Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The climate alarmist community is repeatedly praising the alleged “benefits” of the deadly Covid-19 outbreak.
There’s an unlikely beneficiary of coronavirus: The planet
By Rebecca Wright, CNN
Updated 1005 GMT (1805 HKT) March 17, 2020Hong Kong (CNN)Factories were shuttered and streets were cleared across China’s Hubei province as authorities ordered residents to stay home to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
It seems the lockdown had an unintended benefit — blue skies.
The average number of “good quality air days” increased 21.5% in February, compared to the same period last year, according to China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment. And Hubei wasn’t alone.Satellite images released by NASA and the European Space Agency show a dramatic reduction in nitrogen dioxide emissions — those released by vehicles, power plants and industrial facilities — in major Chinese cities between January and February. The visible cloud of toxic gas hanging over industrial powerhouses almost disappeared.
“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” says Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “I am not surprised because many cities nationwide have taken measures to minimize the spread of the virus.”
…
Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/16/asia/china-pollution-coronavirus-hnk-intl/index.html
The CNN article is not an isolated anomaly.
Other MSM outlets such as the LA Times and the New York Times have praised the climate benefits of Coronavirus, or cited the positive climate lessons we can learn from the economic damage caused by Coronavirus shutdowns – they appear to want the hardship caused by Coronavirus economic shutdowns to become a template for how we live all the time.
The Times took this disgusting trope a step further, and explored the positive side of Coronavirus killing off old climate skeptics.
The benefits of Covid-19 are extremely slight if you are dead from the virus. Rebecca Wright of CNN appears to be severely deluded about the real effects of Covi-19.
Once again they are willfully confounding CO2 and REAL pollution.
Of course skies are cleaner when they shut down all their (real) polluting sources. But this has NOTHING to do with “the planet”, which is a coded reference to CO2 emissions.
The Chinese govt are already acting to reduce REAL pollution because they have a REAL pollution problem. Whether or how this affects CO2 is largely irrelevant to them.
Nitrogen dioxide is not carbon dioxide. As you say, they are conflating pollution with CO2. Not the same thing. CO2 is a benign gas that is necessary for life on Earth. CO2 is also odorless and colorless so has no effect on how clear the sky might be.
Perhaps the UberGreens will wake up and realize the societal damage that will be brought about by the enacting of their professed solutions (a-la GND) to their imagined problem once the end of the COVID-19 scare is in sight and all their favorite haunts and entertainments have shuttered for good and they’re out of work with no income
For green thinking people there is no damage, it’s a benefit in their ill thoughts.
COVID-19 IS doing what ending fossil fuels would do…
To economies
To society
Both are Anti-Social solutions to a non problem
a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
And not for the first time in modern history.
Where would this Wuhan virus rate in a complete list of all things that could kill us, I wonder?
Methinks the media is serving us all a lesson that “perception is reality”.
In the same vein, who would actually notice or believe that the planet is in the grip of a “climate crisis” if the media had not bombarded society with this self-serving construct.
Based on measures so far MERS (2012)was MUCH deadlier COVID-19 but also much less infectious and had very obvious symptoms and no measured incidence of infected people infecting others before symptoms showed. Confined to the middle East, the death rate was about 34%(2500)with no confirmed deaths in the USA. It is still circulating at low levels in the Middle East.
Swine Flu, a variant H1N1, the common flu(2002) killed between 150,000-575,000 people worldwide, but the death rate was about 0.02%. Highly contagious but more deadly than the common H1N1 flu.
So far, COVID-19 has a death rate of 3%, kinda obviously much more dangerous for older folks It also is highly contagious like the common flu and apparently can spread in the 5 or so days before symptoms become apparent.
Those differences make COVID-19 much more dangerous than the common flue- nothing to sneeze at(tongue in cheek).
But the worst flu to hit the world, probably, was the 1918 flu- 20% fatality rate and many millions infected. At also favored young people. My mom’s sister(20) started symptoms on Friday and was dead Sunday evening. Mom said that was fairly common in the neighborhood.
Philo,
Could you provide data/links that support the 3% mortality rate for Covid-19?
From what I’ve read, South Korea seems to have better population statistics and the mortality rate seems to be about 0.25%, comparable to influenza and other coronavirus variants.
In my neck of the woods (W WA state) a computational biologist at a local cancer research institute has been sequencing the genome for confirmed cases here, and if I’m reading right, it’s been in the wild in WA since some time in January (https://nextstrain.org/), courtesy of a traveler from China, possibly Wuhan, so likely many more unreported cases to make the denominator much larger and the mortality rate much lower than 3%
If you have any data on Covid-19 and ACE2 receptor binding please refer or link. I am curious about the human cardio patients taking ACE inhibitors (I’m not one fortunately).
Interesting experiments we’re running lately, on social, financial and health systems. Very curious to see what happens to the UK/GB plan to spread herd immunity and isolate only the at-risk and infected.
Kill the humans
Save the planet
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/01/13/human-pollution-the-planet-is-doomed/
But if well kill all humans to save the planet, how will it be “known” the planet is saved?
Gaia will know.
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic, and the death of 10s of thousands is Raising Awareness.
…and the death of millions is socialism….disguised as Climate-change ‘prevention”….
There will be plenty of inner city latte drinkers financially decimated and about to get a lesson in life.
I am hoping for a run on coffee, teach these c*&ts a lesson.
CNN has been founded by Ted Turner, a dangerous Malthusian psychopath, therefore it is not surprising if its journalists are a bunch of complete irresponsible dumbasses jabbering his sickening nonsense all the year long.
Ted Turner was dipping his tiny wick into Hanoi Jane.
So what do you expect from him? John Birch?
Prediction: $2/gal gasoline at the US pump this summer will sink this narrative. The summer will come, months of families stuck at home will go to wanderings. And the Covid-19 epidemic will recede in memory (at least till the Fall). And the US economy will roar.
Gasoline is about $1.75 per gallon around here right now.
This GDP (Gross Domestic Product) estimate is several years old, but it was estimated that a reduction of $0.80 per gallon would add one percent to U.S. GDP. We are losing GDP with the economy shutting down temporarily but the lower gasoline prices will offset that loss somewhat. And if they stay this low after the economy starts up again, then it will add to the economic boom.
Low gasoline prices are good for the economy. Politicians should seek to keep gasoline prices as low as possible. In other words, quit taxing gasoline. Get your spending money somewhere else. Anywhere else but from gasoline.
Do XR have a hand in the spread? It seems to fit their demands of shutting business down, stopping air travel etc.
A few young fit activists jetting from place to place have done the trick!
We know anecdotally from the leaked document and statements made and cover a couple of articles ago that the membership numbers have tanked post covid19.
They have said the cancelled plan mass protests to be good citizens
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8108607/Even-Extinction-Rebellion-bans-mass-gatherings-coronavirus.html
The rumor was that there would be such low numbers because many of there members are old retired folk which is basically what Health professionals said at the bottom of the article.
Cruise ships were being specifically targeted as major polluters weeks before we first heard about this virus in Wuhan. Now they’re ‘floating petrie dishes’.
1 – The education system trains people to think analytically, using the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere, which puts things in context and is therefore the brain’s BS detector, is left to atrophy. That leads to a disconnect from reality which mimics schizophrenia. link
Marxists love theory and find it easy to ignore reality. Democrats are the same to a lesser degree. University educated journalists also have an impaired connection to reality. It’s actually unsurprising that such people can celebrate coronavirus.
2 – (unrelated to 1 above) ‘They’ are right about one thing. The reduction in anthropogenic emissions of all kinds is going to be an unintended experiment. The reduction of air traffic after 911 had measurable short term effects on the atmosphere. Did we learn anything important from that?
commieBob
March 18, 2020 at 2:07 am
Surely we are seeing a not insignificant reduction in man made CO2 at present with all the evil cars and planes being unused, factories on slow down, etc..
As a friend commented, we should be looking to see if the Mauna Loa CO2 levels show a significant downturn during these months of economic slowdown. If not, then we can stop worrying about man made CO2 being a significant contributor to the gradual CO2 rise we have been seeing and the warmists can start to worry about something important for a change…like a pandemic?
There is less travel, however travel was never a huge portion of energy consumption.
Electricity/heating is probably up as people stay in their homes, many of which used to be unoccupied during the day.
Energy use at the office is down but the amount is uncertain. Having 100 people in a single building is a lot more efficient than having 100 people in 100 buildings. Also, not all offices are able to shut down completely. My office had both developers and a call center. The developers are working from home, but the call center people can’t.
I’m waiting to see some demand numbers, both gasoline and electricity.
Another thing, with everybody going drive-thru for so many things, I’m not sure that even gasoline usage is going to go down.
I was reading this morning about shoppers having to go to multiple stores to get everything they need. Used to be able to get everything at one store.
Well with NY in lock down and LA surely to follow the benefits of Corona virus will soon be brought home.
The map at the top of the story is misleading. Looking at it, it’s not clear that the number of cases in China and America differs by an order of magnitude. link It seems to be more to scare than to inform.
There’s a big circle in Hubei, but its kindof obscured by lots of little circles. My guess is they’ll do some rescaling in the near future, that should make the big circles more obvious.
The more interesting number from the link is the cases per 1M people and the number of European countries because of there open borders.
I don’t get it. China has 80,000 cases in 1.4 billion people which is an infection rate of .00056% or 1 in 17,600. And their curve is flattening. Double or multiply 10X the numbers if you think they are not being truthful. And another thing, the Diamond Princess was a floating petri dish that left Yokohama on January 20 and discovered it’s first case on Feb 1. That is 10 days of close contact among 3700 crew and guests that produced 700 infected and 7 deaths. That is a 19% infection rate but only half ever had symptoms. 7 / 3700 x 100 = .19% or 2 people in 1000 die if part of an infected close quartered community. Why am I not more scared?
Because you’re willing to believe numbers currently published by China? When their ambassador to South Africa is saying the virus didn’t start in China, and hinting at the US being to blame?
Read the recent numbers from CDC about US cases. Not clear if they’re resolved cases or active cases, but still: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm Younger people don’t die from it — assuming they can get ICU care and ventilators if they need it. That will not continue if more of us, even young people, don’t get scared and stay home: https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Availability-for-COVID-19 (SCCM: Society for Critical Care Medicine)
The problem is not that we don’t have critical care beds. It’s that many of them are already occupied by very sick people, and the assumed average stay is about 4 days. This bug puts people in critical care for a couple of weeks, if they live. We could be in Italy’s triage situation more easily than you realize.
I don’t know if they read WUWT, but less than 12 hours after cB’s comment, the size of the red dots has been reduced.
PS: I’m sure that in less than a month, they will have to reduce the dots again.
Speak of the devil, they reduced the size again last night.
There is also ongoing shitstorm in Germany about “satirical” video made by state broadcaster.
The link to story on ZH: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/german-state-tv-celebrates-coronavirus-killing-humans
Nasty.
Unsurprising. Remember 10:10?
Her reasoning is akin to “The operation was a success although the patient died.”
Earth temperature is going to increase ala post 911 flight cancellations
So, more plant growth?
From the article: “Other MSM outlets such as the LA Times and the New York Times have praised the climate benefits of Coronavirus, or cited the positive climate lessons we can learn from the economic damage caused by Coronavirus shutdowns – they appear to want the hardship caused by Coronavirus economic shutdowns to become a template for how we live all the time.”
If the MSM desire clear skies then they should be promoting nuclear power plants. That is the only thing that will give us clear skies while providing sufficient, affordable electricity to power humanity’s needs.
Windmills will give us clear skies, but they can’t power the globe. They can’t even come close to powering the globe. Putting your hopes in windmills is a delusional dream that distracts from real solutions.
There are a lot of fools on the Left. Don’t listen to them. They think they know what they are talking about, but they don’t.
With so many factory closings, it will be a HOT summer!
Perhaps what we need to stop the virus.
No, b’cause CO2 is decreasing, so no hot summer 😀
Take it to your bookmarks 😀
Krishna Gans:
“No, b’cause CO2 is decreasing, so no hot summer”
CO2 has NO effect on our climate.
It will be hot because there will be fewer dimming SO2 aerosol emissions because of the closed factories.
Cleaner air =stronger intensity of the sunshine striking the Earth’s surface.
You didn’t see the smiley at the end of the line ?
btw, China restart production as Corona is at an decreasing level there.
First factories are working, shops and restaurants open again.
Krishna Gans:
I was puzzled by the smiley, didn’t realize that it was sarcasm.
Not too swift, on my part.
Will they be allowed to export anything that they might produce?
The scare being created around this virus is by design. Scared people are easy to manipulate. Look at what we’re talking about, universal income, paid sick/family leave, universal healthcare, you think these things will go away after the scare has passed?
Most of the civilised world has these things already.
Why should illness cause homelessness?
Funny how people associate the ability to steal from the fellow citizens as being civilized.
People vote for the way to share resources. It’s not stolen.
It is not civilised to vote for killing the poor or the black or the weak or whomever else the barbarians in the Thunderdome are torturing this day.
As long as other people get together to vote, it’s ok to steal other people’s stuff.
So says the man who is quite proud of the fact that he’s being supported by stolen stuff.
Ah yes, you can always tell when a socialist knows that he can’t win the argument. He starts to declare that the only options are full blown socialism, or Mad Max style anarchy.
Don’t you just love the way socialists torture the language in order to justify their desire to take other people’s stuff.
One person makes stuff, other people vote to take that stuff. It’s now called sharing.
The mail stated “standby unless otherwise advised”.
So we’re all home phoning each other. Quite a lot of schedules toppled all of a sudden. Medical renewals, simulator proficiency, all is at standstill.
Grounded equipment and other infrastructure running costs could take down many jobs while stranded passengers opt for about anything private/charter in a framework of spiraling costs.
Now you have a precise in-vivo idea of what makes greens happy:
-Fears, people dying, total immobility and government control.
It will be very interesting to see how long it takes—if ever—for there to be a dip in the exponentially-increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration measurements from NOAA’s Mauna Loa observatory, reflecting the nearly instantaneous and significant reduction in fossil fuel use globally due to governmental and societal reactions to COVID-19.
Alarmists have to be quite worried that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration will stay on its well-established trend line independent of mankind’s reductions in emissions of CO2 from use of fossil fuels. That is, no dip will indicate human emissions of CO2 pale into insignificance compared to natural emissions, most likely associated with Earth’s natural warming since the end of the last glacial period.
The total drop in energy usage so far is minuscule.
Really? Got any facts to go with that statement?
Observation, plus a few minutes thinking about it. See my more extensive comments above.
February Mauna Loa numbers are posted at Climate4you. No obvious reduction from a visual inspection. February should have had quite reduced emissions from China at least.
Thank you DMA. I will be very curious to see what the March numbers reveal.
Sick, how much tunnel vision do you have to have to define suffering as a good thing.
The light from blue skies coming through the shudders of the quarantined and through the eyes of the dead is good because it, in some twisted way, fits into their climate change scam.
The constitution gives freedom of the press to chronicle events not to make up events. After all, events are not made in the image of the free press.
There is also a morality issue of people following a corrupt press and is no different than knowingly voting for a corrupt politician.
This type of statement shows how sick the “Green” movement is…Human suffering is Okay if it benefits non-sentient the earth somehow. That is a serious mental illness…
I have been warning about this being used as an exemplar, propaganda tool and excue for the eco-fascist tyrrany.
A correction: Human suffering is Okay if it benefits the green ovement
a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
Now, just cut off the natural gas and electricity to everyone’s home and everyone could fully experience the benefits of the “Green New Deal”.
Fromthe WHO website one can read read this paragraph:
Doesn’t this put COVID-19 in the shadow of Tuberculosis?
Isn’t it on the same scale as Anthropocentric Global Warming vs Natural Global Warming?
If we turned off the power to CNN, we could see a beneficial effect as well.
“The Times took this disgusting trope a step further, and explored the positive side of Coronavirus killing off old climate skeptics.”
Liberals spend a lot of time fantasizing about being able to kill those who disagree with them.
One pandemic a year keeps the atmosphere clear. Yeah right, you greens, reds, CNN and other msm-outlets…
While pandemics are a natural way of reducing population, people who celebrate them are soulless, vile creatures. Oh, wait, we were speaking of CNN, weren’t we?
Expect joy over the next earthquake, typhoon, anything that kills the human parasite. These are sick, sick creatures.
‘people who celebrate them are soulless, vile creatures’
Don’t forget the people who exploit them. That’s a step lower on the scum ladder.
The only positive I have seen come out of all this is; “US Gas Prices by State” – Google it and click the GasBuddy one. 17 states are below $2 per Gal . . .
As George Carlin stated “the planet is fine” and it was fine then and now . . .
JPP
I found a very interesting article:
Solution to the corona problem isolate panic makers – Documentation of an extraordinary contribution to the current discussion
I have been warning about this being used as an exemplar, propaganda tool and excue for the eco-fascist tyrrany.
This praise of a lack of economic activity by the lefties and Progressives will end as soon as the taxpayers start pointing out that teachers and bureaucrats will need to be fired to save money that the government can no longer collect.
I was walking a main aisle in Walmart yesterday when two staff brought out two skids of 24 roll packages of toilet paper. There wasn’t the panicked herd of a few days ago, but people were circled around taking the one only allotment. As I passed, I said to my adult daughter just loud enough that those people could here, “You can wipe your behind with yesterdays newspaper, but you can’t eat toilet paper”. There was simple wisdom in this but all I got was some blank looks.
What’s a “newspaper”, boomer?
Well I suppose you could wipe with your iPad. Has anybody out there ever read the iPad warranty ?
Seriously, it’s what you’ll wish you had when either the Sun, or Kim Jong Un decides to release a big flare.
Cheers !
No, it’s just a slow news minute.