Category Archives: Science

Dyer: Global Heating: Breaking Records, Beating Forecasts; Now What?

Climate Change: The August Deadline
By Gwynne Dyer — 31 July 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.

“By August, if we’re still looking at record-breaking temperatures, then we really have moved into uncharted territory,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt in April. Well, 22 July was the hottest average global temperature ever recorded – and 23 July promptly broke that brand new record. Here we are in August, and it is not looking promising.

Gavin Schmidt is Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was choosing his words very carefully when he used the phrase ‘uncharted territory’, because that is a frightening place to be. Continue reading Dyer: Global Heating: Breaking Records, Beating Forecasts; Now What?

Is the Petroleum Profit Party Really About to End? Two Oil Countries Are Making Their Bets — And an Extra about The Other Washington

I. Guyana: Oil, Time & Money

Gwynne Dyer — Sept. 18, 2023

Guyana is not a ‘hellhole country’ of the sort Donald Trump complained about when he said he wanted immigrants to come to the US from white places like Norway instead, but it did used to be poor, tropical and largely populated by people of colour.

Continue reading Is the Petroleum Profit Party Really About to End? Two Oil Countries Are Making Their Bets — And an Extra about The Other Washington

Is This for Real? Life in space discovered?? Gwynne Dyer Says, “Maybe Yes.”

Life discovered on planet 120 light years from Earth

– Gwynne Dyer is a UK-based Canadian journalist and historian who writes about international affairs

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.

Continue reading Is This for Real? Life in space discovered?? Gwynne Dyer Says, “Maybe Yes.”

The Invasion of the Invasives Is Here (Right In My Back Yard)

Washington Post

Scientists warn invasive pests are taking a staggering toll on society

The authors of a major new U.N.-backed report say invasive species are costing the world more than $423 billion a year

By Dino Grandoni
 — September 4, 2023

Invasive pests are wreaking havoc across the planet, destroying crops, disseminating pathogens, depleting fish people rely on for food and driving native plants and animals toward extinction, according to a major report backed by the United Nations.


[COMMENT: Also from a report in my tiny back yard in Durham NC. . . .]

Continue reading The Invasion of the Invasives Is Here (Right In My Back Yard)

Two Pieces of Good News: AI Bringing Speech for the Paralyzed Closer, And Dawn at the Grand Canyon

The Guardian – August 23, 2023

Paralysed woman able to ‘speak’ through digital avatar in world first

By Hannah Devlin

Latest technology uses tiny electrodes on brain surface and is faster than synthesisers which rely on eye tracking

A severely paralysed woman has been able to speak through an avatar using technology that translated her brain signals into speech and facial expressions.

The advance raises hopes that brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs) could be on the brink of transforming the lives of people who have lost the ability to speak due to conditions such as strokes and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Continue reading Two Pieces of Good News: AI Bringing Speech for the Paralyzed Closer, And Dawn at the Grand Canyon