Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Conversation, we listen to disease experts but ignore climate experts, even though they are both groups of experts, because we have an instinctive fear of disease.
Coronavirus response proves the world can act on climate change
Eric Galbraith Professor of Earth System Science, McGill University
Ross Otto Assistant Professor of Psychology, McGill University…
The alarms for both COVID-19 and climate change were sounded by experts, well in advance of visible crises. It is easy to forget, but at the time of this writing, the total deaths from COVID-19 are less than 9,000 — it is the terrifying computer model predictions of much larger numbers that have alerted governments to the need for swift action, despite the disruption this is causing to everyday life.
Yet computer models of climate change also predict a steady march of increasing deaths, surpassing 250,000 people per year within two decades from now.
As scientists who have studied climate change and the psychology of decision-making, we find ourselves asking: Why do the government responses to COVID-19 and climate change — which both require making difficult decisions to avert future disasters — differ so dramatically? We suggest four important reasons.
Instinctive fear
First, COVID-19 is deadly in a way that is frightening on an instinctive, personal level. People react strongly to mortal threats, and although the virus appears to have much lower mortality for otherwise healthy people under 60, those statistics do not quell universal personal safety fears.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-response-proves-the-world-can-act-on-climate-change-133999
There are a few details the professors left out, like that disease epidemic models have a firm foundation of observational evidence. Climate predictions of imminent catastrophe not so much.
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Oh sure.
We can attack climate change when the worlds economies and civilization itself is reduced to lighting houses with whale oil and deforesting everything for cooking fuel. Sure. That.
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
Cutting fossil fuels cures climate change the same way bloodletting cures disease.
+1!
The epidemiologists have: data.
Promoters styling themselves “climate scientists” have: nothing.*
*Unskilled, failed, computer model output is, indeed, nothing.
What kind of medical data is that?
Some people got ill from unspecified causes and died?
They got nothing.
Com’on GoatGuy, we really could act on a climate crisis if one were to come along.
Coronavirus response proves the world did not take climate change seriously.
The world did not take climate change seriously for at least 300 million years of which the last 3.5 are the coldest and therefore we call it an Ice Age.
So what would be good about 2 miles of Ice over Greta’s homeland?
Robertvd: “So what would be good about 2 miles of Ice over Greta’s homeland?”
You’d never run out of ice for your gin and tonic. Other than that, I’m not seeing an upside.
You wouldn’t have to listen to prattlings
And the increase of NO2 over China from post COVID-19 economic reinvigoration proves that tackling CC as proposed is futile economic suicide for any country that attempts it
“Coronavirus response proves the world did not take climate change seriously.”
That is the lesson to take from this.
The reason for this behavior is there *is* evidence the Coronavirus is real. There is *no* evidence that Human-caused Climate Change is real.
People respond to immediate, certain and direct consequences (COVID 19 Exposure) while future, uncertain and indirect (Global Warming) gets a ho hum. People know a 1.2 in per decade sea level rise and another 0.5 C warming is not even a threat.
An we are pretty certain that the permanent drought in California announced by ex governor moonbeam was BS.
Not only that, Tom, but their claim that “People react strongly to mortal threats, and although the virus appears to have much lower mortality for otherwise healthy people under 60…” appears to be wrong, too. It seems it’s lethal to those under 60, as well. Since this was said with what sounded like glee, I’m sure this is a disapointment to the Alarmist dude.
They sure seem to hate older people and babies. It makes one wonder if they ever learned about the birds and the bees thing.
“Not only that, Tom, but their claim that “People react strongly to mortal threats, and although the virus appears to have much lower mortality for otherwise healthy people under 60…” appears to be wrong, too. It seems it’s lethal to those under 60, as well.”
I heard a reason for why those over 60 seem to be hit hard, that I had not heard before: The doctor said that older people’s immune systems are not weaker than young people, they are actually stronger, and when the Wuhan virus strikes, it causes a stronger overreaction of the older person’s immune system, and this immune response is what does the lethal damage.
That’s why these drugs that reduce this immune response are working well on the Wuhan virus. One of the reasons, I should say. 🙂
I can help professor. Because one is real and one is bogus.
You can add one is in a direct threat to your life, the other is a possible threat based on lots of guesses to someone in the futures life.
Fighting Global Warming/Climate Change the way radicals demand is a major threat to life in developing countries and the environment everywhere. Fighting the spread of a new contagion may save lives while destroying the energy underpinnings of modern society will decimate both society and the environment.
LdB
Like 100 generations hence. Maybe……….
But surely the hugely multiplying unicorn farts alone threaten – well, something. Eventually.
Don’t they?
Please? Don’t they?!
Unicorn farts, and – let me see – maybe over-grilled troll burgers?
Auto – yes, Mods – /Sarc. For sure /Sarc
“Coronavirus response proves the world can act on climate change”
Or maybe the response proves that the world does respond to real crises and not to fake crises. The world turns out to be smarter than previously thought.
The real problem is that Mother Nature does not take climate change seriously.
The epidemiologists have: data.
Promoters styling themselves “climate scientists” have: nothing.*
*Unskilled, failed, computer model output is, indeed, nothing.
Janice Moore March 19, 2020 at 10:11 pm
Hi Janice, I guess the climate crowd is just jealous that when the epidemiologists speak the public stocks up on toilet paper. 🙂
michael
Hi, Michael,
How nice to see you 🙂
Not just for itself, but because I pray (yes, WUWT atheists, I realize you think prayers are a waste of time) for you and your family from time to time. My current re-reading of “My Dearest Friend,” collected letters of Abigail and John Adams to each other, with so many mentions of Revolutionary War sites, for instance, brought you and your sons to mind. So, I prayed for you all. Hope all is well.
LOL. Re: TP, UNBELIEVABLE. And, last night, when I shopped at Fred Meyer (a Kroger store), the shelves were STILL (same as it was over 2 weeks ago) empty. Who ARE these people? No one I have talked to about it has stockpiled TP. Too weird.
Everything else I needed (don’t need to buy TP, the Honey Bucket I rent comes with it -and to think I have been so chagrined this past year and a half about having no bathroom… it was a blessing (wry smile)!) was there (except hand sanitizer – and I didn’t need that, it is just convenient for me, living as I am without running water – I bought glass cleaner instead (alcohol based, well, heh, water based, really).
Overall, my errands went very well. No one freaked out if we passed closer than 6 feet apart in an aisle, etc.. The only other weird thing was at Safeway (where I can find the NON “organic” (will not support that junk science sc@m) free run (my heart will not let me eat caged chickens eggs) eggs). Only about 7 dozen eggs remained in the case (capacity approximately 1,000 cartons).
Amazing.
Sorry so long. Just nice to talk with someone…
Take care,
Janice
Coronavirus events prove that people are likely to react when they see a real threat to their well-being. but not (eg, Global Warming) if they can see that there is no problem and the wool is being pulled over their eyes by Charlatans. The disease epidemic models have a firm foundation of observational science. Climate modes are pseudo-science based on fraudulent data. In both cases however governments are normally seen to over-react to any threat and stuff the response up. Individual people not so much.
There’s always the madness of crowds.
The difference between the people and the government is that the government will amp up a crisis so it will have an excuse to do something the people would never accept otherwise.
Side note: Am I imagining it or is the above quote the most quoted quote found on WUWT?
Well Bob…..as far as I know…… it’s perhaps the most applicable ‘famous quote’ to the whole ‘Sky is Falling’ climate scam.
It’s one of the most quoted.
The quote about the “madness of crowds” is fairly popular, too.
The quote about human stupidity and an the universe is probably in the top 5.
I think the bottom line is few of us think Climate Scientists experts they rate at about the same level as the profession we openly call shrinks and the other we call sharks, ambulance chasers and bottom feeders.
The doom claiming “experts” are 0 for 50 in the accuracy of their claims.
I apologize, it may be 0 for 100. There are so many “expert” predictions that no one takes them seriously.
I also notice that the so called “experts” and their camp followers continue to fly, a lot. And many often use private jets. Justin Trudeau, self described climate change fighter extraordinaire, even used two jets during the last Canadian federal election.
Pandemics, are infrequent, but real.
With many people staying at home, imagine we are in the gang green world of the “experts”. Lots of blackouts and brown outs when the wind dies and during week long rainy periods.
Hospitals? Sorry the power is off again, the ventilators?
My dad always defined experts as X is an unknown quantity and a spurt is a drip under pressure. The thing about the current advice from the doctor experts is that it actually has an empirical base and a well known equation to describe what is happening. Climate change experts change data and tune their models to provide the outcome they want and goodness forbid that real data should be allowed to prove their theories wrong. My dad would call the doctors , doctors and the climate change practitioners are the one to which he would apply his definition of expert.
Co-worker had a similar expression. “An Ex is a has-been, a spurt is a drip under pressure”.
When it becomes clear that people are dying in increasing numbers from climate change, the world will respond. But climate idiots from Extinction Rebellion taking their own lives doesn’t count.
The epidemiologists have: data.
Promoters styling themselves “climate scientists” have: nothing.*
*Unskilled, failed, computer model output is, indeed, nothing.
You will *still* find people who do not take precaution against CoVid.
Doesn’t bode well for climate change.
As John P.A. Ioannidis (posted here yesterday) wrote governments may be overreacting: “One can only hope that, much like in 1918, life will continue. Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake”.
And that in effect is what the climate catastrophist cranks are proposing, that is a complete reversal of human development with known consequences viz. civil and international strife starvation disease and the deaths of millions.
Maybe the coronavirus response, which will catapult the worldwide economy into a recession or depression, will show people what to expect from extreme climate change solutions, and thereby make those measures completely untenable.
The one thing the COVID-19 Pandemic has proven is the economic depression that comes with reduced traveling between nations down to local economies. While issues like “The Green New Deal” were to include reduced traveling and Commrace this pandemic shows the impact that’s leading towards another Great Depression if governments don’t act to reduce those effects. In the USA the media driven panic that everyone is going to die if they don’t become angoraphobic and germaphobic like Howard Hughes created large groups of hoarders that disrupted the normal Supply and Demand leaving empty shelves in every store starting with Toilet Paper — which is not even a symptom of COVID-19 — and led to stocking up on all kinds of food and cleaning supplies. Now that the warehouses are empty the amounts of products coming in are gone within hours. I took over 20 pictures of empty shelves in our local Frys Supermarket on Wednesday afternoon and I still didn’t take pictures of them all. Every store in Arizona is reporting the same issue. This is a preview of life in the USA under the Green New Deal.
Dr. Curry has addressed the topic in one of her latest posts:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/03/19/coronavirus-uncertainty/
As expected, her discussion is much better than the content in The Conversation.
Dr. Curry allows negative feedback, where as The Conversation only allows agreement.
The reality is people have reacted to climate change and that’s the problem. They’ve been doing things for 15 + years with zero result. Here they were encouraged to act when China’s And South Korea’s actions shows that this scourge can be defeated. The cost is considered worth it and it has a real and near term solution. With global warming no matter what everyone does the result is so far into the future and so uncertain that no country should cripple its economy if the outcome is so unsure. With Global Warming the huge amounts spent so far and the lack of results just indicates how futile these measures are. Nothing like clear futility to act as a disincentive.
I am afraid that anyone whose claim to fame is based on being a “Professor of Earth System Science”, is at a disadvantage in being taken seriously.
And whilst the medical profession has plenty of skeletons in its cupboard, doctors have a high reputation with most people. In general, I think they are perceived as being caring and trying to do no harm. Of course there are exceptions…
But it cannot be disputed that people like “Climate Psyentists” fall into a different category, probably even in the eyes of people who aren’t anything like as cynical (or well informed) as those who read WUWT.
The GangGreen bunch have been caught lying far too many times and their hectoring shroud waving doesn’t chime well with their blatant hypocrisy.
Medical experts would be unlikely to allow some 16 year old with obvious developmental problems to become their main cheerleader.
Even the most basic ‘man in the street’ has a reasonably well developed nose for bullshit.
We don’t have to worry about the GND or other climate-change solutions ruing our economies – they’ll be ruined in about 10 weeks. And the atmospheric CO2 levels will be down.
According to the press, California Governor Newsom has stated that, based on the models, 25 million Californians will be infected with the corona virus in 8 weeks. When pressed about this, his staff wouldn’t provide any details about the models, the initial conditions, or the R0.
At the same time, he has told us we must stay home (except, presumably, for essential travel). When the 25M infected folks don’t materialize in 8 weeks. he can declare that the “stay-home” policy obviously worked.
I wrote the following email to the Editor of The Conservation:
“Beth,
I am horrified that you are claiming to be balanced on energy and environmental issues. The Conversation is just more agitprop, under the guise of intellectualism.
Steve“
I wrote the following email to the Editor of The Conversation;
“Beth,
I am horrified that you are claiming to be balanced on energy and environmental issues. The Conversation is just more agitprop, under the guise of intellectualism.
Steve“
Steve,
Since you won’t get a response from Beth (whoever she is) for reasons that will become apparent, let me proxy for her.
Dear Steve,
You are, of course, completely correct, but why don’t you Google my salary?
Regards,
Beth
Steve, you are on dangerous ground,
if/when you start putting scientific facts in …first you will be verbally attacked (in graphic detail), then ‘moderated’ then your account will be closed
The Conversation only allows approved thoughts
Try searching ‘Peter Ridd Great Barrier Reef’ on The Conversation….All disappeared !!!
It may prove we can but it doesn’t prove we should!
Can we? When the final economic fallout from CoronaVirus is calculated, it may be that we wish we had just let nature take its course. In a few weeks we will likely have collapsed the world’s economies. To ‘solve’ CAGW, we would have to do similar for years or decades. We wouldn’t survive.
Jeff
” We wouldn’t survive.”
Feature – not a bug.
Auto
Yes, what it proves is that anything like the GND, whose goal is to make something like the Covid-19 isolationism permanent, will destroy nations as the resulting boredom and economic hardship precipitates riots that will destabilize civilization across the globe.
It’s baffling how those pathetic clowns can get almost everything upside down.
It’s easy when your mind is Down Under but you live in the Up Over
We acted on CFCs and lead in petrol too. Why? Because we know they are a threat. However climate change, we know it is a crock, and are doing nothing but making a few token gestures, like planting a few trees.
And thank god we do as a whole see it for the crock it is.
“We acted on CFCs and lead in petrol too.”
Were CFCs really a problem?
They were claimed to be a problem, however like climate change, the only evidence presented was unvalidated models.
What if (as I suspect) COVID 19 is just another version of the flu? The symptoms are the same and, since no one knows how many people are infected because so many are asymptomatic, no one can say with any certainty what COVIID 19’s mortality rate is. Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being lost in foregone commerce. How long will it take the authorities who have demanded the sacrifices now being made to admit that the sacrifices are no longer necessary?
Here in Edmonton, Canadian Tire has been closed, in response to possible contagion. What? Are there really dense crowds of people in a hardware store? This seems like an absurd overreaction. The precautionary principle seems to be, if someone with medical credentials can imagine a catastrophic scenario, we must act as if that scenario is likely. That’s the same kind of disordered thinking that has caused the Climate Crisis.
I think there’s strong evidence COVID is much nastier than the flu. Thankfully that Malaria drug breakthrough might tip the scales.
It’s a very different virus, too. The Wuhan virus is certainly nasty for some people. It remains to be seen how this all ends, in the meantime the economic damage is all around us.
CDC explains the similarities and differences quite well. Speaking of absurdities, what is a store named Canadian Tire doing selling tires?
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
For certain risk groups, it seems. Apart from those it appears to be pretty mild. We just need to better understand what those risk groups are. The latest I’ve found that increases risk 1.36 times is the flu vaccine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31607599
https://www.disabledveterans.org/2020/03/11/flu-vaccine-increases-coronavirus-risk/
36% greater chance may not be right. Reading through the comments in the second URL suggests it’s only a 7% increase.
“no one can say with any certainty what COVIID 19’s mortality rate is.”
Add to that, mortality can be defined differently per country. Germany’s method is more honest because in many cases the virus is merely the last straw.
https://twitter.com/HeavyLobster43/status/1240994712678514688
This person has updated his feed to clarify that Germany does not do postmortem tests, so existing cause of death is pre-existing morbidity. So that tells me if a postmortem test is positive in other countries, the cause of death is listed as the virus, no matter what other morbidities existed. That strikes me as dishonest and problematic.
Again, people are dying WITH the virus; some of those die because the virus kills them, but not all.
As icisil rightly says – that is problematic.
It may also be dishonest – ‘Look, it’s worse than you thought!’.
And the corollary is that we m u s t destroy our economy more thoroughly.
Auto
I trust a plumber, because he knows the system, understands it fully, and has a very high percentage of successful diagnoses. I don’t trust the stock analyst even though he earns far more, because none of that is true for him.
I trust the NASA rocket scientist sending a probe to the Moon because she understands the physics, she knows the starting points and the probes usually get there. I don’t trust the NASA climate scientist because she doesn’t and her forecasts are mostly wrong.
Do these people actually not understand this?
I think that most people do understand this, but the chattering classes are most impressed by credentials and awards, just like they are impressed by Emmy and Academy Awards. Get a bunch of p.eople together with a lot of letters after their names, and the people who push the narratives will support their stories over anyone else who claims otherwise. It is true in entirely too many situations, because most people don’t have any direct experience to judge what they are being told.
I tell people who ask me about this to think about something they have seen or read about in the popular culture, where they KNOW the subject – either from working on it or extensive education. Does the popular culture report accurately about the stuff that you KNOW. And then, if you say no, then you should think about all the other stuff that they use to build a narrative, and decide how much you can depend on THOSE narratives. In my case, the field is nuclear power, and the popular culture reports almost nothing that is accurate. They take snippets of facts (some entirely valid) and build whatever narrative they want to push, whether it is anti-nuclear or in favor of some new nuclear fad.
I used to evaluate thermal=hydraulic models of fluid systems associated with nuclear power plants, and can tell you that it is very hard to predict the temperature and pressure inside a well documented piping system or building after an “exciting event”, where all the phenomena and geometry and heat sources/sinks have been accurately measured. Getting an answer within 10 degrees F of measured values in actual test facilites is considered good agreement. Anyone who tells me that they can predict (project) the average temperature of an entire planet for the next 100 years, with an accuracy of less than 1 degree C, is crazy. They don’t even KNOW all the important phenomena, much less understand them well enough to model them.
Doctors are a bit better, but medicine is still an art, NOT a science. Like engineers, they use scientific methods and information to try to do their jobs, but biological systems are very complicated.
The “social scientists”, though, are probably the worst, and they are going to use this crisis to try to build their perfect world society. I will be very surprised if there is not some conference at the end of this crisis to consider a treaty to have a world government take control, “To make sure that this never happens again.” “For th children”, of course.
Perhaps professor galbreath should consider manipulation of climate data, the action of scientists working within and with east Anglia university , organisations like the BBC stating “the science is settled ” scaremongering every time theres a Bush fire in Australia “its global warming” when the truth be told it’s a seasonal event. If the professor was to consider the above which I’m sure he has ,that can only lead me to one conclusion ,the professor is part of a conspiracy that is lieing,misleading,manipulating world populations , people professor galbreath have a instinct to know when there being lied too.