Anthropologists observe that the small bands of human populations they study, try to get along with each other until they reach a point they can’t feed themselves, then they raid neighbouring bands for food so their own children won’t starve. Paul Kennedy, the host of the CBC radio program Ideas, asks, if rich nations, like ourselves, would be any different.
Gwynne Dyer, Military Historian and Journalist answers the question in a three part series, on Ideas, called, The Climate Wars.
I listened to the first podcast from the series last night. Unlike Al Gores movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which I knew intellectually was probably right, in its scary predictions about climate change, Gwynne Dyer's answer affected my gut. His words made me feel extremely depressed.
He says that our current models, predicting the rate of climate change, do not take into effect feedbacks like the melting of the summer sea ice in the arctic. Apparently it is melting faster than was thought and the temperature of the earth is already starting to go up. One may think that a temperature rise of six degrees is not a big deal, except if our own body temperature went up 6 degrees higher then normal we would be very worried because it could be fatal.
It’s no different, he says, for the Earth except when it happens it will be too late.
You can listen to the podcasts by going to the Ideas podcast page - http://tinyurl.com/yuzctc.
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