24 January 2022 Shrinking Asia By Gwynne Dyer In the politics of population, the magic number is 2.1. That is ‘replacement level’: if a country’s fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) is 2.1, then the country’s population will remain level. Above that number, it starts to grow; below …
5 January 2022 The Industrialisation of Space By Gwynne Dyer It will be a bumper year for big space launches to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, including many manned flights, but the real shocker is the number of satellites and spaceships being launched by private companies. Never mind Elon Musk’s twelve-thousand-small-satellite Starlink programme, which is …
27 December 2021 ‘Nuclear Twilight’: Something Else to Worry About By Gwynne Dyer As a dreadful year draws to an end and the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers …
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14 November 2021 COP26: Sharma’s Tears By Gwynne Dyer Closing the two-week COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Saturday, Alok Sharma, the British president of the 197-country conference, declared “We’ve kept 1.5 (degrees Celsius) within reach, but its pulse is weak.” But he was close to tears several times in his closing remarks. That was …
9 November 2021 COP26: A Mixed Bag By Gwynne Dyer It’s not too early to assess the success or failure of COP26, the climate summit that began in Glasgow on 31 October. The first week, while the heads of state are there, is when all the big promises are announced; the second week is devoted …
27 September 2021 The Quad and the Next Cold War By Gwynne Dyer Never mind AUKUS. It’s the Quad that counts. The creation of an Australia-United Kingdom-United States military alliance last week caused a tempest in a teapot, but the real action was elsewhere. In Washington on Friday the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘Quad’ for short) …
18 May 2021 The birth rates are falling fast in all the world’s more prosperous countries, but the generation now in their middle years have not yet grasped what that means for their later years. If they end up needing some sort of assisted living, either at home or in a care home, they will …
Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the saying goes, but China does it differently. It brings clubs. Last Monday, China and India had the nastiest frontier incident since their border war of 1962. In the Galwan Valley of the Aksai Chin, a disputed region the size of Switzerland in the western Himalayas, Chinese and …
I’ve never really believed the story climate crusaders tell to explain why so many people don’t get the message. You know, the one where if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will hop right out, whereas if you just turn the heat up slowly it won’t notice. It will stay …
Wuhan, the Chinese city where it all started, was locked down for 79 days before the restrictions on movement were finally lifted last week. A bit over-cautious, perhaps, but in China the coronavirus does really seem to be under control – not totally eradicated, but controllable without extreme measures. If Donald Trump “reopens” the United …