Climate Wars - Gwynne Dyer- CBC Documentary

The year is 2024. It's only fifteen years in the future, but the world has changed a lot.

As the flow of hungry ex-farmers from Central America and southern Mexico turned into a flood in the early 2020's, the US border came under severe pressure, and huge new shanty towns sprang up around the crowded Mexican cities. Food riots became a regular feature of urban life and martial law was declared in Mexico City and ten other big cities. The four big hurricanes of 2023 and the decision to abandon parts of southern Louisiana and coastal Florida was the last straw for the American public who had several million of their own climate refugees to resettle inland, and the public's patience with ever-growing illegal immigration from Mexico snapped. The White House gave the order to fortify the border, and within a week, Congress had voted the funds.

The decision to close the border was a catastrophe for Mexico. The big cities were already a pressure cooker and that shut off the safety valve. The military coup of early 2024 ended Mexican democracy. By now many shanty towns were effectively no-go zones for the army.

Television images of desperate Mexicans being killed while trying to cross the border alienated the one fifth of the US population whose families originally came from Mexico or central America. After 2024 the United States was an angry and divided society.

The average global temperature in this scenario is 2.8 degrees Celcius higher than it was in 1990. The year is 2046.

It's 12 years since the European Union collapsed. Germany, France and Poland have regained some stability now that their new border defenses have stopped mass flight northwards from the Mediterranean countries. The Italians have basically lost control of the country south of Rome to refugees from the other side of the Mediterranean, but northern Italy will have nuclear weapons by next year. The Spanish have largely recovered from last year's famine, and they are getting nuclear weapons too. It's suspected that both countries plan to blackmail northern Europe into giving them more food. After the collapse of the EU, the British pulled up the drawbridges. It's Fortress Britain now.

In China, almost half the population has survived the floods and famine, but there's a permanent drought in northern China. The Russians are afraid that that the Chinese plan to grab the grain lands of Siberia. This seems very likely.

Southern India is re-emerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and the parts of Bangladesh still above sea level are al no-go areas because of famine, refugees and bandits. Further west, the radiation levels are still very high in the territory between Delhi and Lahore.

The expulsion of Mexico from the North American free-trade area has had grave consequences for Mexicans. The wall along the US Mexican border is still holding, and deaths along it are down by half in the past three months.

The latest numbers from the Arctic suggest that methane emissions from the permafrost are now overwhelming all progress in cutting greenhouse gas emissions from human sources.

Brazil, Bangladesh and several other governments are known to be considering emergency intervention in the atmosphere to prevent runaway warming. The newly elected Green administration in the United States is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop them from carrying out such a dangerous experiment.

It's the mid-point of this century, and the average global temperature is two and a half degrees Celcius higher than it was at the start of the century. Scientists disagree about whether the Greenland ice cap is irreversibly destabilized, but the sea level has risen more than a meter in the past thirty years, and it's still accelerating.

By 2042 the Chinese were desperate. The Vietnamese, Indonesians and Bangladeshis were beyond desperate. Sea level rise was drowning their river deltas and low lying coasts, and half the time the rice crop that wasn't lost to flooding was failing because of the intense heat.

Yet the counties of higher latitudes, which weren't suffering nearly as much from the changes, were still paralyzed by their domestic politics. Many people in Europe and North America were ready to try some geo-engineering to stop the warming, but the Greens in every country bitterly opposed it. They thought it was too dangerous. It was a distraction from the real job of getting the emissions down, and it was tampering with nature. The governments feared eco-terrorist attacks.

So China and the tropical countries decided to act by themselves. China supplied the balloons, and Vietnam and Indonesia provided the launching sites. There were over a hundred of them, each releasing up to a dozen balloons a day, each balloon bearing a load of several tons of sulpher up into the stratosphere. Within a couple of months, the sulphate particles were dispersed all around the world in the stratosphere, where they would remain for several years, reflecting some of the incoming sunlight back into space.

There was outrage in western countries when the tropical countries started putting sulpher dioxide into the stratosphere, but with China backing them, they were safe from western military action. And for a while, the project went well. The goal was to drop the average global temperature by two and a half degrees, all the way back down to what it used to be in 2010 in order to stabilize the ice sheets.

Everything was coming along nicely until Mount Pinatubo erupted again, a bigger eruption this time, enough to drop the temperature another two degrees. The Vietnamese and Indonesians stopped sending up the balloons immediately, but the combination of two degrees cooling from the volcano and two and half degrees from the geo-engineering, added up to a sudden cooling of four and a half degrees. Many countries had switched to more heat tolerant plants to withstand the warming, so there were crop failures worldwide, and hundreds of millions of people starved to death.

The temperature went back up within two years, but several things had changed irrevocably. Many more states had failed in the chaos of the famine, and one third of the human race lived and died in places where there was effectively no government. Geo-engineering became a completely taboo subject in the west, and several major western countries let it be known that they would use nuclear weapons against any country that tried it again, even China.

There are, as yet, no alternative ways to avoid runaway warming.