Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Inside Climate News thinks the mounting death toll from Covid-19 will push climate skeptics to embrace blind faith in experts. But they completely ignore that many climate skeptics are deeply worried about Covid-19, and have been from the start.
Decades of Science Denial Related to Climate Change Has Led to Denial of the Coronavirus Pandemic
After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next.
BY NEELA BANERJEE
BY DAVID HASEMYERAmerican science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.
…
Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn’t hard to understand how that happened.
President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19’s seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China.
…
Will Covid-19 Deaths Lead Skeptics to Rethink Views on Climate Change?
…
Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change.
In 2009, thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists were leaked, in a scandal known as Climategate. Climate deniers seized upon excerpts from the emails to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming before international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple reviews of the scientists’ emails exonerated them of tampering with data, but to deniers, Climategate remains proof of the dishonesty of climate researchers.
“There’s a hostility toward the messengers,” Taylor said. “Technocratic elites and scientists are for the most part Democrats, and that’s one thing the Republican base knows really well. They’re not trustworthy. They’re not part of the tribe. And Republicans have been hearing for 30 years that they have an agenda they want to advance.”
…
As the death toll from the pandemic climbs, conservatives are likely to set aside their continued skepticism of science, including the facts underpinning climate change, Taylor said. “The distrust of expertise and the medical profession will wither away,” he said, “because we’ll see the consequences of that distrust.”
But Goldman is less optimistic that the impact of Covid-19 can lead doubters to reconsider anything other than Covid-19.
…
Read more: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042020/science-denial-coronavirus-covid-climate-change
Nullius in verba – Take nobody’s word for it. This is the ancient motto of the Royal Society, a science organisation which was founded in 1660.
Granted much of the Royal Society in my opinion no longer lives up to that motto, but there is no reason we shouldn’t. The blind acceptance of “experts” advocated by Inside Climate News is a religious belief system, not science. Experts frequently get things wrong. Sometimes entire professions get things wrong, for extended periods. History is full of groups of experts who blindly rejected the evidence they had made a mistake.
Consider the alleged expert advice from the WHO. If President Trump had blindly accepted the bad advice of WHO experts, who were still arguing against travel bans in late February, Trump would not have imposed a travel ban on China in January, against expert advice, and the situation in the USA would likely have been much worse than it currently is. The WHO refused to release the names of the “expert” doctors who vetoed a motion to declare a pandemic in January.
Trump’s rival Joe Biden at the time described the January Chinese travel ban as “xenophobia” and “hysteria”, not supported by the advice of experts. Even CNN says that Biden later flipped on supporting the travel ban.
What about the other claim Inside Climate News made, that skeptics’ blind distrust in experts is leading us to reject evidence that Coronavirus is a problem?
For starters, the most damaging rejection of evidence to date in the Coronavirus saga had nothing to do with Conservatives. The corrupt socialists who run China imprisoned and disappeared entire teams of doctors who tried to warn people. Worse the Chinese programme of disappearances is ongoing; According to The Times of Israel, Dr. Ai Fen recently disappeared after publishing a story “The one who supplied the whistle” in China’s People Magazine in March. Many of Dr. Ai Fen’s colleagues including the famous Dr. Li Wenliang have also disappeared or died.
But socialists like the CCP frequently get a free pass from greens when they shoot the messenger, in this case maybe literally.
What about the alleged climate skeptic rejection of the evidence? It is true there are disagreements amongst climate skeptics about the appropriate response to Coronavirus. But readers might remember WUWT raised the alarm about Coronavirus in January, in a post titled China Corona Virus Horror: Hospital Corridor of the Dead and Dying. I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.
No. Because it’s not about “expert” opinion. It’s about controlling a subservient population under cover of supposed expertise.
Bingo!
John and David has said it all!
Plus, the people the article’s author insists are experts are anything of the sort.
ATheok
More on that score: experts in virology and medicine are being exposed as barking up the wrong tree. In the following video is a detailed explanation as to why giving COVID-19 patients 5% hydrogen in their air supply has a dramatic, positive effect on the illness.
https://youtu.be/-oh9Ztgjm4A
The thinking behind it (independent of the presentation above) is by Dr Hany Mahfouz
https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fz72vj/theory_covid19_targets_and_infects_erythrocytes/
These two presentations together are convincing: the first presents the case for the excessive release of oxidants through two mechanisms. It gives us some idea why it targets men more than women, older more than younger, certain ethnic groups and why forms of quinine (and a few other drugs) are protective. The fact that 5% hydrogen supplied in the air works so well proves this virus is not causing viral pneumonia, it is causing chemical pneumonia.
The root problem of course is “experts” are rushing in with assumptions while not carefully looking at all the evidence available. Carry on everyone, share here first.
First, the LEL for hydrogen in air is 4%, so at 5% the mixture is potentially explosive and even static electricity could service as a source of ignition.
The MHI may not sell products but the Chinese “patients” were promoting a hydrogen generator for sale. Besides the Chinese infomercial, do you have a link to a real paper, study, trial?
BY NEELA BANERJEE
BY DAVID HASEMYER
INSIDECLIMATENEWSDOTCOM
News Flash
As long as Liberals continue to conflate their climate beliefs with Social Justice and Economic Justice and any other Liberal Justice Cause, and demand an end to Western Capitalism in favor of Socialism, Conservatives will remain anchored against any proposed actions. Conservatives are rooted in Capitalism and smaller Governance not Welfare State and Larger Government
It is also painfully obvious that this is not about science but that “climate change” is being used as a trojan horse to mask a world wide political reorganisation under false pretenses.
All the pseudo psychological mumbo-jumbo about “denial” is just like all the phobias attributed to those who are not fully WOKE.
They were quite willing to throw the scientific method and integrity under a bus and now come on all shocked that no one believes scientists any more.
I wonder why.
I wonder why? WHY is because they countermand yesterday’s “advice” today, and will reverse it again tomorrow. No masks, wear masks, only N95 work but you can’t have one, woops wait, don’t go out without it–or you can make them yourself out of your $100 “fair trade” organic cotton T-shirt but now you don’t need GLOVES?
The models are shite and these people are a JOKE. That includes Fauci the great and The Scarf, to whom we seem to have handed the entire governance of the Western World. They are making it up as they go along, that much is obvious.
BTW, nobody seems to be able to find the statute endowing all these mini-me fascist governors and mayors with the “Emergency Powers” they’re claiming to suddenly run the minutiae of your life.
Gonna be a pile harder selling “climate models” that’ve failed for 40 years after watching repeatedly as COVID-19 “models” fail for 40 consecutive days in a row.
“After the (climate data manipulation industry) spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining (their own credibility)”
After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science
And whats aubout the trillions of dollars to try to establish a consensus in flawed so called “climate science”, devaste nature for so called “climate protecting” energy ?
So, the fossil fuel industry made Mann use bogus statistics, and to stonewall attempts to replicate and reproduce his results? And they made subsequent “independent” research do the same thing? And they made the CRU emails out of whole cloth? I could go on…
Indeed, Bryan A.
When all the solutions being demanded impose socialism, we are seeing an ideology not a scientific discipline and that alone is why any halfway intelligent human being is a skeptic.
What is more, capitalism has been a better caretaker of the environment than socialism/communism. Look at communist China, lots of pollution. Former communist Russia, Chernobyl is but one example. Socialist Venezuela, you don’t care about environment when you are constantly hungry.
The environment is a red herring. It is not about the environment, that is just the instrument the leftists are using to achieve their real goal.
I have posted this before, but any modifier to the word “justice” can be replaced with the prefix “in”.
Social Justice = injustice (it always implies taking something worked for from one group to give to a group that did not put in the work to earn it – voting is not the same as working)
Racial Justice = injustice (somehow judging by behavior and content of character is so passe.)
etc.
They’re about to learn all about “economic justice” up close and personal when some unemployed, desperate home invader smashes their window at 3 AM looking for something to eat. We’ll see how well their SJW chatter works then.
No, even more now those with the stupid computer models can predict squat.
GI=GO with all the Garbage assumptions.
Bingo#2
+1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/niels-bohr-quotes
I’m not sure how Covid-19 changes this.
Here’s the irony or is it dichotomy ? As more ‘covid’ data comes in from reality, the models are revised down, down, down (regardless of knowing the true prevalence) however, reality plays no role in modeling with global warming……(notice what I did there, I didn’t use the euphemism ‘climate change’)
No. Because the Dunning-Kruger effect trumps the trust of experts.
You did know that, didn’t you?
Q – You know who uncritically trusts experts?
A – Folks with low IQs. link
Holy crap, loydo, it’s a LOT of the ‘EXPERTS” that, to MANY people, seem to have Dunning-Kruger. The ‘experts’ just ‘know it all’, and carry on as such ( . .not all of them, I agree, but many more than not . . ).
I know several at my workplace, who ‘know it all’ ; yet they really don’t; and those of us who review critically what they say, and not just accept what they say because they claim they are the ‘expert, can see their B.S.
Speaking of experts, when did our Steven Mosher, I presume, become an expert on China?
“Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab”, wrote Steven Mosher, an expert on China, in The New York Post. We do not know the truth and we might never know it. The theory that the virus originated in a bio-research laboratory might indeed might turn out to be “fringe.” However, considering China’s level of secrecy and its dangerous campaign of censoring talk about the virus, is not doubt at least legitimate?
If the entire paragraph was, indeed, a quote from our Steven, this may be the first time I ever agreed with him.
Mosher just makes stuff up.
He is all fantasy, bent that way by his work associations.
“fred250 April 12, 2020 at 11:58 pm
Mosher just makes stuff up.”
I think he read something on a wall in a toilet while trying to find lew paper.
Mosh may well be right about the origins of the CCP virus. For a start, no one can ever recall seeing bats at the infamous wet market in Wuhan. Secondly, these is a virology research institute less than 300m from the market which specialises in bat viruses. One of the researchers there disappeared mysteriously a few months ago, probably having died from Wu-flu. A YouTuber called Laowhy86 has more details.
@ Graemethecat April 13, 2020 at 1:35 am
Would this be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
I predicted that if Trump wasn’t removed with the scam impeachment then the Orwellian Globalist Party would crash the economy somehow. Now I’m not sure if you can actually calculate a p-test for that sort of prediction, but I don’t really believe in very large and glaring coincidences.
What we do know is that SARS is a new virus that first was recognized in humans in 2002. It was a very deadly virus but did not spread easily in human populations – we are not the host it evolved with. However, scientists around the world have been experimenting with SARS ever since in gain of function studies, and a scientist was even accidentally contaminated and died in Chicago a few years ago. Individual labs around the world have “succeeded” in making SARS more deadly and published their research:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502.
I read elsewhere about a Dutch lab succeeding in making SARS live longer on surfaces and in airborne water droplets but can’t find that story again.
So we know it’s possible, we know multiple labs around the world did bioengineer SARS and published their research, and we know that if Trump loses the 2020 election then the interim trade deals with China and the eventual permanent deals are out and the old deals are back in, gaining China $trillions in revenue through continuing imbalanced trade. But we are assured that it is not a bioengineered virus by proclomations of “it’s not possible”, “there is no evidence”, “that’s a debunked conspiracy theory”, and “nothing to see here, move along.”
As for Mosher, I think he lives in the region and is probably knows more about regional politics than climate science.
“Speaking of experts, when did our Steven Mosher, I presume, become an expert on China?
“Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab”, wrote Steven Mosher, an expert on China, in The New York Post.”
That is a different Steven Mosher
“Our” Steven Mosher, the one that posts here at WUWT, does live and work in China, so he is probably more knowledgeable than most about the situation there, although I think he is stuck in South Korea right now.
Pretty sure that was a different Mosher. It was brought up at the time.
IIRC, that was from a different Steven Mosher.
CB.
“Experts suffer even more from the overconfidence effect than laypeople do. link”
Your link says nothing of the sort. In fact it seems to suport the warnings of the falling for the DK effect.
MC
“it’s a LOT of the ‘EXPERTS” that, to MANY people, seem to have Dunning-Kruger”
Oh, the irony…
Whether someone is expert or not seems to bear absolutely zero relationship to trustworthiness here. Confirmation bias dominates expert opinion and is a far better gauge. As a result the DK effect gets a run in every second post.
That’s a direct quote. I will refrain from calling you an idiot in spite of ample evidence. I’ll just assume that you’re having a senior’s moment or something like that.
If we’re going to be fair, that also applies to those who uncritically trust the experts that the Corona-chan test is accurate.
No because science is base on predictions, predictions and more predictions ALL of which have to happen or you have to “Modify or abandon your theory”. So when the CO2 based predictions of global warming don’t happen, and they haven’t, what do you do Loydo?
My, and others, skepticism is not due to the Dunning-Kruger effect but due to failed predictions by “the experts”.
I think Loydo should give us one little bit of evidence establishing that human-caused climate change is real.
Everyone in favor hit the “like” button.
Too easy. http://rabett.blogspot.com/2020/04/twas-best-of-times-for-proxy.html
LMAO. That’s the best you can do? The hockey stick? ROTFLMAO. Please try to stay up to date. That was eviscerated long ago. See climateaudit.org for details.
So tell me in your own words TRM is it the proxy data, the instrument data or their being juxtaposed you think is invalid and why?
Logos
Agreed, no s t climate scientists like Michael Mann and Psychologists like Stephan Lewandowsky obviously suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect
Indeed you come here all the time proving that point.
Well, you should know about that.
Have you learnt how to work a calculator yet?
“Have you learnt how to work a calculator yet?”
Loydo doesn’t need to, whatever answer he gives is correct.
Hi Loydo:
Speaking of experts, I don’t mean to bother you and all, but I was hoping to get some sort of closure on the following exchange betwixt me (der Dummkopf) and thee (der(?) Experte):
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/10/but-is-the-growth-of-the-pandemic-really-exponential/#comment-2962314
Just when you get a chance? I mean, take yer time and everything like that there and what-not.
Ha ha! Expecting Lyodo to engage in an intellectually honest dialog. That’s a hoot!
Dear Sy, I did respond to your 1st question – when I saw it. I just noticed you drawing my attention to another. Happy to respond…if I don’t its not personal…I just did’t notice. Scrolling back through WUWT posts is not usually my idea of an enlightening read.
Back on March 27th, when I gave my warning of NY being like Italy 2 weeks which was pretty accurate given the death toll, Trump was still lying about testing and how great things were going.
“another 2 or 3 weeks maybe” for Fauci to be on Trump’s wrong side and getting smeared by Fox?
Try 2 or 3 days. https://www.foxnews.com/us/trump-retweets-firefauci-tweet-fueling-speculation-of-a-frayed-relationship-with-dr-fauci
Loydo, that is a reference to “speculation”, it is not a reference to science. If you interpret speculation as science you will start to sound a little crazy, and…. wait, it’s too late. Never mind.
Dear Loydo, thank you for responding. No, I don’t take it personal – well, maybe, but it’s a personal problem. I’m working on it by practicing self-disdainment, i.e., I’ll talk to me then deliberately ignore myself in order build up immunity to the sting.
Ok, after your cited article, I’m gonna give you the Fauci thing, since “being in the crosshairs” might apply. You moved the goalposts with the “smeared by Fox” addition. I didn’t really see that in the cited article, btw, but we’ll let that go.
So we’re just left with this: “Its also a matter of time before Trump begins calling the US death toll fake news: rewriting history will be his only defense.”
How much time? I’ll calendar it and we’ll talk again. What say you?
“How much time? I’ll calendar it and we’ll talk again. What say you?”
Given how Trump will be desperately scratching around for distractions in the coming weeks I’ll plump for the end of April. I take it you are of the opinion that won’t happen, ie that Trump wont try to cast doubt on the death toll?
Let me also forecast Trump will begin to shrilly browbeat the Governors to end the lockdown (in an attempt to shift blame to them) and that they will and that that will cause a resurgence of the virus and will result in another round of mass deaths and lockdowns. Timeframe for lockdown #2 October 1st. Happy to be completely wrong, but I don’t think Donald Trump, or Fox for that matter, will understand any time soon viruses aren’t suscetible to propaganda.
End of April – got it!
Well if he doesn’t, he should:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/birx-says-government-is-classifying-all-deaths-of-patients-with-coronavirus-as-covid-19-deaths-regardless-of-cause
Why wouldn’t you? You ARE trying to be fair and balanced to all parties involved, including Trump, aren’t you? Or would you argue that even the current death tolls are accurate?
Oops, nm, I answered my own questions. Just read your second paragraph – bit of a[nother] TDS moment for you don’t you think? I tell ya, you and Bob . . . I’m worried.
I dunno about calendaring all the way to October, I suspect I’ll be too busy to be wasting everyone’s time making silly comments on WUWT.
Doubt-mongering. But if you read the fine print (like Trump won’t) you find –
Dr. Michael Baden, a Fox News contributor: “but that’s probably a small number,”.
Fox and Trump are in a dangerous feedback loop. Fox said it so now Trump will say it – “see they’re saying it on Fox”.
“At yesterday’s the president cast doubt on…”
The rest of the world watches on in morbid fascination as exceptionalism slowly swirls down the drain.
“immunity to the sting” lol.
It’s surely not “doubt mongering” when by their own admission there’s no doubting the numbers are flawed, is it? There’s a lot of rural area in this country. According to the census bureau, as of 2016, 97% of the nation is rural and contains +/- 20% of the population. That’s around 60M people. That’s a lot of potential small numbers adding up to something bigger.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210.html
What’s happened to epistemology? Where has it gone and why? Intellectual discourse in general and science in particular has been reduced to “maybe,” “could be,” “likely,” “might,” and “probably,” just to name a few weasel words. Whatever happened to good ‘ole confirmation of one’s premises with some good, hard, data and repeatable experiments?? What’s wrong with that?? It’s not like we CAN’T do it, but rather we DON’T. Lazy. Lazy is bad.
Sometimes you need to know that which is true to precision. Furthermore we ought to want to know what’s true in the first place because Truth is in and of itself a beautiful thing. It’s God’s gift to mankind.
Everybody doesn’t have to be so serious ALL of the time. 🙂
“good ‘ole confirmation of one’s premises with some good, hard, data and repeatable experiments?”
Admirable sentiments Sy but in the midst of a pandemic sometimes estimations and best guesses are all we have time to make decisions on.
As far as the scientific virtue of doubt goes (and I believe it is a virtue), it is unrelated to doubt-mongering, which is devious, often malevalent and has become the rhetorical weapon of choice for most of the anti-AGW warriors.
#firefauci #fireWHO #next distraction
I have to disagree with you Loydo, I don’t think there’s any reason to estimate nor “best guess” a cause of death from COVID. Surely we can test that with precision by now. Or would you argue otherwise? If so, then what makes you believe that Trump is responsible for “thousands of deaths”?
How can that be if nobody knows?
Oh loydo / Griff, you learned a new sound bite,
Loydo is definitely NOT Griff. The lack of critical thinking is there in both, but they are two different people. Griff we know lives in the UK, and I am pretty sure its rather privileged too. Loydo is, I am sure, in Australia.
Mmm thats right, Cube’s Griff-fetish is getting a little weird. I saw him accuse someone else of being Griff recently, Simon if I recall correctly. He was even corrected by a mod a few months back…alas to no avail. Cube…get a life.
Griff is degenerated to a genus name for people usually not being able to switch on power for logical thinking.
Loydo, despite his dimness, is nowhere near as insane as griff.
Hmmm…That got me to wondering and thinking…Hope I never need to find out which is the cleaner set of underwear in the hamper!
Loydo;
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/character/eu/ysondre/Loydo
I can see Cube’s mistake. Talking point spouting NPCs are pretty interchangeable with each other.
Loydo is just your run of the mill left wing whacko. Look on the bright side she is in Australia which that view doesn’t rate beyond 10% junk status. So she will still be tortured and crying when she is old and gray.
You making comments, is a very strong case of the Dunning Kruger effect, Lo-doh !
You are totally out of your depth when it comes to knowledge or intelligence .
You drown yourself with your every post.
Fools do think themselves wise men. Shakespeare.
Life is tough, and if you are stupid, it makes it even worse… U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA)
But you can’t resist responding to every one of them?
There seem to be experts with differing opinions in the field of epidemiology which makes me think it’s a healthy science.
The totalitarian loathing of experts with differing opinions in the field of ‘climate science’ marks it out as politically motivated pseudoscience.
Aren’t you the best example of the Dunnig-Kruger effect ?
In so far, your post is unmasking your self.
Loydo, “experts” with no knowledge are not experts. The models publicized by these fools are ridiculous and don’t meet the smell test.
If we need some advice on how to act like a simpleton rube then we will ask you.
No.
Will the massive failure of ‘expert’ predictions of Chinese Flu effects and their attempts to turn a bad flu season into a global depression make me trust experts in other fields?
Um… no.
The old saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” applies a hundred fold to the climate change crisis. So the saying would be a “crisis now is worth a hundred crises in a hundred years time”. Now that we have a real crisis on our hands I doubt whether climate change will ever get up into the list of real concerns again.
Only if we make sure it doesn’t. When even the Pope at least implies that COV-19 is nature’s revenge (which must mean God’s, since Nature is God’s creation) on our way of life then there is (a convenient) logic in the argument that we need to mend our ways.
And guess what!! I just happen to have this ready-made way-mending concept packed up and ready to go. Etcetera, etcetera!
The London Times is reporting this morning that 45 “members” of Extinction Rebellion have been referred to the Home Office anti-terrorist programme.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/45-climate-activists-treated-as-terrorists-nxg9kns76
It’s a start!
It never as a real concern. It was a political movement. That’s why the IPCC got given a Peace Prize instead of real Nobel Prize.
Looking at all the CV-19 numbers its apparent that clean air is crucial to reducing contagion. The only alternative being a facemask.
Why is clean air important? Is it simply the viral percentage in the air? Is CV-19 stuck to water or hydrocarbons in the air? The fact that it infects lung tissues suggests that anyone with hydrocarbon lined lungs is susceptible. This will apply to healthy young people. Diesel vehicles and ships will be deadly in a new way.
Appartment and office buildings without UV and appropriate filtering on their air systems will not do well.
We are yet to see investigative epidiemeology from our medical experts. This will make a difference. The liklihood of a vaccine for a Covid virus is remote. Governments have been throwing money at the problem for over 50 years.
The idea that herd immunity can save a small section of the population from mortality is fanciful. Equally can we afford to save them if it means crushing the economy?
What relevancy is real air pollution with global warming?
“The idea that herd immunity can save a small section of the population from mortality is fanciful.”
….
Herd immunity saves a lot of people from dying. Take measles, small pox, polio, mumps and rubella for example.
Given Covid-19 as a R0 of around 2.7, achieving herd immunity would require
1 – 1/R0 = 0.62
Around 60% of the population would have to be immune to achieve herd immunity.
Of course if the R0 has been underestimated, a much higher proportion of the population would need to be immune to achieve herd immunity.
You can achieve herd immunity with vaccines.
Yep – when a vaccine is available.
What vaccines, Henry? If one exists today, the Chinese own it. Do you think they are going to incriminate themselves as creators of the virus, by admitting they already have a vaccine?
“Herd immunity saves a lot of people from dying. Take polio () for example.”
Nope. 100% false.
No such thing in France.
niceguy,
I do believe herd immunity will save a lot of people from dying. That’s exactly how it has worked in the past before modern medicine. The problem is, a whole lot of people do die before the herd gains immunity. Preventing that, it appears, is why we are all in lock down.
I am very curious to see how this works out when next flu season hits and COVID rears its ugly head again or, after we stop being locked down and it continues on its natural course. Have we saved lives or, just postponed deaths? We will soon find out. It will be important to compare what happens in the future to countries that went with lock down to those that didn’t.
Neither polio nor other similar dirty diseases were eliminated by herd immunity.
Of course, herd immunity used to protect from measles, but then a dangerous experiment was tried: mass vaccination. And we had a measles crisis.
Geoff – you provide remarkaby little evidence to support your claims. Well, actually none at all. And they don’t seem to be at all valid anyway. Why, for example, would the fact that WuFlu attacks the lungs suggest that “hydrocarbon-lined lungs” would be particularly susceptible. Given that you present no evidence, we might equally suppose that that lining could protect them from WuFlu, mightn’t it?
But on a much more serious note, why is it that so many of the climate alarmists are trying so desperately to make connections between climate and WuFlu. My suggestion is that the climate alarmists realise that their fake crisis has been thoroughly trumped (npi) by a real crisis, and their fake crisis may never recover. Now to support that suggestion, do I really need to provide evidence? But I will anyway:
The climate crisis has been going for ages, with a ferocious and sustained attack on the use of fossil fuels based on predictions of human extinction. You can’t get mush more serious than that, can you? Well the chart of aviation traffic linked above shows no decline through the climate emergency but sharp decline during the WuFlu emergency. Evidence, I would say, that people have seen for a while that the climate emergency is fake and the WuFlu emergency is real. There’s a 90-day chart at https://www.flightradar24.com/data/statistics but I can’t quickly find one over a longer period.
You also need to factor in the difference between important and urgent. Best demonstrated by Prime Minister Hacker in that wonderful political handbook(!) “Yes, Prime Minister”.
I don’t remember the exact context but the response was, “The nurses can vote against me in three years time; the back benchers can vote against me at 10 o’clock tonight!”
I think that sums up the situation fairly well.
The CDC failed us in the U.S. because they discouraged use of facemasks. So much for the experts.
The CDC has switched from using reliable lab results for determining influenza mortality, to unreliable death certificates to determine cvd-19 mortality.
So much for credibility as well.
Geoff,
When did water in the air become a pollutant? Btw, CO2 is .0004 percent of our air and the Alarmists battle is against CO2, not carbon. It is highly unlikely that CO2 is a vehicle for the virus. There’s just too little of it. Not to mention, your entire notion is without evidence or, merit.
Now, if you want to talk real pollution which AGWers do not seem to care about, yes, that could harm the lungs and make them less able to combat the virus but not CO2. Every breath you exhale contains large amounts of CO2 so, the body and lungs handle it quite well since CO2 is a product of respiration.
In addition, the US has done a bang up job of cleaning our air. It would be great if all the time, money and energy expended on AGW were spent on assisting the world’s developing nations on cleaning up their air and water but, alas, there’s no money nor power and control of humanity in that so, AGW it is to the many so inclined to ruling the world.
Not to mention increasing the GDP of nations which can only be accomplished by getting the people out of poverty with 24/7 reliable electricity and a grid to deliver it would go a long way towards protecting both the environment, human and animal health and to protecting species and habitats. As it is, the insane push for unreliable renewables keeps people in poverty living with dirty air and water and no sewers, cooking over smokey dung or wood fires while vast tracts of forests and arable land are taken over by bird, bat and insect chopping windmills, bird roasting solar arrays and forests devastated for the very dirty biomass and biofuels obsession. The Amazon, for one, is being obliterated to grow sugar cane for biofuels.
Meanwhile, the AGWer’s beloved China continues to build a new coal fired, old-fashioned polluting coal fire power plant a week to keep up with the West’s demand for the production of windmills and solar panels, among all the other things we’ve outsourced to China and is building them all over the developing world to boot. China, you might recall, has given the world numerous, fatal viruses with COVID-19 just being the latest. But, if anyone criticizes the Communist, oppressive, freedom and human rights hating Chicoms, they’re racist.
Note, So. Korea and Taiwan have fared the best in the Chinese virus outbreak precisely because they didn’t believe a word the Chicoms said and prepared early. They know the Chicoms lie. They didn’t listen to the corrupt WHO nor the incompetent CDC, either. So much for experts.
Now, if you want to talk real pollution which AGWers do not seem to care about,
Not only they don’t care, in contrast, the promote air pollution, they offer wood fire heating as climate protecting alternative, not mentioning the more than strong pollution with PM2.5 particulates, NOx pollution and high CO2 production – burning in some hours around 80 years tree growth.
Won’t speak about forest devasting for wind mills, momocultures for so called energy plants, etc, etc
Well, expert opinion says herd immunity will stop this and future Covid-19 pandemics.
But don’t take their word for it, look at evidence.
Isn’t herd immunity just a short way of saying “let everyone die who will, and the rest of us will be OK.”
I have been reading a fair number of papers, often only abstracts that are available, about coastal environmental restoration and finally saw one, with reasoning, about how we need to start verifying our models. Best available science has been around for a long time in fisheries and environment, but the fallacy is that it may not be any good if you don’t know what your are missing. Given complexities of systems involved missing would be often predicted.
The other obvious phenomenon by those doing the restoration papers is their mixing of the science and policy. So many authors are so sure of what needs to be done, at a minimum always study some more. Too many are patting themselves on the back at the same time about the relevance of their work. That’s not their job. Controversies seem to be more about the policy than the science or at least the relevance of the science to the policy. That may be the main signature of the Anthropocene. It’s called lack of judgement.
“Leaderships” of scientific organizations are extensively pushing this, a rather juvenile trait I am afraid.
Whether that statement is true or not, the fact remains that MANY science realists (labeled, here “climate skeptics”), are not deeply worried about COVID19 and have NOT been from the start.**
Reason:
1. Because from the start, those dying of COVID19 had serious co-morbidities or were very old (mostly 80’s and 90’s).
2. Science realists look at what reliable data shows.
1) Death certificate data used by those in favor of the liberty-smashing lockdowns is unreliable to the point of meaninglessness. (See April 10, 2020 Breitbart article) The U.S. CDC is telling physicians to report COVID19 as the presumed cause of death even when there are serious co-morbidities.
(See Annie Bukacek, M.D.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5wn1qs_bBk — thanks to pat on the April 10, 2020 Bjorn Lomborg thread)
That is: To die with COVID19 is not die ofof COVID19.
2) Italian data shows that most people who die of COVID19 have significantly life-threatening co-morbidities and also that most people who die are over 70 years old.
(https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_20_marzo_eng.pdf )
3) DataMOST PEOPLE WHO GET COVID19 DO NOT DIE OF IT.
(I would and COULD cite many article supporting this assertion, but, the software WUWT uses sends you into moderation for too many links — articles supporting this can easily be found with a search using “COVID19 death rate overestimated”)
**********************
**When I watched the local (Seattle) TV news conference at the end of February, 2020 about the Life Care nursing home COVID19 outbreak in Kirkland, Washington, as it was wrapping up, I shouted at the TV, “Why doesn’t someone ask about those co-morbidities the health examiner mentioned? Did they die OF COVID19 or WITH it?” (And no reporter present asked that question that day. Arrgh!)
With respect Janice IMO the comorbidity theory is weak. While it is likely a factor in a lot of cases, plenty of people with no known comorbidities are getting sick and dying in New York, and some of them are young.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/coronavirus-in-young-people-ny-patients-skew-younger-some-die
“With respect Janice IMO the comorbidity theory is weak.”
Almost no-one died in Italy who didn’t have other serious health problems. The New York figures are inflated by counting deaths of many people who may not even have had Chinese Flu. And, even then, about 90% of people who died in New York had other serious health problems.
Yes, some people die who didn’t have such conditions; we’ve known all along that a tiny percentage of healthy people die from this thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority do.
And a massive percentage of deaths are occurring in care homes, among people who are close to death. Over 40% in Massachusetts, for example.
How many of those “young people” have admitted to their doctors that they are big-time pot smokers, vapers, or sugar addicts? Factors can raise one’s risk that do not fall into the ordinary category of “co-morbidities” but affect the outcome nevertheless.
The data (see the pdf from Italy) reveals that co-morbidity is a significant factor.
The death certificate data upon which you are basing your conclusion is unreliable. (Please see Dr. Bukacek above — and many other experts say the same).
Re: younger people dying of COVID19
1) In some cases, they have known serious co-morbidities (Spanish soccer player had leukemia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/03/17/21-year-old-spanish-coach-died-coronavirus-he-didnt-know-he-also-had-leukemia/ )
In the wrenchingly sad case of the baby that died by drowning, it tested positive post mortem for COVID19 and was listed as dying of COVID19.
2) the exceptional case does not destroy the overwhelming data which indicate that ~98% of those who die OF COVID19 are those with co-morbidities and or are elderly (and I realize that many of us are or will be very healthy and active in our 80’s and 90’s — I hope I will be one of those! 🙂 ).
The key for us science realists is : data.
*************
THANK YOU, Eric, for all you do to keep WUWT afloat. Your dedication is much appreciated.
Hello Janice,
In Northern Italy and Wuhan funeral homes and crematoria have been overwhelmed by the vast number of bodies to be disposed of. From this we can be certain that the acute death rates are vastly higher than normal. However, we don’t yet know what proportion of the dead were moribund, and would have died within the year anyway. However, this will become apparent when we know the overall mortality figures for the year. I suspect the annual mortality in Italy will not be so much higher than usual, meaning that the Wuhan virus merely hastened the inevitable for most of the victims. I doubt we’ll ever get honest figures from China.
I presume most in NY do a LOT of inoculations, years after years. Could be a factor.
Crazy times, now I’m agreeing with Eric, wtf. Many people die *with* a chronic disease (like Prostate cancer) and not of it. But when it comes to acute diseases like Covid19 the vast majority die *of* it, not with it. Some – a very small minority – would have died in that 5-10 day slot whether they had Covid 19 or not, ie *with* it.
“Loydo April 13, 2020 at 1:24 am”
Oh dear! Comparing prostate cancer with a virus? Chalk and cheese! You do know what chronic means, right? I have a chronic blood disorder (Hemochromatosis), ie, there is no cure. BTW, this is a genetic disorder not acquired.
Very few people die from lead poisoning from being shot with a bullet … just saying.
Actually, many (most?) patients are probably dying of doctor-induced injury (iatrogenesis). Whether from early intubation of high compliant, hypoxic patients with high PEEP/low oxygen ARDSnet protocol, experimental toxic drug treatments that cause acute liver/kidney injury, or possibly the stopping of ACE inhibitor/ARB treatments in ICU patients that unbalances pulmonary immune response leading to cytokine storms and pulmonary microvascular thrombosis – all that has yet to be sorted out.
Illnesses don’t act one way in one country and then differently in another. If younger people are showing up at hospitals with respiratory problems, then other things are likely the reason based on data from other countries. Like vaping, which causes EVALI, a respiratory illness virtually indistinguishable from covid, and which very few doctors have experience diagnosing. And smoking and drug abuse, which both can and do cause pneumonia without Corona-chan. For example, abuse of fentanyl is prevalent in the US, and it can and does cause pneumonia. So just because younger people are showing up at hospitals with Corona-chan doesn’t mean she is (primarily) responsible for the illness.
And then there’s latent TB. How many of those showing up at NYC hospitals are immigrants from other countries who have latent TB brought from their home countries? People with latent TB can look perfectly healthy, but it can activate when the immune system becomes compromised, like let’s say from Corona-chan; and when it does become active its symptoms are very similar to covid. The only way to diagnose correctly is to do a TB test. Accurate testing can be time consuming and expensive, so I have my doubts that’s being done. Consequently, if a TB patient tests positive for Corona-chan, the diagnosis will be covid.
“Like vaping, which causes EVALI”
Only if black market THC capsules are vaped.
“Like vaping, which causes EVALI, a respiratory illness virtually indistinguishable from covid, ”
Only if black market THC capsules are vaped.
” Like vaping, which causes EVALI, a respiratory illness virtually indistinguishable from covid”
Only if what was vaped was a black market THC capsule.
“3) DataMOST PEOPLE WHO GET COVID19 DO NOT DIE OF IT.“
Perhaps true but to be honest I just don’t want to be that sick. I’ve several friends who’ve had it now and they have all been quite miserable for weeks. Two fatalities so far, both with underlying health issues.
Well, Cube, who does?
Is it worth 2 TRILLION DOLLARS and an economy-crippling lockdown to you to possibly avoid getting sick?
Is being under quasi-house arrest worth it to you?
Yes?!
As for me “forbid it, almighty, God” that I would EVER say such a thing.
Patrick Henry lives! 🙂
So complain to whoever enforces your local laws there is nothing we can do about it.
Please forgive me, Cube. I stand by what I wrote, but, I very rudely ignored your deep sorrow.
TWO friends…. Oh, Cube. I am so sorry.
Please accept my belated, but heartfelt, condolences.
Take care.
Well Cube, I have friends who have been quite miserable for the past three weeks too. They have not been anywhere near Covid 19 though (as far as we know) but, the lock down depression they are suffering may well be the end of them.
To die of being run over while drunk is not to die of being run over.
obviously the underlying condition of alcoholism is to blame
Not if you get a whiff of Covid before the post mortem!
Then you’re a Covid death.
And justify the shut down – another bit!
We still cannot trust the numbers.
Comparing apples and baseballs.
Auto
With respect, Janice (and I mean that) co-morbidity is in danger if becoming a red herring or a straw to be grasped by those who are scared they might catch it. “Whistling in the dark” is another name for it.
This particular virus — which is not a strain of influenza — seems by a margin to be attracted to the elderly and the vast majority of deaths have been of people 70+ and/or already battling other conditions. In that context it is virtually impossible to determine a primary cause of death especially in a pandemic where the pressure is to certify death and shift the corpse along before the queue gets too long. (Sorry if I sound flippant!)
If a man with a weak heart and any one of the assorted other ailments that we geriatrics are prone to is also attacked by a corona virus can you reliably say which of those ailments is the cause of death? If he died after being infected with the common cold (also possibly a coronavirus) would he have survived without it and if so for how long?
Another example from a couple of days ago: if a man has a fatal heart attack while swimming but survives just long enough to drown what does the death certificate say, especially since without an autopsy to establish presence or absence of water in the lungs …. See the point?
Differentiating between ‘of’ and ‘with’ is something of a luxury in a pandemic and statistically the numbers who just happened to die of their cancer at the very time they were being treated for CV-19 must be infinitesimally small. If CV-19 hastened that death by even a day it must be at least a contributory factor.
Newminster it is important because for the 1st time in my lifetime Govts have ordered people to stay at home and have shut down “non-essential” businesses. If they label all deaths of Covid then it builds their case while diminishing death by other causes.
If this is the way it is always done, then I guess that is the case, but people are scared. So scared they won’t even go to the doctor. Scared that government can’t save them 🙁
Dear Newminster:
If a plaintiff (his or her estate would file the case) with a eggshell skull dies from his head injury proximately caused by you negligently bumping into him with your shopping cart, thereby pushing him into a display of Lucky Charms breakfast cereal, a box of which landed on his head,
you will be liable for his death.
That COVID19 “contributed” does not make COVID 19 the medically accurate cause. That is, for most victims, but for the co-morbidity, they would not have died.
Further, the MAIN point is that MOST people who get COVID19 do not die of it.
Respectfully yours, 🙂
Janice
The childish Leftist fetish for “experts” is obnoxious. The primary qualification for any Leftist “expert” is they be a card carrying member of the tribe. Paperwork showing where one was indoctrinated is also of great interest, they are snobs, after all. But that’s about it. All other qualifications are of secondary importance, and can either be overlooked or manufactured.
It isn’t experts I distrust. It is poorly substantiated opinions. I have great respect for many experts and substantial trust in many that I have found truthful, knowledgeable, and willing to admit errors.
I distrust journalists more than experts and require even more evidence of truthfulness from them. Two that come to mind as trustworthy are Donna Laframboise and John Robson.
Indeed, DMA. The basic premise of the Banerjee – Hasemyer paper is merely an unproven, unsupported by ANY evidence, assumption. In other words, their entire paper is JUNK.
They assert that science realists do not “trust” (a better term would be “give serious regard to,” but I will stick with their inaccurate language here) experts in climate science.
A list of names proves them wrong and sends their paper to the garbage can where it belongs:
Dr. Richard Lindzen
Dr. Peter Ridd
Dr. Robert Carter
Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr.
Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr.
Dr. Judith Curry
Dr. Roy Spencer
Dr. John Christy
Dr. William Gray
Dr. Fred Singer
Dr. Patrick Frank
Professor Jim Steele
Dr. Freeman Dyson
Dr. Murry Salby
Dr. Hal Lewis
Dr. Christopher Essex
Dr. Susan Crockford
Dr. Ivar Giaever
Dr. Demetris Koutsoyiannis
Dr. Willie Soon
Dr. Nicholas Drapela
(many more could be easily added to this list — even ONE name would suffice to refute the discussed articles’ authors’ empty claim)
but, but..
…. they have Greta and Big Al !!
Hey Janice, Dyson (RIP) was no doctor. He never did a PhD!😀
Thank you for the correction, Joe 🙂
Make that:
“Mr. Freeman Dyson.”
No one on that list questions whether “human CO2 emissions have caused an increase in global temperature”. If you think that is incorrect then I would be impressed if you provided an exact quote to demonstrate it.
A very, very small increase. Barely measurable and equal to the warming caused by CFC release.
No, large, obvious and accelerating.
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2020/04/twas-best-of-times-for-proxy.html
Loydo when are you going to embrace CO2?
This “quote” would be as long as an complete long article here at WUWT.
If you follow WUWT for a longer time, reading articles and comments, yuo will find much more quotes as you may expect.
Start here
No, large, obvious and accelerating.
In your belief, Little Iceage” is a never ending story ?
Be happy not to be obliged to live in.
Quote:
Singer: ‘I accept the theoretical existence of a greenhouse effect. In other words, I recognize carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gases in the atmosphere can absorb infrared radiation and have a potential effect on climate. On the other hand, I am not convinced these effects really exist to any appreciable extent, so I am definitely not a lukewarmer.’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/07/ip-award-winning-atmospheric-scientist-dr-fred-singer-dies-pioneering-scientist-the-dean-of-climate-skeptical-scientists/#comment-2958203
@Loydo
Best 2k Temp construction, you refer to:
https://climateaudit.org/?s=best+2k
Trust “experts” like Tedros? George Webb has been going into detail about Tedros in some of his videos. He is a war criminal and is a “field” expert to be sure in the use of biological weapons in his home country.
Webb thinks Tedros is a front for “The Secratariat” that really runs it (yes they call it that). Say what you want about George he is thorough and goes deep into the details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOsgzfyYp-k
I don’t know if he is correct or not but interesting to hear.
Yes. The WHO experts were telling us not to close the borders with China back when Trump ignored them and did so. Now Democrats are shrieking that Trump should have closed the borders earlier.
Lions are roaring.
Cats are purring.
Dogs are barking.
Democrats are shrieking
(and in November, 2020, Republicans are going to be cheering, “HOORAY! TRUMP WON!”)
And, still, it will be Democrats are shrieking
#(:))
You wax poetical nicely there Janice.
Well, TRM, thank you for your kind words. I didn’t mean for that to be poetic, but, well, ….. thank you.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed is China paying reparations for all this – quite easily accomplished by forgiveness of debt, whether they agree or not. Is this a taboo subject?
….. and why are there black helicopters over my house ??
All climate ‘experts’ who follow a non climate expert, Fourier, are no experts. Duh!
False axioms + Logic = Wrong Conclusions
http://phzoe.com/2020/04/08/do-blankets-warm-you/
Zoe, Fourier never claimed to be an expert on “climate”. He was an expert on certain aspects of mathematics that made NMR spectroscopy the powerful tool that it is today. You’re vilifying (unsuccessfully) the wrong guy. Why don’t you hit a real target like Svante “I got a Nobel Prize because I gave out Nobel Prizes” Arrhenius, whose “conjecture” was decimated by Einstein sixty years before the climate clowns even started their kleptocracy.
OK, but …
Fourier didn’t claim to be an expert on anything, but that is irrelevant because most scientists are too humble to explictly admit expertise.
Fourier explictly denied geothermal.
Climate ‘experts’ follow Fourier. He is their expert. Arrhenius considered him an expert.
There are no AGW climate”experts”… So, it’s an invalid analogy.
I don’t distrust Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, etc. I have tremendous respect for their expertise. It’s just that they’ve been wrong a lot and they don’t know Jack Schist about the real world, real economy and real jobs… Oh wait… That is the analogy.
You are wise to not trust Fauci.
This argument is false in its premise. The models predicted 100s of thousands of deaths if social distancing policies were in place. The models have been revised downward by at least 50% based on real world data. Even farther down if considering the healthcare system usage. The models were wildly inaccurate for a much more well posed problem after only a few weeks. It should increase distrust in expert predictions.
I model complex physical system behavior for a living. The future state of any significantly complex system cannot be predicted beyond a very short time. Models are best used to develop a high confidence inequality.
Draconian measures that have little ultimate effect. A dramatic response is considered necessary even when the data is of poor quality or insufficient. Waste and ineffectiveness are the problem. Models that aren’t validated and understatement of uncertainty are the reason for the waste and ineffectiveness. Public policy experts talk about data-driven decision making, but the output of models is not data. If anything, the problems with modeling and uncertainty have been validated with this crisis. There is a renewed skepticism of models that aren’t validated and a renewed observation that uncertainties are vastly understated. Public policy is implemented arbitrarily.
Criticism of draconian measures of immense cost does not imply denial of a pandemic. Criticism of draconian measures of immense cost should imply that other, less expensive but equally effective, public policy options should be considered or developed. Furthermore, the pandemic does not exist in a vacuum. The Han pandemic is but one of many causes of morbidity and death. The others don’t go away. Dedicating excess resources to the Han pandemic increases the cost to mankind in both resources and lives. It is poor public policy.
No. The pandemic’s significant factors are correlated with globalism, immigration reform, sanitation, personal hygiene, social contagion, and viral sanctuaries. As observed from the pathogen’s progress, a [political] climate change would not alter the outcome.
Trust the experts, believe the scientists, no way.
The UN 5th Assessment Report told us that there was twice the energy per square metre radiating down from the sky above, the Greenhouse Effect, than coming in from the Sun. Why did anyone ever believe that? It is nothing but a huge lie.
Walk out into the open on a sunny day. Stand in the shade with an open sky above and you will feel the local ambient temperature. Feel the objects in the shade, they will all have the ambient temperature. You will not feel any heat radiating down from the sky.
Walk out into the sunshine. You will immediately feel the radiant heat coming directly from the Sun, warming that side of you facing the Sun. Feel the objects outside exposed to the direct sunlight. They will be warmer than the ambient temperature, especially on the side facing the Sun.
There is no such thing as a Greenhouse Effect warming the Earth’s surface. We have always known that the Sun is the source of the heat that we feel when we venture outside. Yet for some inexplicable reason we have denied our true senses and accepted the word of the authorities. Never again I hope.
The biggest problem here has been that democrat crackpot nasty poopsi distracted the whole of america with her impeachment game at the very time that america was being infected with the virus.
The next biggest problem was democrat New York mayor Bill de Blasio saying on March 13 “go about your ordinary business”. We all know how that turned out for New York.
As for climate gate, no one was exonerated. You can’t forget or exonerate “hide the decline”.
Will Covid-19 lead reality denies (global warming clowns) to admit their dishonesty over the last 30 years ?
Will Covid-19 get reality deniers to abandon Goose Green Greta, the demented teenage school dropout who says she can see carbon at 400 parts per million ?
Will Covid-19 finally get the whole population of the world to realize that money spent on global warming clowns actually detracts from the amount of money spent on real science, including medical science. There is only so much money available for scientific research, spend it clowning around on global warming, then there is no scientific progress for humanity.
Ultimately, the people have to trump the experts. Otherwise, why not just cancel democracy and institute rule by experts. That worked so well for the Soviets. The trouble is that the word ‘expert’ has too many meanings.
I trust my life to a surgeon, or an airline pilot, or an engineer. That kind of expert has demonstrated performance.
As far as possible I avoid relying on economists and climate scientists. Their claim to expertise is their academic qualifications. They have no demonstrated performance.
If you disagreed with Stalin’s agriculture expert Lysenko you got taken out and shot.
Loydo would approve.
Think of the interesting compound word, indeed. It can be synonymous with “To be sure”, as in, “I was hoping the trip would be fun and indeed it was!” It can also by synonymous with “extremely”, as in, “It was a wonderful meal indeed!”
Still it is the compound of two words, in and deed. I say if an expert isn’t an expert indeed, then he’s no expert at all.
“Expert” is a compound of two Greek words: “ex” meaning “former” and “spurt” meaning “one time shot”.
x = unknown quantity
spurt = drip under pressure
x-spurt = unknown drip under pressure
Also, an incompetent pilot ends up risking his own life.
An incompetent surgeon might end up paying too much insurance to be able to make money, so his incompetence potentially endangers his income.
An incompetent civil servant’s life is not threatened by his incompetence; not even his income.
The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Deaths from it will make Climate Skeptics continue to closely scrutinise all the experts, especially after they have seen the massive failure of the expert predictions of the Covid=19 effects and the alarmist attempts to turn a severe flu season into a global financial depression. The alarmist efforts mimic the effects that would come from an implementation of the ‘Green New Deal’. Together with the complete absence of any evidence of catastrophic climate change, the failure of the experts reinforces Climate Skeptics mistrust.
Spot on, Nicholas. As we learnt at school all those years ago that fire is a good servant but a bad master, so we see today that computer models might or might not be a good servant but they are certainly a bad master.
Coronavirus is not an influenza strain. At which point, I’m afraid, your argument breaks down. I’ll be proved wrong if the current mini-heatwave in the UK and France results in a precipitous drop in new cases in the next three or four days.
Newminster;
You won’t see that drop (if it happens) for another week or two. Anyone on the verge of being symptomatic or testing positive while asymptomatic it going to add their tag to the total regardless. A nice warming spell would only influence cases with a current low viral load at best or reduce transmission to new hosts.
Totally unrelated subjects. The virus kills. Climate change does not. Severe weather kills especially COLD weather. Climate “experts” do not know the difference. I have to find a CAGW “expert” to trust. Lately, medical people have been getting into climate and thinking they are experts, so they are fuelling some mistrust.
A climate crisis freak called skeptics “science deniers” . Please! Go away with your end is nigh BS. Not buying your excuses to dismantle the only economic system that has ever worked. You know the one that makes it possible for all these alarmists to have the time and freedom to dream up this utter crap and try to propagate it on the world.
No the end of CO2 lies is near. We witnessed a possibility of a real crisis- and we lived the no fun life alarmists are demanding ( of everyone else) and we see the naked emperor, the calling the sky falling. The boy who cried wolf. Enough, done full stop on fake crises.
Experts in what exactly please ?
On one side, a virus, something observable down to it’s atoms, reproducible and repeatable. All it’s mechanisms of action are known.
Despite all this knowledge, no one has an idea on how to eliminate it. Right. So many experts and tenured professors and still not even consensus on chloroquine as a possible alleviation, let alone, eradication of that pest.
On the other hand, a very complex and widely distributed physical influenced by an unknown huge set of actions and variables, ranging from the hyper-macroscopic sun, all the way down to elementary cosmic particles interacting with the atmosphere.
And suddenly, despite the total absence of a complete coherent all inclusive mathematical model, an entire crowd of experts seem to know how things would be in the far fetched future while somehow omitting to mention that reality proved wrong all their previous predictions.
Is blatant incompetence the new highly sought after professional asset for a successful expert career?
Right on Flight L. Skeptics love science and technology. They particularly don’t like seeing it badly done and worse, corrupted and used as a launch pad for global governance, by elite ‘experts’ and the phalanx of supportive media pro…gandists.
I never used to question the First Amendment, but with modern ‘woke’ media I think we have to ask ..Freedom to do what exactly? To propogate fake news, lies, out of control spin, sedition, joining with deep state to oust a duly elected president?
Thank God for courageous sceptics or these forces would have a free hand. Even the Soviet Union had sceptics that started the cracks that widened until it fell apart.
I don’t see science at work among the climate scam artists.
Science is data driven, objective, open to being wrong.
The errors in the virus models remind me of Pat Frank’s work on error propagation. We have this huge unknown in the actual number of people infected. It is a measurement error. That ignorance propagates forward creating huge uncertainty, making the models essentially useless.
I could be wrong but it reminded me of that.
Wow! Good observation. Models with even a small unknown interval at the start wind up with a large unknown interval after several iterations. That goes for both climate models and for corona virus models.
Virus models having errors causing error propagation reminds me of the situation in western medicine that is only more recently coming to grips with the human microbiome and the enormous role it has to play in modulating the immune system of mammals in general in this instance, and amongst other things.
If the microbiome and the virome is not taken into account, it creates uncertainty when modeling the growth of single viruses, for example. I guess i am trying to say that it takes more than a fistful of experts to make a good model, with minimal error propagation.
From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6K6ssEziwM
Title: “The human virome: what is it and why should we care?”
•Oct 10, 2018
“Amy Proal
“Here I talk about the human virome – recently discovered ecosystems of viruses that persist in all human tissue and blood. The virome is much more expansive then first believed: an estimated 380 trillion viruses inhabit the human body at any given time! Most of these viruses are bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria. By infecting bacteria, these phages are able to modify their behavior. It follows that studying the human virome can give us much more context on bacterial microbiome activity in the human body…leading to a better understanding of chronic disease processes tied to microbiome dysbiosis/imbalance.”
“Why is clean air important? Is it simply the viral percentage in the air? Is CV-19 stuck to water or hydrocarbons in the air? The fact that it infects lung tissues suggests that anyone with hydrocarbon lined lungs is susceptible. This will apply to healthy young people. Diesel vehicles and ships will be deadly in a new way.”
I really don’t mean to pick on you but you don’t seem to understand how corona cold viruses spread. I suggest rereading Rud Istvan’s recent articles here. Nor do you seem to know that modern internal combustion engines do not fill the air with hydrocarbons.
This was in reply to comment farther up. I must have mistakenly posted this as a comment on its own rather than as a reply to that comment.
Interesting study that suggests people who have Epstein Barr virus are at much greater risk for covid19 complications
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-21580/v1
Does that include latent virus?
I think includes latent virus cases as well. But seems strange that this would cause worse outcomes, study may just be an anomaly and too small sample size.
“After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science,”
And I begged for them to send me just a little bit of that money. I
Yep, still waiting for my dark money cheque…
The only dark money “cheque” I get is the dividends that any oil company stocks I own distribute, and as that’s a very small part of my diverse portfolio, it’s not really all that much.
“After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science,”
As the authors of that statement ought to know, that figure was the amount donated to pro-business organizations, only 10% of whose efforts were devoted to the climate change issue. Greenpeace called the recipients “climate change denial organizations, falsely insinuating (as they knew) that the all the donations were to to climate change “denial.” They have misled their readers as they intended.
Rethink THIS:
From about the start of the COVID-19 crisis in December 2019 until now, April 12, 2020, a total of 120 days have gone by. On each and every one of those days, here are how many people died, in the United States alone, of the following:
442 deaths per day from preventable cardiovascular disease
1,315 deaths per day from smoking
88 deaths per day from motor-vehicle crashes
241 deaths per day from alcohol-related causes
120 days x 442 cardio deaths/day = 53,040 cardio deaths
120 days x 1,315 smoking deaths/day = 157,800 smoking deaths
120 days x 88 motor-vehicle deaths/day = 10,560 motor-vehicle deaths
120 days x 241 alcohol-related deaths/day = 28,920 alcohol-related deaths
So, during the 120 days, when 22,071 people in the United States died from COVID-19, … 53,040 people died from preventable heart disease, 157,800 people died from smoking, 10,560 people died from motor-vehicles, and 28,920 people died from alcohol.
53,040 + 157,800 + 10,560 + 28,920 = 250,320 people in the United States — people who made individual choices to accept the risks of their behavior that could kill them and DID kill them — received no news coverage, while 22,071 people caused the entire country to shut down normal operations.
250,320 divided by 22,071 = 11 times more people in the United States died of other PREVENTABLE causes than from COVID-19. That’s 11 x 22,071 = 250,320 people died from other largely PREVENTABLE causes than from COVID-19. And the whole country shut down normal operations, because of them alone!
Just a note: there are quite a few more cardio deaths than my number, but I figured the percentage of those that were preventable, and that’s the number I used.
Robert were can I find your numbers?
Thanks
Derg,
For all those numbers, just go to CDC, and other prominent medical organizations’ webpages. You’ll probably find yearly totals, which you can reduce to daily totals. On the heart disease statistic, I used a fairly established yearly total, and then, from another website, I determined the number of those that were preventable.
I did the 120-day totals based on a daily average from the yearly figures, and then I went on from there to clarify what these mean, compared to COVID-19 stats. It’s not an Eschenbach statistical masterwork, but it’s an idea. (^_^)
Now I need a Monckton graphic masterwork to illustrate it. (^_^)
Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Bill Nye, “Pope Francis,” Angela Merkel — which expert would you like me to, uh, skeptic all over first? In fact, Pooh’s WuFlu has given me even more reason to doubt global warming and plenty of examples of why command economies can’t save themselves.
I didn’t know I distrusted scientists! I thought it was just the idiots pretending to use science that I distrusted. That and the people who belittle skeptics for daring to have doubts.
A pandemic is a scary thing. You can actually identify the virus, see it’s structure, watch as it kills people, study the spread, fight the disease.
Climate Change is not a scary thing. You can’t separate it from natural change, it has no shape or structure, it doesn’t kill anyone that you can identify (weather kills people, climate change does not), you can’t study the future (only the past), and you can’t fight what is mixed in with and probably only a small contributor to natural variations.
The only people I know of denying the truth about CovID-19 is the Chinese – a communist government.
What is going to be fun is watching for a pause in the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. Talk about your unplanned experiment. We will get to see if man is contributing at all to the rise of CO2, or if it’s out gassing by the oceans.
Nothing so far.
Not the only people denying the truth. Have you heard of David Icke?
Robert,
+ many pluses, from a man with consistently good replies to a wide range of questions.
You left out the real main difference you can die in a week vs perhaps in 100 years.
“American science denialism, deployed for years against climate change”
I apoligize for my science denial and promise to change my ways once they get their statistics right.
Multiple links below with apologies to the moderators.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/09/climate-statistics/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/11/16/agw-issues/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/28/rcb/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/04/30/illusory-statistical-power-in-time-series-analysis/
If you go back to that January posting and peruse the comments, you’ll find that from the start there was a broad range of opinions. No groupthink by any means.
There is still a broad range of opinion and an admirable amount of changing of opinions as more information comes to light.
This community is to be commended I’d say. I have learned far more about COVID-19 here than from any other source, and generally a few days ahead of the curve. Stuff shows up in the popular media that is old news to me.
Well, I have had a very long career in science and engineering and there are a lot of experts I trust and rely on around the world, and as a senior consulting engineer and geologist I’m relied upon.
When you charge a fee for your research, advice and designs for a company to base investments of 100s of millions of dollars on, you better have done your homework well. Your models better be validated, pilot plants better perform. Forecasts better be close to the mark.
There is no way that consensus climate ‘scientists’ could make a living at what most scientists, mathematicians and engineers do on the sceptical side. Sceptics routinely won all the debates and that is why the consensus hasn’t debated for 15 to twenty years.
Oh no, its not de*Nile of science (what the hell does that mean, anyway). It’s outrage over what passes for science in this field, it’s resistance to the fiddling of data, the cherrypicking and manipulating to end up with the answers you were looking for. We’ve been tough on the same kinds of negligent science and political agendas re Cov-19. China keeping secrets that have cost untold tens of thousands of lives and trillions in economic losses. WUWT has taken a leadership role in putting out top flight information on the virus globally by very talented scientists.
Finally, we are equal opportunity sceptics. We even fight among our selves on many topics. That is supposed to be the norm for a scientific community. ‘Sceptic’, believe it or not, is not a perjoratve term . Its a vital part of real science. Its the engine of advancement. To have spent hundreds of billions and to have not changed the guess by Charney in the 1970s on climate sensitivity of CO2. To be quoting Arhenius and Tyndall from the 19th Century on how climate works….this is not advancement. This is not ‘progressive’.
I really like this comment by Mr Gary Pearce. Real scientists don’t need to scare you into accepting their findings or to whine if you don’t accept their findings on the basis of their scientific authority. In fact, real scientists would consider the the claim to truth by virtue of scientific authority as a logical fallacy.
Thank you Gary, the voice of mature sense and balance.
If only those on the other side of the climate divide, the alarmists, could see their constant over dramatic prose, are less credible than their “adjusted” data. Maybe, post Covid mania, they might reflect on their position. The current lock down, whether valid or overreaction, at least shows what happens when wealth creation is stopped, which is something the climate alarmists are constantly demanding!!
Another three weeks of social distancing and economic destruction should give us all a clear indication of what a post capitalist world would look like.
Anyone who is not troubled by lock downs and what is going on across the developed economies of the world, isn’t seeing the bigger picture.
Protect the vulnerable, yes. Protect the weak, ye. So let us strengthen the economies of the world to do those things, yes!
The engines of wealth creation must be restarted.
Climate Science is like social science … not really a science and never has been. It is mainly a group of left wing hacks from other fields with no formal science degree can feel like they are important and call themselves scientists.
You cannot be an expert in anything unless you can comprehend all the facts. At present we have no really reliable experts in the theories of the world’s changing climates – because it will take perhaps a thousand years to gather enough scientific solar and global data to be able to come up with a reasonably sound theory.
Likewise, it will be at least a year before we have enough data about this particular virus and its progress in the wildly varying demographic and geographic circumstances on this green globe of ours, for any experts to appear.
Therefore, let us sit down, breathe through our noses – and just get stuck in to helping all the victims of this epidemic in the best and most charitable way possible. And let us all get back to work if we are lucky enough to have a job – and let us work particularly diligently and save our money so that we can recover the sooner from the havoc wrought by this nasty, but luckily not very dangerous epidemic. That’s how our ancestors dealt with epidemics. Of course, they never had the hubris to imagine that they could ever contain, even eradicate, the illness – and never in their wildest fantasies would they destroy their hard-won economy for that purpose.
Don’t get spell-bound by large fatality numbers. We only die one death each – which, alas, none of us can avoid some time, sooner or later.
“But not today. Not today.”
-Likable Gladiator, from famous movie.
I’ve yet to see a definitive number virions you have to breathe in to become infected. Is it one or ten or hundreds or a thousand? How many do you have to transfer to your eye, nose or mouth?
If you breathe in a small number does the slow rate of replication in the body give it a chance to power up the immune system and fight it off before it becomes symptomatic? Is this why we have a fairly large number of asymptomatic people?
What are the treatment protocols currently? Why is the CDC trying to maximize the death numbers? Why don’t the “journalists” ask these questions?
Why did the CDC try to make its own tests?
Why is that “Trump’s CDC” when the same “Trump’s CDC” people object to Trump (who has no medical qualification and only his common sense (*)) giving his mere OPINION on a drug?
They can’t have it both ways, not even with Macron’s “en même temps” (= at the same time…).
Either Trump should not touch medical matters, and it isn’t his political responsibility, or he can (**).
(*) which made him question the safety of vaccines, so common sense is quite sharp
(**) and it still isn’t his responsibility any more, as nothing can make President Trump responsible for ANYTHING presidential, as long as the impeachment case is taken seriously; the hypothesis for impeachment was that he was a UK queen style head of state.
Multiplicity of infection (MOI) is a term to google. I believe I’ve read of cell cultures seeded with between 100,000 and 1,000,000 viral particles to achieve at least partial infection.
If the answer to your second pair of questions is ‘yes’ that would make a lot of sense to me. I have wondered about that, also.
Pretty sure the answer to your final question is ‘Kool-Aid’.
“I’ve yet to see a definitive number virions you have to breathe in to become infected. Is it one or ten or hundreds or a thousand? How many do you have to transfer to your eye, nose or mouth?”
No one knows.
How would anyone find out?
Who has had the time to even try?
Who is gonna volunteer to be the test subjects?
It has been extremely difficult to get any sort of definitive answer even for viruses which have existed far a very long time and many studies have been done, and and for which it is possible to recruit volunteers to be inoculated to try to find out.
In fact, virions are far to small to measure out some known number of viral particles, given that many viruses are of visually indistinguishable morphology and/or viability.
The studies that have looked at such questions have generally made use of a unit called a Tissue Culture Infective Dose 50, TCID50, the number of such units which will cause infection in 50 percent of culture inoculated with a virus. There is no way to even compare the absolute relative number of virions between such units from one study or one virus to another, with any sort of useful degree of precision or accuracy.
Since animals, cells in culture, and tissues in culture vary so widely in how they become infected, the only way to definitively answer such a question for people would be to do experiments on people and see who did and did not get sick, IMO.
Impossible and unethical for a deadly virus with no known cure.
We will have to get by with indirect evidence for now, or so it seems to me.
It seems the concept is to some degree a theoretical one based on relative numbers, not precise counts.
Also, it must be a statistical quantity, like (with toxins) the lethal dose for 50% of subjects, LD50, is, since the number is known to vary from one individual host to another.
Here is one review study that has a great deal of info from numerous tests of various disease-causing respiratory and enteric viruses inoculated into human volunteers:
“Doses of <1 TCID50 of influenza virus, rhinovirus, and adenovirus were reported to infect 50% of the tested population. Similarly, low doses of the enteric viruses, norovirus, rotavirus, echovirus, poliovirus, and hepatitis A virus, caused infection in at least some of the volunteers tested. A number of factors may influence viruses’ infectivity in experimentally infected human volunteers. These include host and pathogen factors as well as the experimental methodology. As a result, the reported infective doses of human viruses have to be interpreted with caution."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12560-011-9056-7
Others have looked at questions from a theoretical perspective, such as "Can one virion cause an infection?"
Here:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090313150254.htm
Is WHO investigating the almost magical elimination of the CV19 virus in China?
From 80,000 cases at the start of March, just 82,000 cases by early April, with over 77,000 recovered, and only 1,150 active cases with just 2 deaths per day in April.
Smoke and mirrors and Chinese handshakes…
The climategate suspects (Mann, Jones and Trenberth) were indeed exonerated by people with heavy interests in maintaining the credibility of climate change alarmism. I have read the excerpts in question and there is no way to parse them as anything other than attempts to aggressively defend their theories from examination by anyone who might doubt them. There is no doubt that they were manipulating data to fit the theory. There is no doubt that they were denying access to the raw data to their critics. There is no doubt that they were conspiring to subvert the peer review process to punish anyone who would question their theory. If those lads weren’t guilty of some scientific malfeasance, why were they so devoted to maintaining secrecy among themselves about their adjustments to data? If you have a theory you can prove, you don’t deny anyone else an opportunity to independently see your evidence, surely.
The whole process of extrapolating a temperature record from proxies (the width of tree rings in petrified trees from a single, specific location can tell you the history of the temperature all over the world?) seens pretty hinky from the get-go.
The same way vaccines are exonerated each and every time.
(And I am NOT saying some Africa mass vaccination caused AIDS, I note that the question was open before it was closed, so the case was PLAUSIBLE.)
If as much time and wealth had been devoted to the possibility of virus and bacteria pandemics as has been wasted on the ‘Climate Change’ thingy the world would have been far better prepared for Covid-19, likewise many other real harmful natural factors.
“…I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.”
It’s not about what Climate skeptics did, it’s about what Climate Alsrmists can get people to believe skeptics did.
“…I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.”
Climate change skeptic JoNova was an early and ardent believer in the threat of the coronavirus on her popular blog.
Until the vaccine is created, the lives of everyone infected will be at risk. There is no effective cure for Covid-19.
Herd immunity. Only viable course of action at present.
There is NO effective CURE for any virus, and never will be.
Good gawd, how do you sleep at night?
“Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change. ”
They probably deceive on pretty everything, it’s more obvious to even the people with the lowest information and lowest time to digest it when such deception requires changing models, data sets, and explanations, at high frequency.
Trump first spoke about his friend as he described the “viciousness” of the disease on March 29.
“I had a friend who went to a hospital the other day. He’s a little older, and he’s heavy, but he’s tough person,” Trump said. “And he went to the hospital, and a day later, he’s in a coma … he’s not doing well.”
“The speed and the viciousness, especially if it gets the right person, it’s horrible. It’s really horrible,” he said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3079571/donald-trumps-friend-and-donor-stanley-chera-dies
Hospitals are full of people that were perfectly healthy and well just before they went in. It is one reason why I do not go there!
The virulence of SARS-Cov-2 is due to the fact that T-cells do not recognize the new virus in people over 65 years of age.
Have you heard of phages? Some people think they were “made” by God. Others suggest they are in fact “good” viruses. I err on the latter based on my reading.
It has an age detector, really?
Smart man. Iatrogenesis is the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
He was probably in a coma because he was anesthetized for intubation. It’s such a horrid procedure they have to knock people out.
Type A was also found in Americans who had lived in Wuhan, and in other patients diagnosed in the United States and Australia.
The most common variant found in Wuhan was type B, the study said, though this appeared not to have travelled much beyond East Asia before mutating, which the researchers said was probably due to some form of resistance to it outside that region.
Finally, type C was the variant found most often in Europe based on cases in France, Italy, Sweden and England. It had not been detected in any patients in mainland China, though had been found in samples from Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, the study said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079491/deadly-coronavirus-comes-three-variants-researchers-find
Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists
Researchers in China and the US find that the virus that causes Covid-19 can destroy the T cells that are supposed to protect the body from harmful invaders
One doctor said concern is growing in medical circles that effect could be similar to HIV
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079443/coronavirus-could-target-immune-system-targeting-protective
Puhlease! Comparing COVID19 with HIV/AIDS? Throw me a frikken research grant for the next 20 years!
Acquired immune function shows recognizable changes over time with organismal aging. These changes include T-cell dysfunction, which may underlie diminished resistance to infection and possibly various chronic age-associated diseases in the elderly. T-cell dysfunction may occur at distinct stages, from naive cells to the end stages of differentiation during immune responses. The thymus, which generates naive T cells, shows unusually early involution resulting in progressive reduction of T-cell output after adolescence, but peripheral T-cell numbers are maintained through antigen-independent homeostatic proliferation of naive T cells driven by the major histocompatibility complex associated with self-peptides and homeostatic cytokines, retaining the diverse repertoire. However, extensive homeostatic proliferation may lead to the emergence of dysfunctional CD4+ T cells with features resembling senescent cells, termed senescence-associated T (SA-T) cells, which increase and accumulate with age.
https://academic.oup.com/intimm/article/32/4/223/5713759
In the 1980’s we were supposed to be mostly dead by 2000. We’re not even with 40million+, today, HIV/AIDS positive sufferers.
And we are worrying about 1million, if that, COVID-19 sufferers?
In the thymus gland, undifferentiated T lymphocytes are formed in young people, which can respond quickly to new viruses.
So nothing then?
“We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.”
From here:-https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338957445_Uncanny_similarity_of_unique_inserts_in_the_2019-nCoV_spike_protein_to_HIV-1_gp120_and_Gag
This is by no means the only paper to suggest that this coronavirus is a designer “gain-in-function” virus rather than something attributable to natural evolution.
More virus fear porn.
Why so hostile?
The original paper is here:-
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0424-9
There seems little doubt that SARS-COV-2 can attack T lymphocytes, whereas SARS-COV could not. The authors also demonstrate fairly clearly that this is via S protein mediation. If you want to understand why the S protein (spike glycoprotein) in SARS-COV-2 is different, then you should read the reference I included above:- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338957445_Uncanny_similarity_of_unique_inserts_in_the_2019-nCoV_spike_protein_to_HIV-1_gp120_and_Gag
So yes there is a HIV connection there, but it seems unlikely that the glycoprotein inserts are there by any act of nature. Pornography is too nice a word to describe what this looks like.
Not hostile at all. Just really tired of all the fear porn. That study didn’t really prove any pathogenesis, did it?
In answer to the headline straw man question, when it comes to the fraud known as man made climate change and associated ‘experts’, the answer is still “Nope!”
As a skeptic, I believe that waves of Arctic air in the US are conducive to the spread of the epidemic.
No. Because people will realise that humanity has real and urgent problems to address.
There seem to be experts with differing opinions in the field of epidemiology which makes me think it’s a healthy science.
The totalitarian loathing of experts with differing opinions in the field of ‘climate science’ marks it out as politically motivated pseudoscience….
Sixty years ago CV19 would have been another Flu pandemic. The experts advocating the extreme measures will claim they were right, especially if the death toll is not far off a top end Excess Winter Deaths rate. Apart from wrecking, or setting back most Western economies by 10 years it won’t have achieved that much, in the UK the NHS wasn’t overwhelmed and now has the right number of ventilators for next winter’s Flu, but no herd immunity, when the 2nd wave arrives.
“Will Covid-19 Deaths Make Climate Skeptics Rethink their Distrust of Experts?”
Easiest question with the surest answer I have heard in weeks.
Answer: No.
There are no experts to trust or distrust.
We know who they are referring to when they say “Experts”.
As regards experts in Covid 19, perhaps the problem is that we are listening too much to them. Epidemiologists will of course know how how best to contain the virus – and will advise politicians accordingly. Draconian, economically destructive lock-downs followed. But only Sweden asked the right question, namely “What is the most sensible way to deal with this virus?” Their answer was quite different from lock-downs.
Their approach may cause more deaths – but only deaths that would have happened within a couple of years anyway. In Sweden will we see a spike in normal death statistics this year – followed by a marked drop over the following two years.
And won’t that make more sense??
“Epidemiologists will of course know how how best to contain the virus”
A bizarre assertion. How the hell would they how anything about a virus for which we have no data, and which is in NO WAY a “reboot” of the SARS?
You have to be THINKING before you can REthink.
Distrust of climate experts? It would have helped if a lot of them hadn’t been demonstrable liars.
Shi Zhengli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
“She is a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Shi and her colleague Cui Jie found that the SARS virus originated in bats”
“In 2014, Shi Zhengli was involved in an investigation of bat coronaviruses, specifically gain of function experiments involving both the SARS and bat coronaviruses, a joint research of University of North Carolina and Wuhan Institute of Virology, with Ralph S. Baric as principal investigator.[9] That same year funding for the project in the US had been paused[10] due to the moratorium on risky virology studies with influenza, MERS & SARS viruses, announced by the US government that year”
The documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bXWGxhd7ic
The Epoch Times
ABSTRACT
The beginning of 2020 brought us information about the novel coronavirus emerging in China. Rapid research resulted in the characterization of the pathogen, which appeared to be a member of the SARS-like cluster, commonly seen in bats. Despite the global and local efforts, the virus escaped the healthcare measures and rapidly spread in China and later globally, officially causing a pandemic and global crisis in March 2020. At present, different scenarios are being written to contain the virus, but the development of novel anticoronavirals for all highly pathogenic coronaviruses remains the major challenge. Here, we describe the antiviral activity of previously developed by us HTCC compound (N-(2-hydroxypropyl)-3-trimethylammonium chitosan chloride), which may be used as potential inhibitor of currently circulating highly pathogenic coronaviruses – SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.29.014183v1?fbclid=IwAR12q0EkY2tyBv1WY5TWn5Trh92WJhCEvriR1e3ku1Qn4VeGLN08aXF-6VE
If these are top reporters, the end is nigh indeed.
“…Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change…”
If the Inside Climate News people are naïve and foolish enough to believe that science (and climate science in particular) is forever and always infallible, incorruptible and unquestionable, then (as I always say) I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I will sell them at a good price. The realm of science is just as susceptible to the corruption of activism and the money and politics that go with it as any other realm of human knowledge.
The alarmists don’t just try to sell the climate alarmist narrative itself to us, they also try to sell us the integrity of climate science to make the narrative believable. Climate science right now (IMHO) has nearly the same level of integrity as ENRON did when the latter collapsed. “Experts” are only experts until someone shows us that they are wrong, and science is the belief in the ignorance of them.
If Inside Climate News is ignorant and foolish enough to believe that climate science is not corruptible by money and by political and eco-activism, the influence of them and their ilk at the UN and in govts around the world can only do great harm rather than any good. Their ability in influence and ally themselves with politicians at all levels of govt needs to be fought, and it must be fought with the enlightenment of people to the serious scientific problems with the climate scare narrative and wind and solar energy. Until that is done on a large level, the alarmists and eco-activists will continue to be a serious problem for our attempts to advance and improve the human condition–especially in the Third World.
“The realm of science is just as susceptible to the corruption of activism and the money and politics that go with it as any other realm of human knowledge.”
People who wanted and want “to make a difference” flooded into sociology and psychology and other social sciences once their potential as levers on public opinion and public policy became apparent. This has happened with climate science too. Its recruits have included a disproportionate percentage of would-be world-savers.
Gosh, I misread the title. I thought it was “Will to failure of the Covid-19 models open the eyes of the global warming acolytes?”
Obvious answer is no, facts only change beliefs based upon facts.