When I take a week or so off from column-writing, I always counsel my editor to make space for the columns of one Gwynne Dyer.

Now that is a joke.

This gentleman is a master of the craft, famous for writing a twice-a-week column in 175 newspapers in 45 countries around the world. He is encyclopedic in his international political and economic knowledge. Pick any region, any country, and query him about the current situation there. You'll receive a balanced and factual analysis that will both enlighten and enlarge your grasp. You'll be informed and entertained, and never left without hope.

Dyer is 75 years of age, Newfoundland-born and London-based. I can't believe his age. I've followed him for, I suppose, 40 years, and have yellowed clippings of his writing on many topics. Most of those years, he has appeared in a leather bomber jacket. I'm only sorry it's been retired. He is a broadcaster, a filmmaker, a navy veteran, a graduate of Oxford and Sandhurst, and an Order of Canada recipient.

I know him also for his generosity. Gzowski College principal Melanie Buddle told the audience, which filled a lecture hall at Trent University on Feb. 11, that he has been in Peterborough nine times in recent years. I know he speaks in high schools and colleges all over the country, and those gigs aren't known to be huge earners.

He was sponsored by Gzowski College and the Trent Student Association.

The topic was a sobering one: Global climate change. Dyer spoke for almost two hours without a note, a graph, a power point or a handout. Real adult education, laced with fact and wry humour.

"Am I filled with hope?" he began. "Not exactly. Our future on the planet is uncertain. Aware people now know a great deal from many reliable sources. One important source which I watch, but which is seldom consulted, is the military. Military people everywhere watch and figure and absorb information with one goal in mind: prevent chaos and war, including civil war, in their country."

Leap ahead to a disturbing scenario, 100 years in the future. Global temperatures have risen six degrees. Farmland is parched, starving people from the south are indeed pouring over the Mexico-U. S. border. But the United States is 30 per cent Hispanic. What citizens would endorse the shooting at the border of fellow Hispanics, and what desperation could trigger a second American Civil War?

We have always emitted carbon dioxide, he said, but for millennia its atmospheric concentration was at 180 parts per million. Now in the short period since 1950, we are up to 400 ppm. "It's not so much population increase as it is consumerism: we're flying all over," he said.

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"The north is responsible for 80 per cent of our woes. The waters are warming. The poles are getting closer to the equator in temperatures. The jet stream is meandering. The birds are confused. Arctic ice will be melted in 10 years. The permafrost, which is the land around the northern ocean, is melting, and its dead vegetation will release huge amounts of CO2. The world's oceans, which are 23 per cent of its surface, absorb CO2 but it forms carbonic acid and harms creatures at the bottom."

At six degrees increase in warming, 90 per cent of the planet would be desert, "good for flies and scorpions." Sea levels would be up 18 metres. Population would be 10 per cent of what it is now.

"Yet we have the money and the alternative sources of fuel: wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear and hydro, to go off coal, oil and gas. 10 years ago, scientists showed an undertone of panic, now it is overt." Seven-and-a-half billion persons are now feeding from the same land that fed two billion a century ago. At risk would be corn rice and wheat.

Dyer touched on some possible technical fixes, such as injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to deflect incoming sunshine. But his masterful presentation was primarily a call for faster emission cuts and greater global co-operation.

Rosemary Ganley is a writer, teacher and activist. Reach her at rganley2016@gmail.com

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