PRESSURE ON THE USA BORDER

Military strategists have briefed USA and the United Kingdom of the consequences of imploding climate change that could result in worldwide famines, floods and conflicts over resources.

Military analyst Dr Gwynne Dyer, author of the book Climate Wars, said there was a sense of suppressed panic from scientists and military leaders.

Having spent the past year doing high-speed research on climate change, Dr Dyer has spoken to some of the most senior advisors to world governments.

Even the least alarmist scenario for the next couple of decades involves enormous pressures on the US border, contends Dr Dyer.

"That border's going to be militarized. I think there's almost no question about it because the alternative is an inundation of the United States by what will be, effectively, climate refugees," he said.

"They're scared, they're really frightened. Things are moving far faster than their models predicted. You may have the Arctic Ocean free of ice entirely in five years' time, in the late summer. Nobody thought that would happen until about the 2040s - even a couple of years ago.

"If you're talking about 1 degree, 2 degrees hotter - not runaway stuff - but what we're almost certainly committed to over the next 30 or 40 years, there will be countries that get away relatively cost free in that scenario, particularly countries in the higher latitudes."

Countries closer to the equator in the relatively arid zone were likely to experience serious droughts, claimed Dr Dyer, who has served in three navies and held academic posts at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and at Oxford.

African, northern Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Turkey could be expected to suffer huge losses in their ability to support their populations, he said.

Dr Dyer contends that even the most hopeful scenarios about the impact of climate change have hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation, mass displacement of people and conflict between countries competing for basic resources like water.

Governments will be playing climate change catch-up in the next 30 years. And, according to Dr Dyer, if the world does not decarbonise by 2050 "you don't want to be there."

posted to ClimateConcern