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 Good news: it’s quite an extraordinary result — six out of ten Americans are saying in the most blunt possible terms, that the media is not only biased, but actively working against the people and with hostile intent.
From this far down, there is no bounce. Only a full about-face with mea culpa and an Augean cleanout would even start to unwind this toxic position. And the Media puppets are not even close to that razing day.
The propaganda is falling on deaf ears and at this point, the harder they push, the worse it gets.
Trust is a precious and fragile thing
58% Of Voters Agree: Media Are ‘Enemy of the People’
Rassmussen Reports
Voters overwhelmingly believe “fake news” is a problem, and a majority agree with former President Donald Trump that the media have become “the enemy of the people.”
A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” including 34% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t agree, including 23% who Strongly Disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
So most voting adults don’t want to listen to smug intellectual-babies, or toffee fashionistas tell them how unworthy they are. Civilization is straining at the edges, but the pendulum is swinging back. Resistance is building.
Trump called it Fake News in 2016, and the Media lived up to it. Years ago I remember writing about a survey that seemed astonishing at the time where something like 15% of the USA would describe the UN as “the enemy”. By late November 2020, fully 80% of Republicans described the media as “the enemy”, but now after 8 more months of plastic news, things are even worse. The 40% is nearly 60%.
Hope.
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Forty years of global warming have made East Antarctic summers even shorter and more miserably colder than they already were. (Save the wilderness — burn coal now?)
 Surface Air temperature over East Antarctica (presumably in summer) from Hsu et al 2021. East Antarctica is the vast mass of the Antarctic plateau which was, in theory, going to melt. If that three kilometer thick block of ice isn’t going to melt in summer, when exactly will it?
Remember when the poles were meant to amplify man-made global warming?
 Not much of Antarctica is warming in summer. These graphs come from a paper that Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone found. The authors Hsu et al think the cooling trend has a natural explanation (but if it had been warming, of course, no one would have asked that question). Hsu at al estimate that 20-40% of the trend is due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). And maybe it is, but they use climate models we know are broken. Curiously they predict the East Antarctic will keep cooling — which may be a first (for the models).
For what it’s worth the MJO is a massive convective atmospheric blob that rains its way from west to east across the Indian and then into the Pacific travelling east at 20 kilometers per hour or so. Over a couple of months it does a lap of the earth. Apparently it has a profound influence on both sides of the world — driving cold winter spells as far away as Canada and the US, and possibly, who knows, in Antarctica too.
But as it happens, the parts of Antarctica that were warming are mostly in West Antarctica and are sitting on top of a chain of volcanoes. The media never seem to mention that.
 Could it be CO2, or is it volcanoes? REFERENCE
Hsu et al (2021) East Antarctic cooling induced by decadal changes in Madden-Julian oscillation during austral summer, Vol. 7, no. 26, eabf9903
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf9903
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 Sudden tragic release of stored chemical energy in Beirut It turns out storing Megawatts of high density energy in a confined space is “like a bomb”. Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is?
Clean, green, noisy and explosive.
And they are “unregulated” in the UK.
GWPF
Amy Oliver Mail on Sunday
…according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.
With the potential for huge explosions, fires and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.
The batteries, designed as reservoirs of spare electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun fails to shine, are spreading around the British countryside. And this, says Prof Allison and his fellow scientists, could spell catastrophe.
It’s like a potential bomb,’ he says. ‘When batteries catch fire, you can’t just squirt water on them and put out the flames. It’s evident from our research that nothing has been done to tackle this problem.’
Given the size of the proposed plants, Prof Allison says this could, in theory, lead to an explosion several times bigger than the one that destroyed the harbour in Beirut last year.
The threat of fire is not merely theoretical. South Korea saw 23 battery farm fires in just two years. A recent battery fire in Illinois burned for three days and thousands of residents were evacuated.
Such blazes release highly toxic gases. One – hydrogen fluoride – is lethal if inhaled, and causes irreversible health effects after an hour of exposure, according to Public Health England.
Meanwhile 3 – 4,000 people were evacuated in Morris Illinois the week before last, as 100 tons of batteries burned. The fire burned for days. They could not use water or foam, and in the end, the burning batteries were smothered with 28 tons of cement.
These were run of the mill cell-phone and car batteries.
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Is this the start of a cooler shift?
The La Niña climate pattern is forecast to make a return this fall and last through the winter of 2021-22, according to an official “alert” issued Thursday, July 8 by the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), which suggests further global cooling as we enter the new year.
La Niña –-a natural cycle marked by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific Ocean-– is one of the main drivers of global weather — it is usually associated with colder global temperatures, droughts in the southern U.S., and increased precipitation in Australia.
Entering a La Niña event when global temperatures are already around baseline is significant.
If the climate pattern has the expected affect then we should brace for global temps to continue their overall downward trend –which began in 2016 (see link below)– to levels well below the norm.
We could conceivably be looking at UAH readings some 0.4C below the 30-year average by the spring of 2022.
Read it all: https://electroverse.net/noaa-declares-la-nina-watch-for-the-fall-the-global-cooling-accelerator/
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How much does the Medical Swamp hate antivirals?
 The news nobody wanted to hear (except perhaps Pharmaceutical giants): 29 new active cases in the NSW community.
Will NSW get desperate enough to try cheap drugs with low risks, mass production and promising results? It’s winter and the Delta variant is spreading. Contact tracing is rapidly being outpaced. The number of close contacts doubled overnight to 14,000.
What have they got to lose?
The Financial Review
NSW reported 44 new locally acquired COVID-19 cases, 29 of those were in the community while infectious and the number of close contacts has doubled from 7000 to 14,000 in the past 24 hours.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the lockdown was likely to be extended beyond Friday, July 16, unless there was a “dramatic turnaround” in coming days.
Antiviral hesitancy could be costing the state billions. What if an antiviral trial were offered to anyone who tested positive and their contacts, subject to medical advice (approved by their doctor)? It would be a great reason to go get tested. Got symptoms? — We may be able to help you and your family.
Some antivirals and vitamins like D3 appear to prevent the spread if given early enough — even by 80%. Calculate the obscene cost of every days delay.
Australia must have kilotons of some pharmaceutical grade drugs we could test, adapt and move quickly at costs of cents per dose. If it doesn’t work, we’ll know we tried.
The trust factor is going to shot to pieces when people find out.
Essential reading
Perhaps solve the other pandemic: Vitamin D deficiency — to help beat Coronavirus?
The Big Ivermectin Reviewe Ivermectin may prevent 86% of Covid cases
Hydroxychloroquine, a year later, 3 times higher survival rate. Trump was right. (183)
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While ice skating, slender left wrist successfully stopped ice rink from bruising hip. Now temporarily a one handed blogger. But grateful — thinking how different it would be in hunter gatherer days without handy people with xray machine. Wondering how well bones healed while wandering savanna fighting off snakes with sticks. (Yay, civilization).
 Distal radius now has exoskeleton.  Like someone else’s arm As a long time veteran of leg fractures in youth of both skiing and car accident kind, this is not unfamiliar territory.
Blogging will be more concise for a while. A good challenge …
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Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, but having dropped restrictions, they are picking them up again only one month later as the Delta variant spreads.
In Tel Aviv, 75 students got infected at one party from a vaccinated person who had caught the virus from another vaccinated person. And though the UK data is better than the Israeli data, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has had both of her vaccine doses but still has to self isolate for two weeks due to a “near exposure”. How confident are the UK health experts? Not very. With the UK only weeks away from the so-called Freedom day, will double vaxed people have to self isolate for two weeks each time they are exposed?
This belies the key point about “getting vaxed for the nation”. If being vaccinated is about keeping you out of hospital, not so much about infecting your friends, then getting vaxed is more for self protection. The cost-benefit equation might look good for high risk people, but changes dramatically for healthy young people. We need to know how much vaccination slows transmission yet it’s barely a part of the national conversation.
A month is a long time in pandemic world
 Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash In May the Pfizer vaccine was working respectably well against Covid cases in Israel, and the government relaxed the rules. Then the Delta strain arrived with plodding predictability, and suddenly the efficacy against infection fell from 94% to 63%. (Though the numbers are small).
Like every other country it arrived in, the Delta variant (formerly known as the Indian double-mutant) rapidly outpaced the other variants, and is now responsible for 9 out of 10 cases of Covid in Israel.
On the plus side, the Pfizer vaccine was 98% effective against being hospitalized by the UK Alpha strain, and it’s still 93% effective against the Delta strain. On the down side, the next mutants are coming. They might be nicer, but they might not.
The scandalous risks with leaky vaccines
With vaccines that are this leaky, we’re running the risk of creating nastier variants through a process called “immune escape”. That’s the selection path that converted a 1% chicken killer called Marek’s disease into a 100% killer. It took decades to do that, but it’s not a road we want to travel. The post I wrote on the danger of leaky vaccines was one of the most important on this site (in case you missed it). If you know where to look, you’ll find experts often talk in medical code about “immune escape” but rarely spell out how bad this could be.
The solution is so obvious we already did it years ago: use antivirals.
Antivirals are the antibiotics of the viral world. When we couldn’t find a vaccine for AIDS, we used a cocktail of antivirals. We’ve already got a suite of candidates against Covid: like Ivermectin, HCQ, EXO-CD24, Bromhexine (cough syrup), Budesonide (used against asthma). Not to mention all the vitamins and minerals that might give us a boost too like Vitamin D, C, B6, B12, etc, etc.
If we want to stop lockdowns, we need to get antivirals approved and stop the new mutants coming in until we do. Unlike leaky vaccines, antivirals should also prevent the development of nastier mutants.
Do antivirals stop most vaccinees catching and leaking the virus? Why the heck don’t we know that already? Looks like someone is afraid the trials will show the antivirals work so well we don’t need vaccines.
h/t Serp, Raving, Ian. Dave B.
So much for the mass speedy vaccination in Israel
Officials to weigh reimposing some virus restrictions as Delta variant spreads
The Times of Israel, July 3, 2021
75 pupils contract COVID-19 from a vaccinated person at school party in Tel Aviv; former Health Ministry deputy director calls to bring back ‘Green Pass’ system
This week, at least 75 high school pupils were confirmed to have contracted the virus at a Tel Aviv end-of-year party, after a student was infected by a vaccinated relative. That relative contracted the virus from another vaccinated individual who had recently returned from London, according to Channel 13 news.
Unfortunately Times of Israel was slightly ambiguous. Was the superspreader at the party vaccinated, or were they a student who was infected by a vaccinated person a day or two earlier? This matters. Can vaccinated people still be superspreaders? We need to know!
A whole vaccination campaign that bought four weeks of freedom?
The Times of Israel, July 3, 2021
Former Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto said the country should consider returning to the “Green Pass” system that differentiates between vaccinated and non-vaccinated citizens regarding access to certain venues and activities.
The Health Ministry expects daily coronavirus diagnoses to jump to 500-600 next week, according to media reports Wednesday.
According to the ministry, over 5.62 million people — out of Israel’s population of more than 9.3 million — have gotten at least one vaccine shot. Of those, close to 5.2 million received a second dose.
We’re in an arms race with an inanimate chemical code
 Image: Scientific Animations The UK has a lot more data than Israel, and in the UK Pfizer has only fallen from 90 to 80% efficacy at stopping symptomatic infection. The UK data is probably much closer to the truth than Israel’s is, but the point that matters is the trend. With each mutation we can expect the vaccines to get less effective. We’re in an arms race with an inanimate chemical code that is running experiments currently in 11 million bodies (plus cats, ferrets, mink and any other mammal it can infect). Will we ever catch up? Each new vaccine still needs time to be developed and tested. Even in the experimental mRNA vaccines, where substituting snippets of code can be done faster, there is still a need to test to make sure the antibody response does not trigger an autoimmune disease, or accelerate the next infection, or send the body off making less effective antibodies.
How long does vaccine protection last …?
Why is Israel as low as 63%? As usual in biology, there are many possibilities: the people may have different genes, diets, deficiencies, past infections, and it may be a different age group infected. The vaccines were given six months ago to some people in Israel. One expert in Israel wonders if they are already starting to wear off?
Israel was one of the fastest countries to vaccinate, with 60% of the population had already had one dose by the end of March. And 80% of adults having 2 doses now. Note that 80% of adults is not 80% of the population. The OWID data suggests hardly any vaccines have been given in Israel in the last two months. Hmm. That’s another question. Why — we wonder did vaccinations hit “a wall”?
For the record, Israel used the Pfizer vaccine initially, as well as Astra Zenica and Moderna.
If two rounds don’t work, let’s do three?
The former Israeli Prime Minister wants to rush in the third round of booster shots:
Netanyahu said in a video released on his social media channels that “from conversations I’ve had with some of the best experts in the world, I believe the third vaccine [dose] should be given to the over-50 population starting in August, in order to finish the task by the end of September.”
He said that no one currently knows when a drop in immunity will leave the population susceptible to infection once again.
If any lives actually mattered to our health authorities they’d be reassessing the antivirals and giving people and their doctors the choice of medications instead of pushing and pumping only one solution in a non-stop advertising campaign.
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For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.
Ivermectin use at 200 microgram/kg started on December 21 and was gradually rolled out across Mexico. It took months, but finally, for the first time in a year, Mexican deaths are back to normal, and even slightly lower.
Obviously some countries are too rich to use cheap drugs. For them, only patentable ones with big profits attached can “solve” this crisis.
Vaccinations did not start en masse til February 15th, and by the start of June only 17% of the country had even received one dose.
 Ivermectin use began being rolled out on December 21, 2020. @jjchamie How many lives would have been saved and how many lockdowns could have been prevented?
Obviously excess deaths in a pandemic are also due to hospitals being overwhelmed, and shortages or restrictions and the failure of normal healthcare. It may be years before those factors can be unravelled and a better estimate of Covid deaths can be made.
After Mexico City introduced Ivermectin, COVID hospitalizations and deaths were reduced
Concerned about hospital capacity in the summer of 2020, the Mexican government devised an aggressive testing regime, ramping up from 3,000 tests per day in June to around 24,000 antigen tests every day by that November, according to TrialSiteNews. Mexico City Ministry of Health head Oliva López later announced that doctors will give ivermectin and azithromycin to treat COVID-19.
“The Ministry of Health has identified that there is enough evidence to use in people positive for SARS-CoV-2, even without symptoms, some drugs such as ivermectin and azithromycin,” López confirmed in a press conference.
Local authorities created a home-treatment-kit, including ivermectin, for its 22 million-strong population on December 28, 2020, following a spike in cases of COVID-19.
Dr. Juan J. Chamie-Quintero, a senior data analyst at private Colombian university EAFIT, followed the trends in hospitalizations and deaths in Mexico City before and after the government implemented its ivermectin treatment program.
UPDATE: Cases and deaths are on the rise again in Mexico this week. J Chamie says ‘…the war isn’t over in Mexico Not a surprise that a new surge is growing from Quintana Roo (bottom right in the map)) where a group of MDs are actively blocking IVM treatments. https://facebook.com/COVIDQRoo/posts/no-a-la-ivermectina/283548253281495/ h/t TIP
The wonder drug that disappeared
If you only email friends one link — make it this story. It’s the biggest medical scandal since 1850— Why is a cheap safe drug being ignored? Could it be that there would be no medical emergency and no need to rush out other riskier new treatments which are still classed as “experimental” if there was a safe alternative? There are billions of reasons to ask this question but newspapers wouldn’t publish the story. In desperation, some Americans are going to court to get rulings to order doctors to use Ivermectin on their loved ones. Even if they win, sometimes hospitals still refuse to use it on patients with few options left. One family hired a helicopter to take their mother away from intensive care in a hospital that refused to give Ivermectin (and had a happy ending). The debate is so suppressed, there are rumours the US President was treated with it in secret last year.
For peer reviewed studies read: The BIG Ivermectin Review: It may prevent 86% of Covid cases.
Ivermectin has also been used, with apparent success in India, Peru and Mexico (and so many other places). Covid cases fell in the states of India that approved Ivermectin use but rose in Tamil Nadu where it wasn’t permitted. Despite the success, India’s Health dept suddenly stopped Ivermectin use again and people in India are suing the WHO in disgust. In Peru, Ivermectin cut covid deaths by 75% in 6 weeks.
The FDA and others will say there is little evidence of success so far, but that’s a scandal in itself. Why are there no large trials? And why are other drugs like Remdesivir approved with only one trial? Ivermectin is so safe some 3.7 billion doses have already been used around the world. The inventors won a Nobel Prize for its discovery in 2015. We’ve known it might be useful since April last year, when an Australian group searched through many cheap safe drugs looking for any that might help against Covid. The news then was “Another possible cure for coronavirus, found in sheep dip: Ivermectin”. This was just a lab study, and it suggested doses would need to be too high. Even so, successes keep turning up in the real world? By July last year there were already signs Ivermectin could save as many as 50%. Why were large trials not started then? The UK trial is hobbled from the start.
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 …. Australia and the UK can close one coal plant each, but Asia will build 600.
There’s a socially awkward moment coming at the G20’s next dinner, but despite the combined selfish evil of the theoretical Asian Planet Wreckers, no one will really say much, put trade embargoes on, or boycott the Olympics.
Ultimately, everyone at the table knows that Carbon Voodoo is a Western dinner party game, not a serious pollutant.
Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian
Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
They are all developing nations, apparently, so they can be forgiven, even though the list includes number 2 and 3 on the Worlds Biggest Economies list, and one of these fledglings just left the nest and landed on Mars.
Spot the craziness:
Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.
Why are they knocking back all the cheap solar and wind power? Could it be that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are filled with stupid people who can’t add up. Or is it that they can do the sums and they noticed that every nation with renewables also has expensive electricity?
10 out of 10 based on 123 ratings
The Heat Dome was a freak local event
Once upon a time, scientists would say only 30 year trends counted. Now, all weather is climate except when it isn’t. Climate modelers know the heat over North East America was caused by your beef steak, but the cold over New Mexico was not even worth mentioning. (Nor apparently was the minus 81 in Antarctica a couple of weeks ago).
As Ryan Maue says: Overall the contiguous US is 1.4F below average.
 …h/t Clarence.t WUWT
The Sun is already saying the Heat Dome “killed at least 500 people”. Strangely the February Texas freeze and blackouts may have killed 700 people, but five months later the media is still carefully waiting for confirmation before it puts that in a headline.
Blame the Pacific Ocean
Even NOAA says a Heat Dome is caused by La Nina and a local weather phenomenon:
This [heat dome] happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”
A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the main cause was a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.
Given that climate modelers can’t predict a La Nina more than six months in advance, they also can’t predict the likelihood of Heat Domes in any given year.
Anthony Watts explains that the heat was a weather phenomenon created by air being compressed as it flowed downhill.
High pressure rotates clockwise, causes sinking air, and creates downslope winds (Foehn winds), which heat up because the air compresses as it flowed down the slope of the Cascade Mountains from east to west towards Portland and Seattle. It’s like the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. It’s the same effect as using a bicycle pump to fill a tire. The pump gets warm, not from friction, but because of the gas (air) is being compressed. Conversely, aerosol cans get colder, because gas under pressure is escaping and decompression occurs inside the can. This is described by science, known as the Adiabatic process.
Anthony also points out that as the heat dome moved past the temperatures fell in hours by an astonishing 52F (29C). That was another record drop in temperatures, and all on the same day, but who’s counting?
Blame the jet streams
The simultaneous extreme heat and cold may be created by wavy jet streams. But climate modelers could never figure out what the jetstreams were going to do. They flipped and flopped post hoc as the data changed. The models predicted waviness would go down, but it went up. Then someone came up with a way to explain that, but then the waviness stopped going up.
Meanwhile other researchers without climate models found that jet streams correlate with solar output “over a millennium”. And other researchers found that the interplanetary magnetic field can affect the polar regions on Earth, and also the mid latitude air pressure.
 Wandering Jetstreams help create the heat dome. More than one skeptic predicted the jet streams would get wavier as solar activity weakened. Read Stephen Wildes theory here. And Cap Allon here.
If a weak sun causes wavier jet streams we may well get lots more “extreme” weather phenomenon which will have nothing to do with CO2.
But whatever happens the Climate Experts will be right.
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Is this the future of wind all over the world?
The salad days of wind power in Germany are over. Bad news is rolling in from several directions. Twenty years of hope-n-subsidies has run aground. Profits are grinding down, and hardly any new towers are being erected. People are fighting back against the noise, the views, and the bird chopping. Conservationists might like the idea of wind, as long as it’s in someone else’s forest. Suddenly groups that oppose wind towers are gaining traction, and the red tape and legal battles have grown wings and settled on new developments like a bat plague.
New turbines are now supposed to be two kilometers from any home, and there just isn’t enough spare land to build them on. German wind farms are running out of Germany.
If only they were profitable and provided an essential service, they might still have friends.
Alex Reichmuth; Nebelspalter, via GWPF
Lengthy planning and approval procedures stand in the way of the expansion of wind energy. There is too little designated space for possible locations and too many lawsuits against projects. The resistance to the construction of wind turbines is enormous in many places. Countless nature conservationist groups and citizens’ groups see the landscape impaired, health threatened or rare birds in danger and are fighting with all possible means against new wind turbines. Frequently, political leaders of municipalities and states are against easing the elimination of wind power locations.
To make matters worse for the future of wind energy is the fact that many wind farms are threatened by shutdown. The German Renewable Energy Act which has been in force since 2000 guarantees wind turbine operators secure subsidies for twenty years. For thousands of wind projects this deadline will expire in the next few years. Without subsidies they are no longer profitable. By 2025, there is a risk of 15,000 MW of wind projects being lost which corresponds to over a quarter of Germany’s onshore wind power.
One Minister of Energy and Environment is talking of an industry in freefall:
“We are heading for a disaster,” said Lies to the “Handelsblatt”…
“If the federal government does not pull the rip cord, Germany faces a gigantic dismantling of wind energy with all the consequences for eliminating it.
The wind lobby want to build in forests. Apparently in order to save the wilderness from climate change we have to accost it acoustically. We know infrasound can cause humans to get nosebleeds, dizziness, rashes and headaches — what does it do to badgers and wildcats?
After we finish the human experiments perhaps we’ll start the animal ones?
Keep reading →
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Peter Ridd writes that a new paper uncovers rare lithographs of corals underwater in 1862.
One hundred and fifty year old pictures of corals are rare enough, but these ones had the unmistakable pure white cauliflower look that marks them as totally bleached. But in 1862 the first coal fired power plant was still twenty years away from starting work as a coral destroyer, and carbon dioxide levels were a perfect 286ppm.
This is the spot (below) in the Northern Red Sea just at the end of “The Little Ice Age”. Perhaps the seas were too alkaline then, and were yet to reach the perfect pH nirvana they must have struck the year before humans started scuba diving en masse.
 Bleaching in 1862, twenty years before the worlds first coal fired power plant was built. Ransonnet 1862 | Tomas Cedhagen 2021 We can see why scuba diving was not popular in 1862.
 The first underwater camera had a little man inside?
Somehow the great marine-psychics of the world know that corals didn’t bleach in the early 1960’s even though, or perhaps “because”, there was almost no one down there to see it.
From Peter Ridd:
Reef-scientists often claim that coral bleaching is a new phenomenon that only started in the 1970’s due to climate change. But a remarkable new paper published by Tomas Cedhagen, of Aarhus University in Denmark has uncovered a very early lithograph showing bleaching in 1862.
There are actually many other early observations of bleaching, including by Sir Maurice Yonge in the first major science expedition to the Great Barrier Reef in 1929 (if you don’t count Captain James Cook’s scientific exploration of the reef in 1770). But Eugen von Ransonnet’s remarkable lithograph, taken from an incredibly crude diving bell, seems to be the earliest picture.
Keep reading →
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 Image by AngMoKio For anyone trained in genetics the news that China warned of the potential for race based genetic bioweapons in 2011 is just stating what any good SciFi writer has known for years. But the macabre detail may help wake up the rest of the world to the idea “What if”. What would a New Biotech Cold War look like, and does it look like this?
China was spelling out some toe-curling recipes: warning that new biotech could pump up the virulence of infectious agents; it could neutralize antibiotics and vaccines, or potentially make the “target” population more vulnerable by disabling specific genes. Theoretically, adversaries could add genetic material covertly. How about some involuntary “Gene Therapy”coming to an airconditioning system near you?
But hey, they were just speculating right?
Funnily enough, a guy called Miles Yu was working for Mike Pompeo, advising him on China, and he raised the existence of the Chinese submission with the US State Department last December. Pompeo ordered an investigation, but they couldn’t find a copy of China’s original submission at the time (it’s only a global UN convention, yeah?). But when Joe Biden was sworn in, the investigation was shut down. (They don’t call him Xiden for nothing. ) But Sharri Markson, or someone at The Australian, found it.
And Mr Yu said: “it send chills up my spine”.
How’s that UN Treaty against Biological Weapons going?
 Beijing’s own 2011 declaration to the UN, Biological Weapons Convention reads rather chillingly in hindsight. Though The Australian is not suggesting Covid-19 was a biological weapon or that China has carried out an attack.
China’s warning on man-made viruses
by Sharri Markson and Jack Hazelwood, The Australian
The Chinese government admitted research to create man-made viruses posed “a huge latent threat to mankind” – and said “accidental mistakes in biotech laboratories can place mankind in great danger”…
Chinese authorities also spoke of the “increased threat of biological weapons” and discussed using viruses as “genetic weapons” saying systems biology “can also create the potential for biological weapons based on genetic differences between races”…
..research could “significantly increase the destructiveness of biological weapons” by “making biological attacks more stealthy”.
So there was China in 2011 admitting to the Biological Weapons Convention that there might be trouble complying with the rules. So much for UN State Party agreements which grew out of a 1972 declaration, and is now a major treaty that is reviewed every five years.
By 2016, China was talking about a more sophisticated problem:
It says “foreign genes or viruses can be introduced into the target population asymptomatically by means of gene-therapy vectors, enabling a biological weapon attack to be mounted covertly”.
This could mean a two stage event where stage one was silently introducing a section of code to a target population, that could be used later.
And admissions like this in 2016 sit a little awkwardly with 2020 protests that lab leaks don’t need investigation:
“Accidental mistakes in biotech laboratories can place mankind in great danger,” it states.
Righto.
Hands up who thinks UN inspectors would be able to stop clandestine government laboratories from creating Black Death 2.0 even if the UN inspectors wanted to…
Even if they had an implementation body to assess compliance, which they don’t, they would also need an enforcement process.
Time to ditch the UN, and get serious about assessing the threat and how to respond.
Just another cold war
The weapons are different, but the rules stay the same.
 Lassa virus, Photo Credit: C. S. Goldsmith Translate a few tactics from the last cold war:
Firstly, there’s always deterrence — misbehaving nations need to feel some heat.
We don’t need to know if the virus was deliberately released, we already know that China did not play good global citizen in warning the world and stopping the spread in January 2020, when it could have been stopped so easily. Global trade and travel sanctions are a threat to a corrupt leadership. There should be a price when a nation doesn’t report a new contagion with honesty and openness.
Secondly, there’s Part I of the Biotech Arms Race — You have one nasty virus, we have 1,000: The MAD doctrine in the cold war meant both sides had obscenely powerful weapons to unleash. The problem was and is that destructive weapons sometimes destruct. Nuclear accidents happen, and so do laboratory leaks. Not a sweetness-and-light kind of world to live in. But it might slow down a nation tempted to post out a new Pox.
Thirdly, there’s Part II of the Arms Race: Build the “Star Wars” of Biotech: For every nasty virus there will be ways to intercept. While China was dreaming of bioweapons in 2011, I was advising we dump the Clean Green renewables fantasies and get into the real medical revolution instead. All that money on windmills and expensive green electrons could be spent curing diseases.
We need a mastery of medical science. That means finding faster ways to detect new viruses, and building molecular tools that chop up viral sequences. We can already screen antiviral cheap chemicals in a matter of weeks (though we might want to clean up the medical swamp bureaucracy that stops us using them). We could get very good with CRISPR and go right into cells and cut the offending code out, or we might swamp the code with anti-sense RNA that sticks to offending sequences and renders them harmless. Then there are monoclonal antibodies, or nanobodies that do the work our immune system is supposed to do, but in the lab, pre-prepared, rather than waiting to make it happen in a sick body.
We have so many tools, but right now, they are the planes and guns of pre-World War I.
Covid is a baby biotech weapon. The next ones could be so much nastier.
 Ebola Virus budding from a African Green Monkey kidney Cell. Author BernbaumJG REFERENCES
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, UNODA, UN Office for Disarmament Affairs.
https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/un/disarmament/bwc/conf1112.pdf
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