huge casualties.

Nobody’s talking about the human race disappearing; nobody’s talking about the death of life on Earth. We’re talking about hitting a temperature that we haven’t seen on this planet for 35 million years; but actually, you know, 6 degrees hotter!

We’ve been there before: the Earth’s fine, the Earth’s systems are fine–the only problems are that all the tropics and subtropics and a good deal of the temperate zone is open desert–and the only really suitable zones for life are around the poles, down below the Arctic Circle (but not that far south of the Arctic Circle) which is why if you go back to that period, geologically, and you do the digging, you find crocodiles living on Baffin Island. They’re in the dark half a year, but that’s where there’s living going on so, you know.

And there’d be human beings left at 6 degrees warmer–but I really don’t think there’d be too many. So if you don’t want that, you’d better start thinking. And if you don’t believe that we can shut down the growth in emissions fast enough (if you can believe that, do it) but have a plan B. And Plan B is geoengineering.

The first man to go public with it was a fella called Paul Crutzen about two-and-a-half, three years ago now; very serious dude–he got the Nobel Prize as an atmospheric chemist for his work on the ozone hole. So he knows about the upper atmosphere quite a lot and it was he who said, “Look. We need a plan B here, and plan B is that we try to mimic what volcanoes do.”

When a big volcano explodes, it pushes very large amounts of gas and ash into the stratosphere. Small volcanos can just get it into the the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) but a big one will push a megaton of this stuff up into the stratosphere where it spreads around the planet; it is fully distributed in a few weeks’ time because of the upper altitude winds and it stays in the stratosphere for a long time because there’s no weather up there. You’re above the weather; there is no rain; it doesn’t wash out.

On average the stay time is about two years. And most of the gas is sulfur dioxide and under, you know, with sunlight hitting it in the upper atmosphere the sulfur dioxide rapidly turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid, which reflect lots of incoming sunlight. And that sunlight doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface, and therefore you have a cooling effect at the surface.

When Mount Pinatubo exploded in 1991–the last big volcano in the Philippines–we had a one half degree Celsius average global temperature lower for the following two years (also gorgeous sunsets.)

So we could do that, artificially. We could put enough sulfur dioxide up there to hold the temperature down by reflecting sunlight in the stratosphere. They figured out how to do it and they–actually there are several proposals on the table for how to do it–but the one that sounds likeliest is that you simply use the same midair-refueling aircraft that the air forces already own, and you fit them with tanks that can hold pressurized gas instead of aviation fuel, and you fly them up to the stratosphere. One enormous fart as you let all the sulfur dioxide out and then you’re back down to the ground for another load. A dozen of those planes operating three sorties a day and you’ve got enough up there to bring the temperature globally down by 1 degree Celsius in a year. Then you’re going to have to replenish it from time to time, but not continuously; it stays up there for quite a while.

So Crutzen put this proposal on the table. Well, he was ostracized. He took so much stick, when I–I mean I saw him recently, and he’s okay, he’s talking publicly again. For about two years he just shut down; he wouldn’t answer his phone. He was getting death threats, being disinvited from scientific conferences. I mean it really did overstep the then-bounds of the conversation.

Where I saw him five months ago, however, was a conference in California of 200 scientists who are working very seriously on geoengineering–and they’re all out of the closet. And this conference wasn’t even about geoengineering techniques; it was about the governance of geoengineering research and deployment in the Asilomar Centre in Monterey, which is where the gene splicers held their very similar conference to write the rules 30 years ago. (Don’t let Congress write the rules: you do the template, Congress will pass it.)

So now there’s lots of geoengineering proposals on the table. Another one which actually I find rather more attractive: it’s a guy called John Latham, who’s in the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, he’s actually a retired British professor who they snapped up when he took his retirement. His idea is that you build a fleet of unmanned, satellite-directed, wind-powered vessels that sail around the oceans in little fleets, with maybe a kilometre’s separation–fifty or a hundred of them, with a kilometre separation, and they position themselves below the low-lying cloud that covers a very large amount of the oceans. It actually covers about a quarter of the oceans at any given time–it’s called marine stratocumulus cloud. It’s almost like having ground fog above your head, you know, it forms and dissipates. You can often see the Sun through, though it’s still there but it does, it reflects al–about fifty percent of incoming sunlight that hits the top layer (this cloud) has bounced back into space–so it’s a major cooling factor in the Earth’s climate.

Anyway, his idea is: you spray a fine mist of sea water up into the air from these vessels (and you don’t blast it up to 100 metres; you get it 10 metres in the air, and turbulence will carry half of it up into the clouds) where the the moisture will stick. It will thicken the clouds, they will reflect more sunlight, and produce a heating–er, cooling effect, a greater cooling effect, at the surface. Well, that’s a little bit better than poisoning the stratosphere isn’t it? And it’s a lot easier to turn off, too.

There’s a number of other proposals around but I’ll just tell you one more; this was a guy –he’s the – he’s the chief scientist at NASA’s research facility in Virginia (Langley, Virginia) and an old friend of mine and he emailed me at Christmas last year saying “we’ve crunched the numbers and we figure we could get one degree Celsius of cooling average worldwide just by painting all the roads and the roofs white.”

Sounds a little bit “Rube Goldberg” I admit, but the US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that in March. You know, quick and dirty, one-time-only, but you know, you need a degree, need it now–get your paintbrushes out.

The common denominator in all of these geoengineering proposals – and there are more – is this: they’re cheap. They’re not ultra-expensive. This is not the moonshot; this is not building pyramids. They cost it out; how much it would take to deploy about a dozen midair-refueling aircraft. You’re not building them from scratch; you borrow them from the air force. Three sorties a day for a year and the answer is a couple of billion dollars. Chicken feed! What government doesn’t have a couple of billion dollars? So, anybody can do this. Even some rich individuals could do it, but we’d probably stop them. How do you stop a government?

And this brings me to my final point: it’s sort of boxes within boxes. This may be the gravest source of conflict, because there are some countries that are going to want to geoengineer a lot earlier than others, because they’re in deep trouble now.

If you’re Bangladeshi, and you’re standing up to your knees in water and starving at the same time, when you want to geoengineer is right now–“and I don’t care about your reservations, scientific or otherwise. I don’t care that it still feels okay in Canada–we want this fixed now.”

Perfectly reasonable position, I would say, but a possible source of international conflict of a very grave order.

I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”

And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”

He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking. Obviously, you don’t need to go asking, why beg for trouble, but that is now coming. I’m willing to bet you that the debate about geoengineering, now that the scientists are all out of the closet, is going to take over in a big way in about a year or two, when they make their first requests for permission to do open-air small-scale experiments. And the phrase that you’re going to hear is, and I promise, also, I’m pretty sure of this–that you’re going to hear a lot (it will become part of the common parlance) is “SRM,” which is the collective–what’s the word I’m looking for here–for God’s sake…not an anagram; not analog; but acronym–thank you.

Solar Radiation Management–SRM–is what covers all of these various geoengineering proposals. It’s going to be out in public soon; it’s going to be ferociously divisive. There will be people who say, “we’ve already screwed up the atmosphere with inadvertent interventions; now you’re proposing to fix it with further interventions? Leave it alone!” But the answer is: then we get 6 degrees. So there will be an argument. I think I know which side of it I’m on, although I’d really rather we didn’t have to go at each other’s throats about it. And the arguments may, in due course and over a longer period of time, develop into conflicts. I mean, this is deeply worrisome and divisive stuff.

And now I’m finished except to say this: I am more optimistic now than I was when I started this.

And you may wonder why or how I could be; but you see, I’ve talked to several hundred people in various capacities, but all of them, and fairly senior response–with senior responsibilities who are working at finding a way through this or various bits of it.

And, while every single one of them is a fallible human being, they’re well-informed, they’re serious. They’re trying quite hard and I think there are ways through this. I will not quote the odds (on our being able to find them and take them), but there are ways through this which could involve not losing billions of people. A higher promise than that, I cannot give you. This is going to be one hell of a ride; but I think there are ways that we can do this.

I mean the ideal is that the world’s population peaks around eight and a half billion in the 2050s–most of the way there by the 2030s–and then it begins a gradual descent by the end of the century; we’re back down to seven billion or less (and you just have to extrapolate current trends and you get that).

We don’t have to do anything particularly, just wait for it to happen–but in that whole trajectory which dips down maybe in the mid 22nd century – to where we ought to be, somewhere around three billion, or no more anyway – that in no point in the process is there mass death, kills a billion people. No big nuclear war, no famine, Holocaust scale famine that devastates a continent…

That would be nice–I’d settle for that.