It’s Not The Weather. It’s The Climate By Gwynne Dyer Last week it was Europe’s turn, with a slow-moving ‘heat dome’ that gave almost everybody from the United Kingdom to Poland three consecutive days of record-breaking temperatures. In Germany it hit 41°Celsius. That’s 106° Fahrenheit, if you live in the one country that still clings […]
Courts Are the Last Defence Against Tyranny By Gwynne Dyer India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies, and both of them seem to be in danger. In each of them populist federal governments are deliberately polarising the population, radicalising the politics, and seeking to undermine the impartial rule of law. In
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” Familiarly genocidal threats from Donald Trump, with the trademark mobster-style “NO MORE MR NICE GUY” at the end. Amazing
Vladimir Putin is a reckless man who invades countries and has his opponents killed, but he understands that some things are too dangerous to meddle with. That’s why he proposed last September that the United States and Russia should extend their ‘New START’ nuclear arms control treaty for one more year, to gain more negotiating
Democracy is in retreat or at least on the defensive almost everywhere, while wars are getting bigger and more frequent. The trend lines are frighteningly bad. There are big wars in Ukraine and Sudan and another one is only on temporary hold in Gaza. Smaller wars are underway in Yemen, Burma, and Thailand/Cambodia, and a
“The thing that comforts me,” said Jeff Boudier at Hugging Face, the leading open platform for AI builders, “is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday” during the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. The coming AI crash “is going to enable lots of great
Ukraine: Deadlines By Gwynne Dyer “I love deadlines,” said Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Donald Trump sets deadlines for more complicated reasons that purport to be tactical, but he too is addicted to the whooshing sound they make when
Counting Babies in China (and Elsewhere) By Gwynne Dyer In 2014, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and his wife paid a fine of $1.2 million for having a third child, which was against the law. They didn’t go to jail – it was treated more like a very big parking ticket – but it was assessed
Geoengineering or Bust By Gwynne Dyer This is the second anniversary of the arrival of the Emergency but practically nobody is mentioning it. Instead people are choosing to worry about more familiar problems like global trade wars, the rise of fascism and genocidal wars. It’s kind of a global displacement activity: if we don’t mention
2 April 2025 Nuclear Powers: The Third Wave By Gwynne Dyer The ‘third wave’ of nuclear weapons countries is beginning, and it will be at least as dangerous as the previous waves. Maybe more so, because it will be happening in a world where the old, predatory style of international politics is coming back after