Climate Wars
Author: Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer’s scary new book, “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats,” should be required reading for anyone concerned about the frightening consequences of global warming.
But what makes this 288-page book (ISBN: 978-1-8516-8742-8, $16.95 paperback) particularly valuable is its blow-by-blow predictions of specific calamities that may befall Cuba and other countries as Planet Earth gets hotter.
For example: In the year 2029, the United States erects a border fence — complete with automated machine guns and anti-personnel land mines — to keep out Mexicans desperate to leave their country, much of whose parched farmland has turned to desert.
Famine grips most of the subtropical regions of the world, while in 2036 the European Union finally collapses and drought kills off 800 million people in China.
Readers of CubaNews will be interested to know that in a scholarly book of this magnitude, Cuba merits a page or two of its own.
Dyer predicts that the Communist Party makes a comeback, despite the “brutal impact of the post-Castro ‘democratic regime’ on the living standards” of Cuba’s 11 million people.
“The unforeseen effect of the creation of a virtual but impermeable border between Cuba and the United States was to loosen the grip of the Miami Cuban elite on the island,” he writes, speaking of the very near future.
“As U.S. citizens, they were still free to come and go, but the psychological impact of that heavily armed frontier on both the Florida Cubans and the real Cubans was very great. The land scams of the years immediately following Raúl Castro’s death in 2016, when huge tracts of state-owned land were bought up by wealthy Cuban-Americans while local campesinos ended up landless and even poorer than before, had left a deep well of resentment.”
What comes next is a real headline-grabber.
“The closure of the U.S. border made the incomers seem somehow more vulnerable than before, and there were still plenty of communists around. Indeed, some of them still had their old militia weapons and now, for the first time in a very long time, they actually had a measure of popular support,” he says.
“The communist coup of Aug. 16, 2028, was greeted by an explosion of joy in the poorer parts of cities and towns, from one end of the island to the other — and the U.S., with a great deal of other Latino business on its plate, simply accepted it. American troops were withdrawn from all parts of the island, except Guantánamo Bay, within a month.”
Not that any of this matters, because if the world doesn’t eliminate 80% of greenhouse-gas emissions over the next 20 years, warns Dyer, by 2100, average world temperature will have risen by 8 or 9 degrees Celsius, billions of people will die — and the world’s oceans will turn toxic, smelling like rotten eggs.
Details: Jill Perry, Oneworld Publications, 10 Fitzroy Square, London W1T 5HP. Tel: +44 20 7874-1572. URL: oneworld-publications.com.
