Saturday, April 18, 2009

Are We On the Road to War?




















Wendell Dryden said...

The worst thing about Dyer's book / talk is that he can usually be relied on to understate problems.

If this is the understatement...

Thks for the link.

The Mound of Sound said...

The main themes of these episodes are subjects that I and many others have written about for some considerable time. Unfortunately most of these issues have passed totally beneath the radar for the public at large.

Dyer is no alarmist and these radio pieces make liberal use of top sources from the Pentagon and the scientific community,American and European.

Through extensive research and his access to the best and brightest, Dyer has connected the dots and brought forward a comprehensive picture of what we're facing and why we need to deal with it - NOW. In this context, we see the global warming issue not as a slowly emerging environmental threat to distant generations but as a much more immediate, security threat that could undo modern civilization long before the climate change impacts fully reach the Western nations.

Shining a light on this usually obscure dimension of the climate change scenario provides a dandy measuring stick by which to judge the real measure of our supposed, political leaders. At once they're exposed as being not leaders but technocrats, managers with little vision and an alarming deficit of courage.

As a society, we need to be carrying on this debate at the individual level now and we need to do it ourselves because none of our leaders want to touch it. This is a tragic example of how their corporatist mentality places them in an extremely dangerous conflict with the interests of those they're supposed to serve.

LMA said...

As the experts state so clearly in this series, we are going to be facing extreme weather and global unrest as the earth continues to heat in the next decade, and we desperately need political action to implement a global effort to reduce GHG emissions from fossil fuels and stop deforestation. What frightens me most is the third part of the series and the discussion of "geo-engineering" as a way of slowing global warming to buy us some time. Are scientists really contemplating seeding the atmosphere and oceans with nanno particles and triggering volcanic eruptions? I can't believe we would be so stupid.

The Mound of Sound said...

Well LMA you had better believe it. There have been reports the Obama administration is exploring the prospects. The iron filings in the ocean technique has been tested but apparently produced poor results.

Even supporters of geo-engineering admit the possibility of unknown and potentially serious risks.

I guess what troubles me most about this problem is the indifference we have for it. This is almost assuredly going to happen if we keep heading down this road. No one has the courage to step on the brakes.

In a recent column, Dyer looked at the prospect of a 4-degree temperature rise in the second half of this century. His analysis of that scenario is that it would result in the deaths of all but a half billion people. In other words, between eight and eight and a half billion people would be exterminated because the biosphere would be unable to support them.

To stop this isn't going to be cheap on any Western economy but, that said, the end cost is estimated to be about half of what we all spent to protect ourselves against the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

LMA said...

Our indifference may well continue until we are hit with some catastrophe, e.g., large areas of the southern U.S. become uninhabitable due to flooding or food/water shortages, or climate wars start to affect us directly.
In order to save lives, we could consider voluntary emigration of affected populations to northern climes which presumably would be warming and becoming arable. I've never heard anyone suggest this type of voluntary population shift north, but it certainly sounds better than geo-engineering.