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 …
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 …
The monsoon rains are finally arriving in central and northern India, but they are two weeks late. It started raining in Mumbai on Monday, and it should be raining in Delhi by Friday, but it will have come too late for many people, especially farmers. For some parts of the country, it has been 200 …
They don’t hold world elections, but this is the week when around a third of the planet’s voters get the election results for their country or region. In no case are the results a cause for jubilation. The headline vote, of course, has to be India’s election, a six-week process in which the country’s 900 …