Gwynne Dyer addresses the crowd at Dalhousie's Potter auditorium.
Dyer: Climate change ‘our fault’
International journalist Gwynne Dyer takes his alarming message to Dalhousie.
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(0) CommentsWhen David Suzuki found out that military historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer was researching climate change, he had a few choice words for him.
"'You can't ride my train, you haven't bought the tickets,'" chuckled Dyer.
But the ever-persistent Dyer wasn't discouraged. The Newfoundland-born journalist is published in 75 newspapers across 45 countries - including some in Canada, despite being banned by Conrad Black and subsequently Canwest. He spoke at Dalhousie University on Nov. 12 about his latest book and CBC Radio series Climate Wars. He lectured to nearly 400 students, activists and academics at Dalhousie's Potter Auditorium, several times whipping the captive audience into a politically charged frenzy.
Dyer took the stage through a flurry of anti-war leaflets and nervous chatter. Steven Mannell, director of Dalhousie's new College of Sustainability, called him on stage, describing his geo-political manifesto as "a challenge, a statement of concern and a statement of hope."
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Dyer signs a copy of Climate Wars for an adoring fan.
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Still, some audience members found it difficult to find hope in Dyer's lecture.
"He was trying to almost scare you," said David Stout, a first-year student in Dal's sustainability program.
"System is broken"
And according to Dyer, there's plenty to be scared about.
"Climate change is moving faster than public discussion acknowledges," he said.
Dyer says the climate change forecasts conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 has already become obsolete. At the time, the IPCC predicted that the arctic sea cover would disappear by 2040. Scientists are now predicting an ice-free arctic by 2013.
But don't blame the science. Predicting climate change can be difficult for scientists, he says, because the academic peer review system is a slow-moving, bureaucratic beast, addressing the professors in the crowd.
The IPCC data - and the information being used by the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this year - is severely dated. By the time that data is sufficiently peer reviewed, he says, it could be upwards of a decade old.
"Reality is outrunning the data," he said. "I don't know how you fix (the academic peer review system), but it's broken."
And he says that if we don't understand the reality, we can't address the problem. Dyer says a rise of only one or two degrees globally will cause catastrophic global consequences. He says the food supply will dwindle - causing tempers to erupt between nations.
"Eating is a non-negotiable activity, and starving people have a different take on what's reasonable," he said.
But Dyer says that there are solutions. He says alternate energy sources are cheap and available, and that there is still time to reduce global emissions. But, he says, it's up to the Western world, as the largest emissions culprits, to take charge.
"Very few people in Canada know it, but everyone in China knows it. Few people in the U.S. know it, but everyone in India knows it," he says. "It's our fault."
Engineering hope
Dyer also says geo-engineering could be a short-term solution. Investments in sunlight reflecting technology could stall rising global temperatures. That includes painting pavement white, cloud-thickening robots and man-made volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere.
But these stop-gap solutions didn't sit well with the crowd.
"I suspect that given our ideology and our ways of thinking right now, we'll probably say this is the fix," said Ruth Gamberg, a volunteer at Halifax's Ecology Action Centre, an environmental activist organization. "People will get hooked on sending those fleets out to thicken the clouds and paint everything white and that's where it'll end."
Geo-engineering is expensive, and many audience members questioned whether Dyer's solutions were financially viable. The question period after his talk gave way to impassioned heckling on military spending and government misuse of resources.
Dyer was unfazed. And some members of the crowd stood by Dyer's bitter medicine.
"It's very painful to hear," said Richard Peisinger, a LEED building consultant. "But it's clear, truthful, and bold. He's done very good research, it's as if he's holding up a mirror."
"The key thing is recognizing that we're in a plight, and we have to deal with it very directly."
And despite appealing to David Suzuki, Dyer stresses that this has nothing to do with environmentalism.
"We're not trying to save the planet. The planet is fine, it won't miss us. The planet will come through, but we won't. We're trying to save ourselves."
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