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 ...

The geopolitical question of the moment is: how important is it to humour Russian leader Vladimir Putin? The answer is: not very. Throw him a fish or two, because he’...

By Gwynne Dyer The “new normal”, said International Energy Agency spokesperson Heymi Bahar last May, may be a far faster expansion of renewable energy than expected, driven mainly by market ...

I must admit that I googled the plot of the 1997 film ‘Wag the Dog’ before starting to write this. It’s a dark comedy about a US president facing a ...

The new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus was discovered last week by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, the only countries in southern Africa that have the skills and ...

An article with the innocuous title ‘Reframing incentives for climate policy action’ slipped out in the scientific journal Nature Energy three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because ...

The first snow of the winter will reach Kabul any day now, and the death rate will start to climb: mostly children, at first, but it will not really be ...

“I saw in some of the newspapers they used the term ‘Sputnik moment’,” said general Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I don’t know if ...

“The world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7°C of heating,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “There is a high risk of failure of COP26.” That’s the global ...

It’s possible that the tide which brought hard-right populist governments to power in a number of Central European countries is starting to go out again. In the Czech Republic, ...

‘Don’t bother your pretty head about it’ is the prevailing media take on the risk of the volcanic eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands turning into a ...

A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world’s intelligence services – and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a ...

By Gwynne Dyer It’s been the biggest shock in archaeology for a long time. British and American archaeologists have found solid evidence that human beings – we could call them ‘...

Much commotion but not much change as the most trusted politician in Germany steps down Last January Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) were ahead in the German opinion polls ...

Eugenics was a 20th-century pseudo-science that purported to improve the human breed by weeding out the ‘least fit’, often by measures like compulsory sterilisation or, in the case of the ...

By Gwynne Dyer ‘Changed the world forever’ is the most hackneyed phrase in journalism, and if you can get through this week (the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) without hearing ...

Afghanistan withdrawal has strengthened rather than ended the West’s delusional thinking that led to the misbegotten adventure in the first place By Gwynne Dyer A man is sitting in ...

Violent Islamist movements, as current events in Afghanistan demonstrate, have had some success in Muslim countries that have been invaded by the United States. But they have failed everywhere else, ...

There are 150 new coal-fired plants under construction or already approved and funded in the world, so you can’t really say that we are taking global warming seriously yet. But ...

By Gwynne Dyer “I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban),” declared Ashraf Ghani, the soon-to-be-ex-president of Afghanistan. “We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations ...

At first I was going to write about the ‘Arab Problem’, because there is not a single functioning democracy in the Arab world. This week’s presidential coup in Tunisia ...

The extreme weather events of recent weeks have become a further wake-up call ‘Zeitgeist’ is a slippery word. At best it’s just a fancy German way of saying ‘the ...

By Gwynne Dyer Five times in the past two weeks, government soldiers in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces in northern Afghanistan have fled across the border into Tajikistan after clashes with ...

First the ‘heat dome’, with temperatures in the mid-to-high forties Celsius in many parts of western North America for up to a week (49.6°C in Lytton, BC). Then, when the ...