Gwynne Dyer Presents: Planetary Maintenance Engineers, A Lecture on Today’s Climate Crisis
Cape Breton University is proud to welcome Gwynne Dyer back to campus from London, England, to present “Planetary Maintenance Engineers”, a lecture on today’s climate crisis.
Creating a high-energy civilization was bound to result in the kind of planetary climate crisis we are entering now. A climate crisis is virtually inevitable because any intelligent species must emerge from a long pre-civilized past. Any emerging civilization will grow its population a thousandfold before it realizes that it must limit its numbers. Energy use will explode long before the new, technologically competent society has the scientific knowledge to understand the implications, let alone to control them, and the planet will notice and respond in ways we did not foresee.
Human beings will have to intervene to keep the basic systems we have damaged running, at least until we can restore most of the natural systems and the old climate.
Dr. Dyer has spent several years interviewing more than fifty climate scientists and in this lecture, will share what he has learned from them.
About Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for most of his adult life. He is a trained historian and received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. He served in three navies and held academic appointments at the Canadian Forces College, the Royal Military Academic Sandhurst and Oxford University before launching his twice-weekly column on international affairs, which is published in more than 20 countries.
Dyer also had a 7-part documentary television series called ‘War’, which was aired in 45 countries. One episode, ‘The Profession of Arms’, was nominated for an Academy Award. He also wrote many books, which you can learn more about here. In 2010, Dyer was made an officer of the Order of Canada.