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WHEN a climate scientist forecasts that global warming will trigger mega-famines, floods of refugees and geopolitical meltdown, we may fear that they have a myopic world view. When a security specialist says the same thing, we should start to wonder. Gwynne Dyer has been a lecturer on international affairs for two decades. In Climate Wars he eloquently explores the 鈥済rim detail鈥� of how governments will grapple with a challenge unprecedented since before there were governments.

You won鈥檛 find this stuff in any IPCC report. In particular, Dyer offers eight scenarios of climate-induced human catastrophe over the next half century that draw on war games developed in the US Pentagon and elsewhere. He takes a grim view of where climate is going. Reasonably so, given that when the UN climate change convention was agreed back in 1992, greenhouse gas emissions were rising by 1 per cent a year, and now, almost two decades and a hell of a lot of talking later, they are rising by 3 per cent a year.

Events may soon be taken out of our hands; before long, there will probably be 鈥渕egatons of methane鈥� belching out of thawing Arctic permafrost, making any reductions in carbon dioxide emissions close to irrelevant.

So what does Dyer think will happen? During the 2010s, Russia and NATO go head-to-head over control of the ice-free Arctic, and China implodes as millions starve in droughts. During the 2020s, cyclones kill millions in Bangladesh, while the US builds a 鈥渂ig fence鈥� to keep out starving Mexicans. In the 2030s, India and Pakistan conduct a six-day nuclear war over a hydroelectric plant on the parched river Indus, whose water they are supposed to share. It leaves half a billion dead.

By the 2040s, Canada is selling the contents of the Great Lakes to California, and the European Union collapses in the face of millions of refugees escaping from North Africa. Only the UK sits smug behind its wide moat, with a still equable climate.

It makes for a good read, but do I believe it? Not at all. Dyer鈥檚 view of both humanity and climate is too mechanistic and his view of politics too militaristic. The world is far stranger, and the future will be far odder, than anything imagined in a war studies seminar based on the predictions of climate modellers. We know less than we think. But as an insight into what the military strategists imagine is going to happen as a result of climate change, this book is truly terrifying.