Climate Wars

THE FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL AS THE WORLD OVERHEATS y Contents XI Introduction SCENARIO i: The Year 2 0 4 5 1 CHAPTER i: The Geopolitics of Climate Change 3 SCENARIO 2: Russia, 2 0 1 9 29 CHAPTER z: An Inevitable Crisis 41 SCENARIO 3- United States, 2 0 2 9 75 CHAPTER 3: Feedbacks: How Much, How Fast? 85 SCENARIO 4= Northern India, 2 0 3 6 111 CHAPTER 4= We Can Fix This ... 123 SCENARIO 5 = A Happy Tale 153 CHAPTER 5: ... But Probably Not in Time 165 SCENARIO 6: United States and United Kingdom, 2055 181 CHAPTER 6: Real World Politics 189 SCENARIO 7= China, 2 0 4 2 215 CHAPTER 7= Emergency Measures 227 SCENARIO 8: Wipeout 251 CHAPTER 8: Childhood's End 265 Acknowledgements 277 References 279 Index 285 Introduction Recent scientific evidence has ... given us a picture of the physical impacts on our world that we can expect as our climate changes. And those impacts go far beyond the environmental. Their consequences reach to the very heart of the security agenda. —Margaret Beckett, former British foreign secretary peering through a glass darkly, to understand the politics and the strategies of the potentially apocalyptic crisis that looks set to occupy most of the twentyfirst century. There are now many books available that deal with the science of climate change and some that suggest possible approaches to getting the problem under control, but there are few that venture very far into the grim detail of how real countries experiencing very different and, in some cases, overwhelming pressures as global warming proceeds, are \ike\y to respond to the changes. Yet we all know that it's mostly politics, national and international, that will decide the outcomes. Two things in particular persuaded me that it was time to write this book. One was the realisation that the first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity, and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be 'reasonable' about it. Not all of them will be in what we used to call the THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT, xi CLIMATE WARS 'Third World'—the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The other thing that finally got the donkey's attention was a dawning awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate-change scenarios are already playing a large and increasing role in the military planning process. Rationally, you would expect this to be the case, because each country pays its professional military establishment to identify and counter 'threats' to its security, but the implications of their scenarios are still alarming. There is a probability of wars, including even nuclear wars, if temperatures rise 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. Once that happens, all hope of international cooperation to curb emissions and stop the warming goes out the window. As this is a book about the political and strategic consequences of climate change, for the basic science and some of the more common physical global-warming scenarios, I have depended mainly on published secondary sources, such as the 2 0 0 7 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report and the 2 0 0 6 Stern Review on the Economi