Gwynne Dyer-Much To Do About Nothing

Tuesday, April 07, 2009 08:53 AM

I was humbled to be able to attend and witness three great doctors, who were builders of health care this area inducted into the Northern Medical Hall Of Fame on the weekend.

Dr Eldon Lee, Dr Jack Mackenzie and Dr. Fergus Ducharme were the true pioneers of medicine in this region. Their dedication should not go unnoticed and it was nice to see them receive the recognition that they so richly deserved. They sacrificed not only their own personal life, but in most cases that of their families to provide health care for our citizens. They are amongst a dwindling group of true pioneers in medicine in central and northern BC.

As for the guest speaker Gwynne Dyer, that was another matter.

When Dyer, born and raised in Newfoundland, began his speech with his adopted British accent, I wondered what was so wrong about being Canadian?

In his speech he suggested that at some point, as global warming gets worse, (and in his mind it’s just around the corner) the USA will build a wall along the Mexican border, and will man it with guns shooting any of the Mexicans trying to get into their country because Mexico will be faced with a catastrophic drought because of global warming.

People will be shot he said, thousands .That statement lead me to believe that Dyer has been playing too much game boy as he travels from city to city, giving talks, and of course making money on how the global warming is about to strike with a vengeance.

He said the generals that he talks to confirm this will happen, which further leads me to believe that they also have been playing too much Game Boy and watching too many space movies with their spare time, which must be plenty.

Dyer said that it is China's time to have the riches that we have enjoyed. He of course forgot to mention that they have enjoyed several periods in history of being the leaders in the world and of course forgot to mention they represent 20% of the world’s population and between China and India, just short of 40%.

He blamed Canada for being a major contributor for global warming; we do more to pollute the atmosphere than other countries with our population, he said . Of course he failed to mention that we are large, the next largest country in the world to Russia, with a mere 33 million people, so it takes a lot of fossil fuel for us to get around in a generally cold climate.

He also forgot to mention that a majority of the resources that we produce in this country are for export to countries such as China, who, while its land mass is just behind the USA, contains 20% of the world’s population.

He forgot to mention that we never had a global warming problem until we increased our population in the world to 6.77 billion and the fact that we are eating the center out of the planet.

Those population problems seemed to get lost in all of the chatter. Instead we were left with the feeling that we all should rush home and write our last will and testament, because the fuse is short, and we are about to see the end of the world as we know it.

I don’t know what they paid Dyer for his visit, whatever it was , it was too much in my mind, and the money would have been better spent getting Mary Chow to tell us how to make a good sweet and sour sauce , because in the latter case, the information would have been more useful.

I’m Meisner and that one man’s opinion.

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Posted on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 08:53 AM in Views by Ben Meisner

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Comments

Posted by: RRrabbitt on April 7 2009 1:04 PM

Yep... woodah bin better with a git-tar and a floppi hat....( not to mention the campfire! )....

"And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction."

:-)

V.

Posted by: ammonra on April 7 2009 5:53 PM

"a good sweat and sour sauce"!

No sweat sauce would taste good to me, Ben. :-()

As someone who has a natural British (London) accent, there is nothing wrong with being a Canadian, and I am quite proud of the fact that I chose to become one.

Posted by: Palopu on April 7 2009 10:31 PM

I guess Gwynne was trying to tell us, that we are going to, suffer Dyer consequences if we continue to pollute.

I am inclined to agree with Ben. We should just turn the page and carry on. There are more important things happening that need our attention, than listening to Global Warming fear mongers.

Posted by: duffer on April 8 2009 9:09 AM

I can't understand why people keep listening to these Global Warming fear mongers and believing them!! Why anyone would go and pay to listen to drivel like that is beyond me. I certainly wouldn't waste my money on it. I read the article in The Citizen as well and came to the same conclusion as Ben did here. This guy is a total waste of money, but I guess if he can make a living doing this, all the more power to him. He should have been around at the beginning of the last century selling elixers, and preaching on the streets.

Posted by: diplomat on April 8 2009 9:31 AM

The guests who attended probably had no idea that Mr. Dyer was going to go into that kind of a rant.

Global warming issue is intimately connected to the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

That is what gets my attention because of the combustion of fossil fuels releases vast amounts of many nasty substances into the environment, for instance coal burning releases mercury which is found in coal into the atmosphere - we all know how deadly mercury is when it ends up in the bodies of living things, humans and animals.

Alternate clean energy (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave) can be found to drastically reduce the pollution of air, soil and water associated with combustion of all fossil fuels.

I am sure that any audience would be more sympathetic to a message which has this as its main theme.

Posted by: gus on April 9 2009 1:48 AM

I too think that reducing CO2 generation by burning fossil fuels has multi pronged consequences which will help our future. It really does not matter whether it makes any difference with respect to global warming. The availability of fossil fuels is finite. We should be encouraging alternative energy production. That is the reason the Europeans put the large "carbon tax" on their fuel during the previous oil crisis and they are beginning to reap the benefits now through new generation cars that are killing GM, etc. and the creation of technologies they are now selling to the rest of the world. Windmills that are coming here from Denmark. Canadian invented solar cell production technology being applied in Germany.

Before Dyer's prediction of world turmoil due to food shortage will come true, I think we have to prepare our children for coping with reduced energy availability.

Who knows, in the end it will all work out. Wine in Prince George. Vegies under glass in the Okanagan, the same as they are already grown under glass in the heat of the Spanish climate and the climate of the South Pacific islands such as Fiji.

Posted by: Junco on April 9 2009 1:27 PM

The book, The Late Great Planet Earth written by Hal Lindsey came to my mind when I read the Citizen article. It was also made into a movie in 1979.Both were hugely popular with the "last days" crowd and the impressionable youth. I remember as a young person after coming out of the theatre I was thinking that there was no future because anyway we looked we were going DOWN. Did a bit of partying then because the end was coming...yeah that's the way it was, that's my story and I'm sticking to it, ha, ha. Thirty years later and Hal Lindsey's slant on things have fallen way short of the mark. I say we pay heed to common sense and tangible evidence, but nix the doom and gloomers. I wonder if Mr. Dyer is writing a book and is planning on promoting it through such venues, maybe trying to get some hype out there before the fact? Count me out as a subscriber to any of his jabberwocky...been there done that.