Showing 1 - 10 of 14
Marking time at the COP30 climate summit
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/11/2025
» Populist parties are already in power in some developed countries and waiting just outside the door in many more. The key trick of populist politicians is to tell the voters what they want to hear, and the voters definitely do not want their lives to be disrupted by global heating, so they are told it is not happening. It's "the world's biggest con", in Donald Trump's words.
New Caledonia pragmatism pips nationalism
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/09/2024
» With the sole exception of the fifty people on Pitcairn Island, the United Kingdom (once known as the British Empire) liquidated its holdings in the Pacific Ocean long ago. France, by contrast, has a half million citizens in the Pacific (and another two million living in other bits of its former empire on islands in all the world's major oceans).
Climate change: the August deadline
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/08/2024
» When you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed.
The mother of all climate feedbacks?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 10/05/2024
» 'Just like this year, last year the heatwave extended from parts of India to Bangladesh and Myanmar, and all the way to Thailand. This year it went further east, into the Philippines. So, it's the same pattern," said Prof Krishna Achutarao of the Indian Institute of Technology. "I do not particularly buy into this idea that El Niño is the cause."
Life elsewhere will someday be possible
Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/09/2023
» This week's real news is the discovery of life on another planet. As Cambridge University's Nikku Madhusudhan said in the first sentence of his report: "The search for habitable environments and biomarkers in exoplanetary atmospheres is the holy grail of exoplanet science." And he has probably found the Holy Grail.
A temperature spike in the sea spells doom
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/05/2023
» There is a fever raging in the ocean. Last month it was worst off the eastern coast of North America, where the sea surface temperature was as much as 13.8C higher than the 1981-2011 average for this time of year. Not only was that a record; it was an astounding leap upwards: more than double the previous record.
Freddy and the Ice: Messages From the Future
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/03/2023
» Two new things on the climate front this week, both bad news. Typhoons used to be like drive-by shootings: one pass, one hit and then gone. Now they're starting to come back for a second hit.
Cuban missile crisis redux in Nicaragua?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/07/2022
» It was a piece of news so obscure and implausible that I missed it when it first surfaced last month. The news was that the Russians are going to put hypersonic nuclear missiles into Nicaragua and terrify the Americans into backing down over Ukraine. Or kill them all if they don't.
How to stop sea level rise at its source
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 05/06/2022
» 'Ninety percent of ice flowing to the sea from the Antarctic ice sheet, and about half of that lost from Greenland, travels in narrow, fast ice streams measuring tens of kilometres or less across. Stemming the largest flows would allow the ice sheets to thicken, slowing or even reversing their contribution to sea-level rise."
Climate change hits southern part of Africa
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/04/2022
» Tropical Storm Ana in January, Tropical Cyclone Batsirai in February, then Dumako, Emnati and Gombe in quick succession: three cyclones and two "tropical storms" in six weeks hitting the coasts of southeast Africa.