In 1953 Ray Bradbury, an American writer, published a book entitled simply ‘Fahrenheit 451′. It was a novel about an American fireman in a not-too-distant future who realised that he was doing his job all wrong – because his job was to burn books, which were banned in that future America. (451°F is the temperature […]
A few days ago the European Union’s Earth Observation programme, ‘Copernicus’, made a special announcement at the end of its monthly report on the state of the climate. It said that the average global temperature for the past three years (2023-2025) has been 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. That’s the level we were
800 words (700) 20 May 2025 NB: This is an update after the Trump-Putin phone call. There are minor nips and tucks throughout, so use this version (including a different cut for length). If it has already run, no harm done. Nothing has really changed. Can Ukraine Survive Trump? By Gwynne Dyer We are getting
19 March 2025 Keeping the ‘Rule of Law’ Alive By Gwynne Dyer Last Tuesday there was a vote in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, that may have changed the course of history. When the vote came out ‘Yes’, you could feel the tectonic plates shift. Germany has voted to rearm. In
11 January 2025 Climate Feedbacks – Not in Front of the Children By Gwynne Dyer “This does not mean the international +1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades.” If those carefully chosen words don’t set your alarm bells ringing, you have not traveled much in the land of
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22 December 2024 Nobody Wants to be a Nazi, but…. By Gwynne Dyer ‘Alternativ für Deutschland’ (AfD) means ‘The Alternative for Germany’, and the alternative on offer is fascism. Not actual Naziism, but the AfD uses fascist rhetoric and tactics to attract German voters. It has also attracted some improbable foreign admirers. One of those
18 December 2024 The Daily Miracle By Gwynne Dyer One of the daily miracles of the media world is that there is always exactly enough news to fill the slot. Whether it be a news broadcast, an online blog or a newspaper column like this one (‘800 words, with indicated cuts to 700’), something important
9 October 2024 Remigration By Gwynne Dyer ‘Remigration’: the word had a harmless origin, as a term academics used to describe the phenomenon of migrants who failed to thrive in their new home and decided to go back to their birth country. Then about ten years ago French nationalists and racists started using it to
28 August 2024 Walls and Deportations By Gwynne Dyer Fortress America and Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) are just starting to take shape; bare outlines of what they will have grown into ten years from now. But the trend is almost unstoppable, and it will be very ugly when it’s finished. Some sort of turning point
12 June 2024 Stop the ‘Munich’ Analogies By Gwynne Dyer Scarcely a week passes without some media pundit or attention-seeking historian warning that a Great War is nigh. As always, there are enough signs and portents around to make that sort of prediction plausible, but it’s rarely correct. In fact, it hasn’t been correct now