ABSTRACT
So what can we expect, and when are we likely to feel the impacts of a changing climate? Of course, the effects are already manifesting the world over. Droughts in Africa and Australia, shifting seasons in England, heatwaves in France, hurricanes in the Caribbean and sinking Pacific atolls have all been linked to global warming. But for most people in affluent countries climate change remains an abstraction, something that is reported by the media and argued over by politicians but seems remote from daily life. And so it is likely to remain for some time. Yet if the analysis set out in the first chapter is right our lives are going to be radically transformed. Although precise predictions are impossible, some recent books have provided graphic descriptions of what a warming world will look like over this century. In his acclaimed book Six Degrees, Mark Lynas provides a comprehensive and compelling synthesis of the best estimates of climate scientists around the world of the impacts of a world under successive degrees of warming. An equally forceful but shorter account is provided by David Spratt and Philip Sutton in the first part of their book Climate Code Red. In Climate Wars, the esteemed geopolitical analyst Gwynne Dyer constructs a series of future scenarios in
which warming-induced droughts, floods, cyclones, epidemics, famine and massive population movements spark political and military conflicts. In one, melting Himalayan glaciers in Indian territory see the rivers dry up in Pakistan, resulting in widespread crop failure. Tensions over access to water escalate into nuclear war. Based on detailed interviews with strategic analysts and military planners around the world, the plausibility of Dyer’s book makes it the most frightening I have ever read.
