Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Wired, the people who are denying climate change are also denying the threat of Covid-19. But there is an important difference between Climate Change and Covid-19 which the author overlooks.
The Analogy Between Covid-19 and Climate Change Is Eerily Precise
First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.
GILAD EDELMAN 03.25.2020 02:59 PM
FOR A BRIEF moment there, it looked as though the coronavirus pandemic might escape the muck of partisanship.
It’s true that President Donald Trump, wary of a recession during a reelection year, had first tried to talk the virus into submission. His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the viral spread through February and early March. It did, however, seem to influence the party faithful, as polls showed Republican voters were taking the pandemic far less seriously than Democrats. In other words, the facts of Covid-19 were already politicized. As I suggested last week, it looked as though this process were unfolding just as it had for climate change—but at 1,000x speed.
Then Trump began to shift his message. Suddenly he seemed to grasp the need for drastic measures (while claiming that he’d never hinted otherwise). The White House started repeating the advice from public health experts: Social distancing would be necessary, maybe through the end of summer. In my last piece, I wondered if this new acceptance of reality might keep an epistemic crisis from developing. Perhaps Americans would coalesce into a common understanding of this public health disaster.
But coronavirus denialism wasn’t in remission; it was only mutating. After a weekend of reported clashes among economic and health officials in the White House, and a spate of skeptical op-eds musing on whether social distancing was really worth its economic cost, Trump laid out a new approach by presidential tweet: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
…
The parallel to climate change, in other words, was even tighter than I realized.
…
“The climate change issue has been transformed into a badge of who people think they are,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So if you’re a good card-carrying Republican in the Midwest, then you’d better be against that climate change stuff. And if you’re a West Coast liberal, or you live in Boulder, like me, of course you support fighting climate change.” When scientific questions become political issues, he added, people’s beliefs become statements of identity. “To some extent we see that with the coronavirus.”
…
Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/the-analogy-between-covid-19-and-climate-change-is-eerily-precise/
The important difference between Climate Change and Covid-19 is there is evidence that Covid-19 is a problem.
Since the evidence about Covid-19 is incomplete, there is a lively debate over how serious the Covid-19 problem is. I make no secret that I’m personally alarmed about Chinese Coronavirus, but I understand people taking a more optimistic view, based on available evidence.
There is no evidence climate change in the next few centuries will be a serious problem. Even models don’t provide support for climate action; Calculations using the alarmist’s own models suggest climate action would do more harm than climate change (see the top of the page).
We cannot mount a robust response to every possible threat. Responding to threats is costly. Responding to a threat before we know if it is going to cause problems is a waste of precious resources. If we drain all our spare capacity responding to maybes, without clear evidence there is an actual problem, we won’t have anything left when a real threat manifests.
Responding to Covid-19 is reasonable, because Covid-19 is demonstrably causing serious problems. For example, hospitals in regions hit hard by Covid-19, like Elmhurst Hospital in New York, are running out of ventilators. New York is worried about running out of beds. Hospitals in hard hit regions in Europe are running out of beds and medical staff, as significant numbers of front line staff are forced to retreat and rest after becoming infected. These are major issues for severe Covid-19 victims, and for anyone else in affected regions who needs urgent medical attention.
Responding to climate change, in a complete absence of observational evidence that climate change is a problem, is a waste of resources. Consider the comedic failure by activists over the years to produce a genuine climate refugee. They’ve got nothing.
Tired, Wired argument.
Thanks for the thoughtful rebuttal.
Also, as mentioned previously, Dr. Curry posted on March 19, an excellent perspective on why/how these two topics should not be thought of as similar.
https://judithcurry.com/2020/03/19/coronavirus-uncertainty/
Thank you Eric. This article by Gilad Edelman is imbecilic.
The very-scary global warming/climate change scam has been scientifically falsified dozens of ways. It is now obvious that the climate scam was always a smokescreen for extreme-left political objectives – wolves stampeding the sheep. No rational person could be this stupid for this long – there was always a covert political agenda.
It remains to be seen whether the Covid-19 flu is a true global pandemic that will kill millions of people. Millions of the elderly and the poor do die every winter – global Excess Winter Deaths (EWD’s) total over two million per year and are severely exacerbated by needlessly high energy prices, primarily caused by the climate change/green energy scam. In comparison, global deaths from the coronavirus total about 22,000 to date, or about 1% of EWD’s.
My friend Joe D’Aleo and I wrote a paper on EWD’s in 2015 and nobody cared. EWD’s in the USA average about 100,000 per year. To date, total deaths in the USA from the coronavirus total 1036, also about 1% of average total yearly EWD’s.
So globally, over ~22,000 coronavirus deaths to date is very-scary but 2 million global Excess Winter Deaths is not, and in the USA 1036 deaths is very-scary but 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths is not. OK. Got it.
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”
– Albert Einstein
Just imagine if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election and last year already, she was holding daily press conferences with Michael Mann, James Hansen and Katharine Hayhoe standing behind her as her Chief Scientific Climate Team in immediately and radically decarbonizing the USA with making drilling and mining for fossil fuels a semi banned limited commodity that just became 3x more expensive while wind and solar were being promoted as the only solution no matter the cost and/or efficiency. This is what I see coming in the next 10-20 years, maybe sooner.
This is a novel practise run as to how to fully take over and seize power temporarily with suspension of some constitutional rights and vast economic legislation to regulate who gets economic aid. Remember, the Climate Emergencies have already been declared in many jurisdictions, and it it is only a step away from giving itself the same broad sweeping powers as the CDC/WHO or federal/state health agencies in directing the White House as to major public policy decisions. And the Wuhan Coronavirus is a real thing, as compared to the fictitious climate hustle that would like to extort and racketeer its way through to world domination and make it a permanent situation. Many of them have admitted as much for many years.
President Trump is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, under the present circumstances. But my sense is that he is 100% correct in saying that we should never allow this ‘cure’ to be worse than the disease. The structural damage to the wider economy is having the exact desired outcome that that climate and Marxist zealots have been preaching for years with the destruction of capitalism under the disguise of climate alarmism. And I will probably be prosecuted some day in the future for making these statements if I am still alive.
Excellent comment, you’ve been reading my mind!!
Excess Winter deaths are measured from December 1 to March 31 – 4 months.
It’s five days to March 31, when they stop measuring Excess Winter Deaths. Think about why this matters.
UK Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.
Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios.
The New York Times had reported extensively on the Imperial College London coronavirus model, by Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson who opined that there would be 500,000 deaths in the UK as a result of the virus. Of course, the “hair on fire” crowd grabbed that and ran with it. Except now, he has revised his numbers because it appears the virus was in circulation for a considerable period of time and many more people were infected than first thought. His latest prediction is 20,000. Yes, you read that right TWENTY THOUSAND…..NOT HALF A MILLION.
This virus is way less than one-tenth of the flu. The numbers used by most politicians and media are predictions from a Covid Act Now site that everyone is using, it is based on a UK group whose predictions are famously bad. But the media loves them. How can just a few thousand deaths around the world overwhelm these places? The flu season takes 50 to 100 times more people, so why is there an overflow, as this is part of a rather low level flu season? This is junk news. The numbers do not add up and neither does the science.
Trump is right. The economic damage will kill more people than this virus. The denial of most other healthcare is going to do a lot of damage and even death. The key is that in Italy, they differentiate between “death by Covid” and “death with Covid.” 99+% are “death with Covid,” people already just a tinge from death anyway. This virus does not kill the healthy just as the flu generally does not kill the healthy, not since the Spanish flu which took all ages.
A scientist in Germany pointed out that Germany loses 2200 people a day normally, and they are worrying about maybe an additional 30 a day from this one virus, while they lose 300 a day to “flu” and the economic and medical damage could kill another 30–100 per day? This is a serious crime against the people.
This panic is a political/media generated panic and without the “test” for Covid-19, it would not have been noticed in the flu statistics. The scary part is how glibly the peoples of the world has allowed their freedoms to be canceled in the face of a minor flu factor. Now some places are saying their basic martial law may be up to two years. There is much more to this “crisis” than a virus.
Trump is entirely correct to get the economy going again as this virus is a non-issue in the real world. If you are old and infirm or have immune issues, sure, be careful during the flu season, stay away from relatives and friends, but it does not mean shutting down the world. It is ironic that the activists, who think there are too many people and would be glad to see the old people be gone, use the protection of old people to shut down the world.
Also, as there is no actually verified test for this virus (the CDC admits so)—yes, that’s true—we could very well be tracking several different viruses. And, in many places, they tend to only test people who show up ill at hospitals, such that the related statistics are biased and thus useless. As we know that there are many asymptomatic and untested people with just mild flu symptoms out there, the virus spreads quickly, but really only shows up in health-compromised people.
Without a widely available accurate test and—alas no antibody test to see who has had it—the numbers we hear are of little meaning. In many countries the numbers of cases includes “presumptive cases” (people who were in the presence of one who has shown positive) not proven cases and also do not include the number of people tested. Random testing in Wuhan showed that there were 10–20 times more people out there that were asymptomatic or simply thought they had the flu. That is only known by comparing random test results, including the negatives. No place else has done this, except S. Korea. Lacking the negatives, the ignorant jump to wrong conclusions. Reported cases in many countries really only reflects how many test kits they have available and they do not usually reports the negatives. We wrongly assume that tests are wildly available everywhere. and accurate.
Spain had 431,000 deaths last year. That’s 36,000 a month and more during the flu season, call it 45,000. How can 3600 deaths from one virus that is part of a relatively mild flu season viruses overwhelm them? The numbers do not add up because the flu season general takes 10–20 times more people than this virus. As I have said, if this virus was unidentified, it would have gone un-noticed in the flu season, which, this year, appears to be a mild year.
This is 1/10 to 1/100 weaker than the flu. Do not believe the numbers, they are scientifically worthless.
Keep an ear to the rail, this is a political gambit.
By the way, ventilators get retasked as those on them recover or die. They are reusable.
The weak minded Chicken Littles will not understand it until it’s too late. They have shown that they are willing to give up all their freedoms for a little security. The future of the human race is bleak, not because of novel cold viruses or climate change, but because the general population are sheep willfully lead to the slaughter.
You are comparing deaths for an entire flu season, for flu’s that have been around before and that we have vaccines for, to a brand new virus that only broke out to the world a few weeks ago.
And yet, the efficacy of the flu vaccine has been proven to be abysmally poor, particularly in the age groups that are most at risk with influenza. Their best guess at the strains included in the cocktail is at most 5% correct when looking at the data over the years. Don’t come at with that ‘herd immunity’ crap, there is no such thing as herd immunity when the herd effectiveness is so small it is laughable. I personally know people that get a flu shot yearly and either get the flu (verified by doctor) or are extremely sick with flu like symptoms, every single year. Your flu vaccine argument does not pass muster.
To top it off, the DOD did a study in the 2017-2018 flu season that looked at vaccine interference of the flu vaccine with various other seasonal illnesses, including coronavirus. The results showed an odds ratio for contraction of coronavirus of 1.36, which means you are more likely to contract coronavirus if you had a flu shot. Odds ratio does not directly correlate to risk ratio, and cannot be accurately calculated unless the study gives you the Assumed Control Risk number, which this particular study did not. However, an odds ratio value greater than 1 should not be overlooked. Compounded, human metapneumovirus also showed an odds ration of 1.51.
Lastly, ‘brand new virus that just broke out to the world a few weeks ago’ is 100% false. This thing has arguably been in the States since mid-late November of 2019. Hundreds of people on various forums have reported they had symptoms that mirrored the COVID-19 symptoms anywhere from November 2019 to February 2020. Many of them went to the hospital and were tested for influenza. Most of those that were tested were negative. The doctor said it was just some viral upper respiratory thing, and sent them home with antibiotics, steroids, nebulizers, etc. I would place a sizeable bet that it was COVID-19. So, given that information, the virus was transmitted UNCHECKED and without mass hysteria for at least 3 MONTHS!!!
Were there people dropping dead in the streets? Are millions dying daily? If you trust the COVID-19 hockey stick model, we should be neck deep in corpses by now!
19 years no flu vaccine.
19 years never got flu. Even working in offices with sick people.
Fancy that.
Dergy
Your personal experience is what is called anecdotal evidence. People’s immune systems vary considerably in their effectiveness, and some people may have inherent genetic resistance to novel diseases. That is a survival mechanism resulting from genetic diversity.
While flu vaccines can protect an individual from a particular strain, the poor record of guessing the next mutation suggests that the primary result of the vaccination program is to keep people’s immune systems challenged and to develop some level of herd immunity. Thank your office workers for being responsible enough to get vaccinated, and helping to protect you.
So you are 19 years old Derg?
If that is what you are saying, I would point out that lots of people knew everything when they were teenagers.
If you are saying something else, like you have not had it since 19 years ago, that is something else.
I rarely get sick either, and I have never gone to a doctor when I might have had the flu to have it confirmed.
One thing I am sure of…I will not die if I get a case of the flu.
I am not sure I will not die, or be badly injured, if I get viral pneumonia because of this virus.
“And yet, the efficacy of the flu vaccine has been proven to be abysmally poor, particularly in the age groups that are most at risk with influenza. Their best guess at the strains included in the cocktail is at most 5% correct when looking at the data over the years. Don’t come at with that ‘herd immunity’ crap, there is no such thing as herd immunity when the herd effectiveness is so small it is laughable. I personally know people that get a flu shot yearly and either get the flu (verified by doctor) or are extremely sick with flu like symptoms, every single year. Your flu vaccine argument does not pass muster.”
Great, more antivaxer insanity from people who quote fake news and false facts.
The flu vaccine is not perfect but it is far better than 5%, and over time getting vaccinated provides long term protection even decades later if a vaccine strain then circulated.
One reason some flu strains were not as bad as originally feared was due to protection from mass vaccination campaigns decades ago.
I know people who claim to get the flu every year too. We probably all know some people who are irrational hypochondriacs, but most of us do not base our opinions about the science of immunology on malarkey from people who claim they are always sick.
If you claim to know multiple people who get the flu every year, that is enough for me to know you are either making stuff up, or know an unusually large number of people who are full of crap.
You don’t know what you are talking about. The virus has been circulating for a VERY long time in the world population. The projected death rate in the UK from the Imperial College London coronavirus model has been “somewhat” adjusted. Down from 500,000 in the UK to 20,000. Yes…20,000.
And the developer of the Imperial College model now predicts that the epidemic in the U.K. will peak and subside within ‘two to three weeks’ — last week’s paper said 18+ months of quarantine would be necessary.
20,000 is not a death rate.
It is a total.
And why should anyone pay attention to one guess from one group about something no one has any experience with?
Who cares what people who speak authoritatively but have never been correct have to say?
If they were wrong last week, why are they more right now?
Are they wrong when you do not like the sound of what they say, but right when they say something you find more palatable?
And as for credibility…why listen to people who pick up an internet rumor about this virus not being new, and start repeating that crap as if it is factual, as if they are doing more than repeating an unsubstantiated and incredibly dubious pile of crap?
Some people were sick last fall, therefore this is not a new virus.
Yeah right.
There are people who read that the lung disease caused by vaping is indistinguishable from COVID-19, which is false, and who claim that that lung disease was mostly in October…which is completely false.
Those people than use those two demonstrably false premises to make a case that this new virus is not new…based on not just guesswork but false information.
The first casualty of war is said to be the truth, and we are all getting a lesson in exactly why that is the case.
Every different brand of BS flying around, people who talk as if they know what they are talking about exaggerating wildly on both sides of every aspect of every issue.
No one needs people spreading malarkey represented as information.
Here in Alberta, all transplants have been canceled. That means that perfectly good organs are now being wasted. Potential life saving transplants are being lost because of 8 hospitalised Corona patients.
SIXTEENS TONS, AND WHATTA YOU GET?
ANOTHER DAY OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT.
I have said for many months now:
Trudeau is actively sabotaging Canada.
He is Canada’s saboteur-in-chief.
________________________________
Canadian Member of Parliament Erin O’Toole writes:
I WAS APPALLED TO LEARN LAST NIGHT THAT THE TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT SENT 16 TONNES OF PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT TO CHINA LAST MONTH.
While our doctors and nurses face severe shortages of face shields, masks, goggles and gloves, the Trudeau government sent massive stockpiles of our strategic reserves to China.
This decision came after we knew the virus was coming here. The World Health Organization warned us in January to stockpile protective equipment.
The Trudeau government acted with extreme negligence.
Canadians need to know about this failure of leadership.
Please forward this message on to your friends and family to ensure we can hold Trudeau to account. Forward to a Friend
Hon. Erin O’Toole
Member of Parliament – Durham
by JoNova:
Chinese company flew 80 tons of medical masks, suits, to China in Feb
The Lucky Country wakes up to the cost of globalization. There are only 3,000 Covid cases here, we have barely begun, yet we’re already running out of protective gear. The lives of our doctors and nurses are at risk because bureaucrats were too slow to see the obvious, blindly unaware of foreign allegiances, and they kept using the old Influenza plan when this wasn’t influenza.
Meanwhile, below, China now has excess masks which it is donating to Belt and Road Slaves in Europe and to nations where it wants access to 5G network deals. Our masks, used as levers for China to gain power.
————-
50 shades of incompetence
Chinese-backed company’s mission to send Australian medical supplies to China, by Kate McClymont. [Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald]
According to a company newsletter, the Greenland Group sourced 3 million protective masks, 700,000 hazmat suits and 500,000 pairs of protective gloves from “Australia, Canada, Turkey and other countries.”
This is the free market at work — to some extent, those supplies were more needed in Wuhan in January than in Sydney, but it left us wide open. If journalists had asked better questions of our politicians, we might end up with better politicians:
The Greenland group, which is majority owned by the Shanghai government, has sold more than a billion dollars worth of residential apartments in Sydney and Melbourne since its arrival in 2013.
A whistleblower from the company has told the Herald it was a worldwide Greenland effort — and the Sydney office was no different, sourcing bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitisers, gloves and Panadol for shipping.
“Basically all employees, the majority of whom are Chinese, were asked to source whatever medical supplies they could,” one company insider told the Herald.
A second Chinese property company based in Sydney flew more than 80 tonnes of medical supplies to Wuhan in late February.
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/chinese-company-flew-80-tons-of-medical-masks-suits-to-china-in-feb/
One single hospital in New York is said to be going through 40-70,000 masks a day. A say! One hospital.
Three million sounds like a lot, until you hear about that stat.
They are right, the COVID19 hype is not based on science.
Reported death rate allegedly caused by SARS-Cov-2 is a joke, compared to typical rates in previous years:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
In Europe we are enjoying *unusually low rate of deaths related to health problems!*
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/number.html
Epidemiologists are critical about the scientific basis of announcing pandemic spread of virus (you can turn on autotranslated subs in English if you need):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBB9bA-gXL4
https://youtu.be/BgU_SUrkuQ8
https://youtu.be/h3F___-SDY0
The reported rate of “detection of disease” (https://tinyurl.com/uvclzl9) is actually a simple result of the progress of sales of tests for SARS-Cov-2. The more tests you perform, the more positives you get because CORONA VIRUSES ARE VERY COMMON. Just no one did such a massive testing yet.
I do not recall hospitals stacking up dead people like cordwood in previous years, because of the flu or anything else.
This is a joke to you…is that what you are saying?
A joke?
First they said that covid was good for the climate
and now they say that the climate is as bad as the covid
and we also learn that just as there are climate deniers so there are covid deniers
if all this is very confusing, it fits the pattern because so is climate science.
If they had the science, they would not have needed the covid and they would not have needed things like the Michael Mann Hockey Stick.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/24/unprecedented/
A. Fawcett a source?
Not just any faucet, but a double A one. The “spice” certainly flows better full bore.
While denying that Covid-19 exists or that the Climate does not change from time to time are both clearly ill-informed, the topics are otherwise chalk and cheese. The problem of Covid-19 is so big that you can see it from space, while ‘Climate Alarmism’ or a problem with climate-changing has yet to present any visible evidence.
Even worse than no evidence, the observations made after the various predictions of warmistas have shown in every case either that they were wrong, or that they had it exactly backwards.
Examples include such things as: disappearing islands; shrinking harvest; increasing hunger; loss of habitat; shrinking inhabitable areas; desertification; worsening of severe weather events, specifically more droughts, more and stronger hurricanes & tornadoes, more and hotter heat waves, etc; polar ice “death spiral (although never has a rational basis been offered for why frozen wastelands are necessary for our survival); accelerating sea level rise…
The list is endless, and includes every single prediction they have ever made.
In fact all predictions of doom ever offered by the various prophets thereof over the ages has ever been correct about anything…EVER!
One reason this corona virus is causing the disruption it has caused is due to the fact that we have become, as a race, unfamiliar with dying. Sure, people have kept on dying, but in decreasing numbers, even as populations have increased dramatically.
We have become entirely unaccustomed to dying from contagion in large numbers, from a cause that can be seen coming, but not stopped.
People in previous eras and past decades knew this horror well.
Nowadays…not so much.
Nicholas McGinley: Thank you for the reminder: Don’t forget history!!! There’s an old movie, “Jezebel”, which includes a major plot line of yellow fever outbreaks in New Orleans. I mention it because I thought the movie portrayed very well how humans have seen things in their lifetime, yet panic still spreads (mostly born in ignorance, also featured in that movie). Most folks don’t care for old movies any more than they care to learn from history.
I think you are correct Paul.
Most people do not even know much about history, or perhaps they would care about it more.
I know that I have always had a greatly increased appreciation for what has come before, the more I have learned about it.
All of the important lessons in life are right there in the pages of dusty old books.
Grainy old movies have captured an awful lot of them as well.
I am not familiar with that move you mention, but I will look it up and watch it, and let you know how it strikes me.
I do not think anything occurring recently is some new phenomenon. I can recall when i was a small boy my father telling me about how when certain things happened, certain items have always been very quickly stripped from store shelves, and in particular I recall him mentioning toilet paper. This would have been over 50 years ago, and it was already an old lesson all the way back then. Something about low value/high volume goods…
Sorry I could not see the climate change because of all the weather!
🙂
The difference between COVID 19 modelling and ‘Climate Change’ is that it does not rely on fake modelling with a purported radiative forcing of an increase of 0.01% in CO2 at Mauna Loa over 60 years which the speed of Earth’s rotation turn’s into a cooling agent by circulating it through the -100C of the upper mesosphere.
COVID 19 is a health system crisis that needs to have the infection rate reduced for it not to collapse. The disease causes mostly elderly people to die from an allied pneumonia infection which Sir William Osler called ‘the friend of the aged’. However, increasing the infection rate will cause more younger people to die and to have lots of economic impacts. The humane approach is to reduce the infection rate.
There may be a link between COVID-19 and climate through the Jupiter-Saturn 20-year lap cycle and its phasing with the solstices altering air circulation patterns, but that is a long shot.
@ nicholas tesdorf
“The problem of Covid-19 is so big that you can see it from space”
Really? Can you share the pictures? Or scientifically validated data to support this?
“While denying that […] the Climate does not change from time to time is ill-informed”
Haven’t you meant “does change” instead of “does not change”? English is not my native language, so sorry if I have misunderstood you.
Likely a reference to the satelite images showing business shut effect on CO2 and NOx emissions… Not hsrd to find.
Thanks for the explanation. But this is more a result of the response of governments to the crisis, not a direct effect of the disease itself. OK, perhaps I am splitting hairs 🙂
Wait…I just read you calling it a joke.
Now it is a crisis.
Which is it?
Is it really just governments reacting?
I do not think so.
In fact I know it is not just governments.
Arguably governments have been among the slowest to respond.
There is in fact a close relationship to the climate debate and Covid-19, just not the one the alarmists think.
About 8 years ago or so there was a guy named Jerome Ravetz who pushed hard on PNS (Post Normal Science) and got a surprising amount of traction with it. His premise was that when the stakes are high, and facts uncertain, drastic actions are justified, and so we should destroy our economy and cut back on emissions – just in case.
It was a tacit admission that the science was not settled, and it persuaded no one. Destroying the economy and returning the human race to a medieval society for something that might happen was absurd. Since then the alarmists have doubled down with “the science is settled , and its already happening” narrative. Nearly every country in the world has paid lip service, signing onto the Paris Accord. But what have they actuallydone?
The answer is that the world has divided into two camps. The one that promised to do nothing and did nothing, and the one that promised to do something and did almost nothing. Both camps, with the possible exception of the United States, have increased emissions.
The lesson here is simple. As the news of Covid-19 started to leak out, world leaders were concerned, but didn’t take dramatic measures. Cautious small measures slowly, but finally, gave way to an avalanche of measures shutting down society world wide as the emergency started killing people worldwide. The response to climate change alarm is similar. A few cautious steps have been taken, but until ecosystems actually start to collapse, crops actually start to fail, and people actually start to die in droves, no severe action will be taken by any country on earth.
We’re now witnessing a low carbon economy for real. Air travel shut down, cruise industry shut down, hotel industry shut down,businesses shuttered, millions of job losses, people frightened and beginning to hoard. If supply chains break down (I do not believe they will) desperate people will turn on each other.
So when someone tries to draw a comparison between Covid 19 and climate change, I’ve adopted a rather nasty response made up of two points.
1) We will do nothing significant about climate change until it actually turns into a global emergency evidenced by mounting deaths globally. Covid-19 is proof of that.
2. You want a low carbon economy despite no global emergency having appeared anywhere in the world? Well congratuf*ckinglations you’ve now got a very small taste of what one looks like . How do you like it so far?
Except with COVID-19, people aren’t ‘dying in droves’. Look at the numbers, if you can even trust them, the response to this so-called pandemic is 10000000000% overblown. Look at my comment above, COVID-19 has arguably been in the States since mid-late November of 2019. Also, people that are not in the ‘at risk’ category are being turned away for testing. This is done to keep the recovered/death ratio abnormally high, in order to support their false narrative. If there is one thing I am disappointed with Trump over, it is that he caved to the societal pressure when all the snowflakes started screaming, “Muh, but da media sed if I get COVID-19, I am sure to die, for sure. (sic)”
If I had to wager a guess, which is just a semi-educated guess after many many hours of research, if you took into account the REAL number of infected to death ratio, we are likely less than 0.5%.
I am not discounting the people who have died, every single one is a tragedy, but we are guaranteed to kill more people through the overreaction than the virus will claim. Besides, public lockdown is unprecedented. Measles, Polio, Swine Flu, and plenty of other illnesses have come and gone without the government effectively claiming marshal law – all of which were a much greater threat to public safety than the current illness.
Mark my words, this is just the beginning. Now that they know they can convince the public to be afraid of Baba-Yaga, the boogeyman will take uncountable forms in the future. Anytime there is a controversial or nefarious issue the Powers That Shouldn’t Be want to distract from – wait, look here, another Public Health Threat!
davidmhoffer: They like it alot! There is a great deal of science behind their approach- the only tool they have is a hammer (scaring people with imagined emergency), so it all looks like nails. Right now all the nails are shutting down the economy due to real emergency. Seeing us nails cower gives them hope that their fabricated emergency can somehow work, so they get to pound nails finally. I think the eco-activists are also worried that more people who see an actual emergency will recognize the fake emergency of AGW, and they’ll have to invent some new scary future caused by ugh humans.
David Hoffer,
One of the best comments in a long time.
Your points 1) and 2) above are spot on, especially 2).
I think there may be a few of the warmistas who are grooving on all of the chaos, but I think most of them have been unusually quiet, with a few notable exceptions of course.
But I am tending to think the aftermath of the whole mess will be more telling than what is going on right now. I think people are hunkering down because they can, and also because the people with money and power took an early lead and began to cancel stuff. The demographics of wealth are no secret…older people have much more of it, and along with that wealth they have a hugely disproportionate amount of power. It was not a millennial who cancelled the NBA season in the US over one player testing positive. Oh, ‘ell no!
It is completely rational to wish to avoid getting sick, especially if getting sick means a high chance of getting REALLY sick, like struggling to breath for a few weeks sick, like viral pneumonia sick, like may even die and doctors have no magic pill for you sick. Nothing irrational about wanting to avoid that!
Is staying home for a few weeks all that bad compared to that?
But once the smoke has cleared, and everyone has time to take stock, we will find what was evident from the beginning: Whatever the personal risk, the overall risk is very small. The majority of people will get the virus and have no symptoms or a mild case akin to a cold or maybe a mild flu…maybe one day of a sniffle, maybe nothing at all. A fairly hefty minority will get very sick, but even most of these people will be OK in the end, although it will certainly be a memorably awful few weeks for many. I think most people have been really sick with flu at least once in their life. And some people will die, including some people who were no were close to being about to die, including some who were not old, and not ill whatsoever…but as a fraction of a population this will be a small number. There are a lot of people in the world though, so one or a few percent of everyone everywhere is a huge number, and enough of these will be previously healthy people, to give anyone paying close attention a reason to be concerned.
Most of us will be fine. And life will go on. And no one will be forgetting this episode anytime soon…that is for sure.
I doubt we will ever be so unprepared for a pandemic again.
And I doubt that people will be quite so blithe about exactly what it is the alarmists have been calling for…shutting down our industrial civilization…and not for a few weeks or months, but permanently. It will be very clear how and why we were able to overcome this. Hint: It will not be by being impoverished and stupid. And it will be clear that being impoverished and unable to live as we are accustomed to living, really sucks.
And another thing will happen, I predict: Everyone will become very much better informed about a range of subject material relating to public health and medical science, including the history thereof.
And this will be a good thing for all of us. It is harder to sneak up on someone who is alert and aware of a potential harm. We are now alert, and far more aware.
As always, there will be the usual rogues gallery of bad actors waiting to take advantage of ignorance and fear…and as always, it is up to people with some actual knowledge to do what we can to dispel the alarmism and fake news that is sure to remain in full BS mode.
I personally think there is a good chance this will all turn out to be very bad for alarmists and fake news purveyors. Already we see people pushing back and turning on those with whom they previously has common cause. Tolerance for malarkey becomes small when the stakes are high, in my estimation.
I think this entire unhappy circumstance will serve to remind people that the stakes in life are indeed high, and that every day above ground is a good one for which we should all be grateful. Not one single day is a guarantee. We have collectively worked very hard for many years to make it seem so, but the reality is that we have no such guarantee.
Health, prosperity, and long life…these are gifts that must be worked for and earned.
The climate alarmists have realised that a full shutdown of everything for a prolonged period could kill off private industry by the time of the election and therefore provide the opportunity for big state socialism / GND style, which is their main goal. Therefore, we can expect their commentary to voice the harsh action course with constant criticism of Thump in the hope it might infuence him to accidently assist their cause.
Eric, well said. The disingenuousness of the alarmist camp is truly uninspiring. They are the party of science? The party of boys will be girls and girls will be boys, X and Y chromosomes be damned and that life does not begin at conception? Give me a break. As a retired computer engineer who once wrote a “real-time preemptive prioritized reentrant multitasking OS” that could run 256 “simultaneous” tasks plus many additional interrupt routines, all out of 8k bytes of ROM while implementing memory protection, and consulting for Intel on next-gen processor memory architecture, I am appalled that Wired would publish such drivel.
Wow, those were the days.
The old Commodore 64 chess game which always kicked my butt fit in 12Kb. These days you would have to carefully pick you language to fit a “hello world” app into 8Kb.
LOL! Remember the Commodore Pet? (c.1977. Maybe the very first PC?) With the exponential explosion of memory and processing power, maybe tweaking assembly language code may be a lost art. It did help that the OS above was in an advanced orthogonal RISC-like load-store assembly language (ran on the Intel 80C196) with a builtin binary floating point instruction (32 bit normalize: running at a snail pace 4 MHz the 80C196, in a vehicle motion dyno application, log all the data, calc ET, distance, accel, HP, speed and save to memory before a race car would go 4″ at 300 mph). We saw the modern slop age coming in the early 1990s. Oh well.
Now my phone kicks my rear in chess.
I really enjoyed your intelligent post.
Rod: Yes, got my boss to buy a Commodore Pet (ordered from an airline in flight catalog) in 1977. Had to bring my portable cassette tape player from home to store data and codes. Wrote programs in Basic and learned to be very efficient in coding to avoid problems with the 8K of ram. Many programs had to be broken into pieces to get answers. As I recall it was some time before we were able to get a printer that would work and had to write down results from the built in display.
Those were the days! FDD a distant dream…8K ram?
I needed to calculate a factorial that an HP-65 took “hours” (it seemed) to do, so I went in the store (not sure, Palo Alto or Mtn. View) and programmed the PET to do it. Was amazed that it did it in a few seconds…lightning speed vs. the HP-65. I was blown away at it’s power! (no clue we were in the Stone Age) What processor, a Z80 maybe? Or 8080? Oh boy have things changed 🙂
Rick
The first non-trivial program I wrote was in Fortran, intended to run on a CCC DDP-24 machine with punched paper tape input. I wrote the code as I would have solved it on paper with a pencil. Unfortunately, it would not compile because it exceeded the 98K of memory. So, I had to learn about loops and subroutines. I ended up being a more efficient programmer by not having gigabytes of memory available.
Rod
Just for interest and vaguely on-topic is that in 1962 when Kennedy was threatening the Russians, their ICBM’s had an on-board computer to serve targeting and flight management. It steered by the stars using a star map which it used to locate the sky and set the flight parameters accordingly. The accuracy of the missiles was “within 150 miles” of the target according to one of the programmers. I asked why it was so poor and they replied , “The Earth is not round, there is weather, gravity is not constant with altitude and the entire program had to fit into 4K of memory.
It was written directly in machine language, always seeking to save a byte here or there. The inaccuracy was overcome by sheer numbers. Fling enough missiles…you know…
So it was a confidence game. Denial (of reality) ruled the roost. Never admit what crap missiles you have. In that case it was denial in service of a higher purpose – security. Is that the case for COVID skepticism? Are we looking on the bright side to stave off a solution that is worse than the disease?
Interesting history!
I am wondering how they could have used analog cameras with low power computers?
It cannot be that a star map located the stars…for that you need sensors and some way to input that data into a processor and match it up with a map.
It was amazing for me to find out, that the first program that any one might have tried to wright in it’s own, without being aware or influenced by what others might have done,
happened to be the “hello world” little program…
cheers
Yes the party of science. The same group of people that post climate denial or climate doom memes and then turn around and make “Gaia is trying to tell us something” and astrology posts.
Like many other previously excellent publications, Wired became unreadable and has been publishing drivel for years.
Not as long as some others, but I had long since cancelled my subscription and can barely stand to leaf through it for more than a few pages if I come across a copy nowadays.
I have seen tons of articles online that made me shake my head in disgust and wonderment.
Hard to find any source for consistently readable science news anymore.
It took a thousand years to obtain scientific freedom but evidently only a generation to lose it. And the clueless played on.
The Wired author would fail a Miller analogies test and has shot himself in the foot.
He is tacitly admitting what zero-carbon enthusiasts tend to avoid viz. that their policy proposals would shut down the world economy, not for a month or two, but permanently.
Besides COVID-19/20 has nothing in common with the supposed CO2-induced ‘climate change’ he is referring to; apart from concomitant proven massive economic benefits of fossil fuel use the assumed CC induced will have benefits in large tillable areas of the world climate-wise not to mention the overall greening of the planet.
It seems these guys are upset because they lost the opportunity to have label it the CO2VID-19. 🙂
That would have being really something.
cheers
How many people have “climate change” on their death certificate v the number of people who have “COVID-19” on their death certificate?
The numbers of people who have ONLY Covid-19 on their death certificates is very few, and it is quite possible that the actual numbers of those dying from Covid-19 alone is zero…
I think you understand the point, Dodgy Geezer
The CDC claims their test can detect the virus, but admits a positive test doesn’t mean the virus caused the disease. Positive tests have to be reported to public health authorities, which of course count them as CV cases. So diseases with other etiologies are counted as CV, artificially inflating the number of cases.
From CDC’s CV test Instructions for Use
https://www.fda.gov/media/85454/download (link begins download of pdf)
+1
It doesn’t matter what is written on the D.C. but what is hysterically reported in the Propaganda Press. e.g. Climate Change in fhe form of Snowmaggedon killed thousands who dropped dead from heart attacks while shoveling their driveways in their 60s, and 70s.
Its how the media works the information. When the media acts responsibly for fear of making their guy look bad, i.e. H1N1 and Obama the grocery stores are flush with toilet paper.
while Trump was canceling all flights from China, the Democrats were voting to extend impeachment hearings and their response to Trump’s action was to call him xenophobic and racist. So was it really the Dems taking it seriously?
That about sums it up.
Did you mean to say that? The graph at the top of the page appears to show the opposite – the largest (negative) economic impact is the business as usual case, and the smallest negative impact is the Global Net Zero i.e. extreme climate action case.
(yes, I know their models are rubbish, but not rubbish in the way you say they are)
My thoughts are that Covid 19 is serious but that it is not the horrific disaster that it is being hyped up to be. Does that make me a denier? If so, what is this guy’s argument going to be if I am proved right? Just like with climate change, the deniers….um, no wait, that can’t be right.
For Wired:
1. Coronavirus is a real emergency.
2. CAGW is a fake emergency.
3. Invading green lizardmen from Mars is an imaginary emergency, at least that is until warmist climate scientists are out of a job and need a new source of cash.
(Snow cover extent trend has been doing zilch for a quarter century. I’ve not noticed the melting point of water change during that time. /s )
Besides feast and famine, sex, and being eaten alive by some wild beast, climate change (weather) and plague (disease) are probably the two things that are hard wired into our genetic make-up since we became Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. And plague and disease might be relatively recent since we formed more populous civilizations and had a longer life span than our former younger hunter gatherer adults due to agriculture and settlements that allowed us to grow older which also then was a breeding ground for disease since something had to do us in before a ripe old age we get to experience today because of knowledge and technology. Both of these factors (weather and disease) have played a major part of who we are, and probably have much to do with how we react today to the same issues that humans have experienced since time immemorial. It is only in recent memory (my parents and grandparents time) that we have begun to forget plague and some disease, but it is still simmering just below the surface in our high tech world of today. Same for climate change, or our (ir)rational fear of it still.
Just for fun, consider what might happen in Canada if it turns out that COVID-19 kills less than 100 people, and most of the dead are over 65. Well, Justin Trudeau will take credit for the low death count. Meanwhile, it may just have been that the real mortality rate of COVID-19 for healthy people under 65 is very close to zero.
The New York Times published an article whose title asked, are we overreacting to the coronavirus pandemic? The answer was, we’ll probably never know for sure. That sounds to me like a proactive cover for an expected accusation that, yes, we are overreacting.
AGW skeptics should know better. I don’t know so many are buying the COVID-19 hype. It’s BS.
You need to read more widely.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
No, you need to read more widely. I am bombarded daily by corona panic/hysteria. My BS meter is at 11 (and it only goes to 10).
Here is a nice resource with daily updates (scroll down).
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Covidot.
OK Doomer
You are obviously a consumer of the New York Times.
Another good article:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/
(Rescued from spam bin) SUNMOD
It’s overblown because they’re ignoring risk factors/co-factors and conflating normal illnesses with CV.
I agree, but there is much more they’re ignoring and denying (no real evidence for the novelty of the virus – it’s only newly discovered, uncertainty of the test, lower than usual all-cause excess mortality this season, the cure often beeing worse than the disease…).
A doctor I know said that this virus will probably be worse on people that are forgoing treatment for chronic and unrelated illnesses, because of the stigma of going to seek medical help right now, than the virus itself.
Entire medical organizations have published their agreement with climate alarmism…but now all doctors are experts on everything?
No, they are not.
Doctors are just people with specific training.
They are not oracles of fact in their every utterance.
Yep. It’s a sad day when even most the readers at WUWT are clueless. We once had this thing called individual responsibility and personal decision making. But I guess we’re far too stupid for that and we need Big Brother to tell us what to think and do.
Shutting down the entire economy and telling everyone to stay home because a small group of people are at risk is the most collectivist and communistic thing ever. Sorry high school and college seniors, you may be at 0.0% risk of a serious illness from Covid-19, but your grandma might get sick so you will not get your rights of passage. I mean, how would your grandma ever know that SHE is at risk and it is up to HER to take precautions? Let’s do everything we can to keep the herd from getting this so that it has time to evolve and potentially does threaten the young and vibrant?
And how about next year? Do the Chicken Littles really think we are going to extinct this virus? Are we going to celebrate when only 0.5% of our population is reported to have contracted this cold virus, just to realize that only leaves 99.5% of the population with no antibodies and at risk of catching and spreading this next season? Apparently, yes, we are. Running for the caves like Chicken Little will be a seasonal activity.
Another significant difference between the two issues, is the abstract nature of Climate alarm. Despite decades of failed predictions, the catastrophe fails to materialise. CoVid19, or most medical health issues, have conclusive tests that can be observed measured and quantified. When they start with the same standards for establishing credible Climate change issues, there will be less resistance and more acceptance.
Best to all, Eamon.
Some denial,
“An online article on the 23rd claimed ‘…experts at University College London and Cambridge University estimate there could be between 35,000 and 70,000 excess deaths’ in the UK, but the ‘experts’ were not named.
A councillor friend of mine on Faceache said yesterday he had heard ‘from government sources’ that this virus will be “ten times as bad as the Swine Flu”.
That 2009 epidemic infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide, with somewhere between 150,000–575,000 deaths. Taking the lower figure, ten times that would be 1.5 million. Taking the higher figure, that would be almost six million deaths.
I find it difficult to see anything even remotely approaching that from Covid, considering there have been less than 19,000 deaths worldwide.
On the 24th, Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Mail on Sunday, gave an interview to Talk Radio, in which he says deliberately crashing the economy will not stop the spread of the virus, and compared, as I did in my previous article, the present situation with previous epidemics, and said there has been a significant over-reaction to the virus in the UK and many other countries.
The interview can be seen here –www.youtube.com [4]
The British Army announced it had 20,000 troops on standby as part of a ‘Covid Support Force’ alongside 10,000 specially trained personnel at ‘higher readiness’ to respond to a civil emergency. A civil emergency, like a food riot perhaps?
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this article should be the fact that on March 19th, the gov.uk website said the Covid virus….
…Is No Longer Considered To Be A High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) In The UK.
The website stated
‘The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase. (Emphasis added)
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.’ (Emphasis added)
The webpage can be seen here –www.gov.uk [5]”
China has had 3200 deaths and is getting back to normal. For a comparison around 4200 people die of the flu annually in the UK.
The numbers are just not there!
Everyone seems to have forgotten flu deaths in the US in the bad 2017-2018 flu season-
https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/seasonal-influenza-associated-deaths-united-states-reach-80000-people
It’s a lot like the Oz bushfires as they’ve put off the national enquiry for the obvious. We’re basically survivalists and know deep down you can’t pause too long fretting over the past as there’s always more challenges for the living.
During the 2017-2018 flu season the Italian ICUs collapsed.
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
icisil
So, you are saying that the Italians didn’t learn their lesson!
Do you have EVIDENCE any of these person died “from the flu”?
I’m not sure what gets put a death certificate. However, the end point for flu and Covid19 is often pneumonia. There are, however, pneumonias – – note the ‘s’. [Don’t start with the countable or uncountable; the s or no s. Don’t care here.]
The pneumonia for which a vaccine is available is not the same as that usually found in Covid deaths.
It would be interesting to know what does get recorded as the cause of death, and how specific it is.
This might be asked of a death via auto crash, also.
China went through a month of total lockdown, where people caught out of their homes were arrested and those showing symptoms were forcibly isolated.
Yes, the flu seems to be dying down there, but it hardly went away on it’s own.
Nonsense….it absolutely DID go away on its own. That is what epidemics do. The infection had been on the move long before the panic began. An enormous number of people were infected long before.
The whole thing is another example of idiotic assumptions put into computer models.
Like THIS, for instance.
“The UK should now be able to cope with the spread of the covid-19 virus, according to one of the epidemiologists advising the government.
Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London gave evidence today to the UK’s parliamentary select committee on science and technology as part of an inquiry into the nation’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/#ixzz6HpOcZiSp
His original prediction was 500,000. And Ferguson now claims that the “lockdown” deserves credit except that the UK only began its lockdown 2 days ago and the theory is that lockdowns take 2 weeks or more to work.
Like the IPCC models, we have been PUNKED.
Rahmstorf on his blog published also his view on denier of climate change and Corana.
In the fast growing number of comments he earned a lot of critical ones, two dsys later he closed the comment function.
Normaly everybody there doesn’t comment critical, was s.t. completely new for him and his defending comments worth some laugh.
There’s a strong connection between the two. We are all watching carefully the drop in atmospheric CO2 caused by what I will call Gretan Coronavirus De-Industrialisation – maybe down to the Guardian’s ‘safe level’ of 350ppm. If nothing happens it means that we have the carbon budget all wrong, human-caused global warming is blown out of the water, the UK’s ludicrous carbon zero by 2050 ambition is terminally silly, we can stop the salaries of the Climate Change Committee and get on with enjoying the weather,
Is it ironic that warmer weather tends to diminish infectious diseases such as COVID-19? Global warming has it’s benefits.
https://abc17news.com/weather/2020/03/11/weathers-role-in-the-covid-19-outbreak/
It’s all over weather worriers and doomsters as you’ve been trumped by Covid19-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/poland-says-virus-fallout-makes-it-tough-to-hit-eu-climate-goal/ar-BB11JHdK
The use of the term ‘denier’ appears to by symptomatic of infantile reasoning.
It really ought to be ignored with the contempt it deserves.
Regarding the MSM and Alarmists; it’s like being an alchemist.
You’re believing in BS and breathing in mercury vapors to prove it’s real.
Why don’t people get onboard and admit there’s serious geothermal denial.
http://phzoe.com/2020/02/13/measuring-geothermal-a-revolutionary-hypothesis/
This is one of the biggest scientific scandals of our time.
From my CRC Handbook numbers, the avg watts per sq meter that the earth can radiate is 0.08. Of course this an be higher in different locales, but that’s the average. IMHO that is not significant.
So what?
The CONDUCTIVE heat flux is irrelevant.
Please read:
http://phzoe.com/2019/12/04/the-case-of-two-different-fluxes/
http://phzoe.com/2020/02/20/two-theories-one-ideological-other-verified/
(videos included conclusively prove my thesis)
How long are you going to push this nonsense?
Nonsense! Says the silly geothermal denier.
Okay…NOW I get it!
Comic relief!
Bravo…well played!
New York’s rate of increase of Wuhan virus infections seems to be dropping.
Trying to conflate the Wuhan virus crisis with Human-caused climate change is just another indication that the alarmists are losing the argument. They are grasping at straws.
There was a big surge in testing as tests became available. Don’t assume that the rate of reported cases has any relationship to the actual rate of cases.
MarkW – Thank you. We started at 0 because that’s where you start when you are counting things. The increase in testing is the only reason for increase in the number of positive results. Besides that, many people (with serious symptoms) online have stated they were denied testing because they weren’t in the ‘at risk’ group. Health officials state it is because they have a limited supply of tests, but the real reason (and you know it is the real reason) is to artificially boost the recovered/death ratio. They cannot institute marshal law if the real numbers are reported.
This entire situation stinks, but it smells like Rem-oil at my house.
DP
Not everyone will get the “Rem-oil” reference. I’m a fan of RIG, if you can find it.
Unfortunately human nature’s Logical brain can’t cope when it is shown inconsistently to be full of assumptions, fallacies, appeal to authority of IPCC political re-writters of science conclusions, argument from Omnisicence & Confirmation Bias, so reverts to the motional brain of Ad Hominens & name calling like the Inquisition – it was the Alarmist movement that started the denier phrase (maybe to protect their jobs & scrutiny).
So if we join in the name calling for a bit of fun, then:
We are only ‘CO2 is the only variable in Climate Models, and outputs tweeked to say Earth is Toasting Deniers’, Alarmist are basically Reality Deniers.
Roger Pielke Jr must be overjoyed to find he is now back in the good graces of the Progressive Left.
(Just don’t tell John Holdren that Roger was let out of the dog house.)
By the way, it would be interesting to see the full context of Prof. Pielke’s quoted remarks.
Sometimes, there’s little to panic about but panic itself.
That’s not to deny that Covid 19 is a real and present danger although, personally, in my rural Australian shire, as of less than twenty hours ago there was not one known case and the same goes for most neighbouring local government areas. As for recent unemployment directly related to Covid 19 precautionary measures, there is already one case amongst my offspring and we have only one of working age. Our local supermarket shelves are also largely empty. Given that we have known for decades or even for a century that such a pandemic was possible, it is surprising how unprepared most Australians seem to be. However, given that we have collectively spent the last two decades panicking about a problem that doesn’t exist (AGW), perhaps I should not be surprised at all that the only real preparedness many Australians have shown is the willingness to panic.
Being skeptical of unicorns and being skeptical of horses is NOT the same there Gilad, sunshine. Your 15 minutes of climate fame are over- for that I’m happy.
I would appreciative thoughts by anyone here about the following video:
https://youtu.be/JnXzGB170GI
Ironic – I would suggest that the more pertinent point is that the same people making the attacks – unerringly, performing the same sort of scapegoating, stereotyping, demographic-targeting that made the Third Reich such a success.
Same people.
I bet it will be next time too.
May I posit an idea and not be eviscerated? I feel that many of the companies and institutions that are shutting down their operations are doing so for the sake of ‘virtue signaling’. I receive emails announcing another shut-down that begin “We *care* about you and our employees…”. Of course, what they really mean is “We care what you think about us…”.
If they cared about me they’d honor my right to make my own decisions about my risks. If they cared about their employees, they would let them continue gainful employment rather than forcing them to rely on Government checks.
In this regard these reactions are similar to what we see regarding climate change. Companies will green wash their reputations with some boilerplate about ‘fighting climate change’ just to signal they’re one of the ‘good guys’.
BTW I’m stuck at home now because my Laboratory only allows ‘essential’ personnel. ‘Essential’ includes the cleaning staff.
re: Mumbles McGuirck
I think your premise is wrong, that companies closed down for the purpose of virtue signaling. I work for a large organization (well over 100,000 employees) where about a third of its employees travel internationally by air or car everyday and/or every week. With the risk of being another artery by which the disease can spread, my employer– and many like it– weighed the risks and found it better to implement extreme social distancing. And, for some parts of the organization, it is a complete shut down.
As we learn more, hindsight may reveal that decisions to shutdown may have been overboard. For example, statistically, the disease is wreaking havoc on the more vulnerable of the population. We didn’t know that for sure three weeks ago. Now it is becoming clearer.
Let’s wait and see what happens before drawing conclusions.
Don’t discount the effect of liability concerns regarding such decisions.
Once public health authorities began issuing travel warnings and such, it became evident it would be impossible for any employer, venue owner, etc, to say they had no idea people might be in danger.
The actual risk matters less than the perception in such cases.
Also influencing such decisions was the overlap between the demographics of who is affected worst by this illness, and the demographics of ownership and upper level management.
The overlap is disproportionate, and hence so is the response.
“… polls showed Republican voters were taking the pandemic far less seriously than Democrats …”
While true, only a Democrat would write this line and try to attribute anything to it.
This is a human-to-human transmitted virus by proximity.
There are more Democrats in high density cities .. more Republicans in rural low density areas.
Anybody with half a brain would know without asking that more Democrats are going to die and they should take the pandemic more seriously.
Neo: Yeah, but it sounded too good to let the truth get in the way.
Remember when the left complained that shutting down China flights was xenophobic? Remember when the left said to worry more about the flu?
http://www.domigood.com/2020/03/comfortably-smug-compiles-dont-worry.html
Remember when those “denialists” at Fox were actually warning about this virus during the ridiculous Couppeachment?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Neo,
You said, “This is a human-to-human transmitted virus by proximity.” And, that is why NYC and northern Italy are experiencing such problems.
Climate Alarmism is like Anorexia Nervosa.
Both lead to starvation.
Impossible to see yourself in the mirror?
Walt…I was referring to alarmists and anorexia patients, not “you”.
Bridging the gap between the 2 gasoline consumption for week ending 3/20 is here no big drop https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/gasoline.php
Oh there’s a connection between global warming and pandemics alright, just not the one they want to admit. All of their preferred policies from dense urban living to mass transit to plastic bag bans DIRECTLY lead to the severity of this outbreak. Their religion of political correctness absolutely forbade them from admitting the truth of the origins of this plague and even demanded that they deliberately expose themselves during the Chinese New Year celebrations.
Time for all of the “smart” kids to drink a big glass of shut up and accept some reality.
Yes, Policies that also weakened economies to the point that the resultant recession inevitable as a result of co-vid will likely be the worst of the last two centuries.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/
This just in! You’ve been lied to!!! Looks like Michael Mann had a hand in the development of the COVID-19 computer model. Just sayin’.
Whose the ‘smart’ kid now?
*Who’s – I’m the SMRT kid now! Haha…
In case you missed it, the last two paragraphs are the only truth to that article. The computer model was wrong, they updated it, and boom, no more Coronapocalypse.
‘Round these parts, ya’ll know lots about faulty ‘puter models, right?
” If we drain all our spare capacity responding to maybes, without clear evidence there is an actual problem, we won’t have anything left when a real threat manifests.”
A valid warning but to late. Many jurisdictions already have a bare cupboard due to misguided climate action.
Speaking of Dems and denial, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer(D) of MI released a letter Mar24 via her Dept. of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs threatening “administrative action” against physicians, pharmacists, and other licensed health professionals who prescribe hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.
Repeat: MI doctors who prescribe HCQ for ChiCom virus and pharmacists who fill those prescriptions could lose their licenses.
An excellent response by Kathy Hoekstra was posted today in the Detroit News. See
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/03/26/opinion-michigans-doctors-fight-coronavirus-and-governors-office/2922272001/
The implications of Whitmer and her administration’s knee-jerk scare tactics should terrify all Michigan residents. Not only is our state’s top leader threatening the selfless health care workers who are on the frontline trying to save lives, but she’s denying possible life-saving medications to actual COVID-19 victims.