The global economy has been sucker punched by a world wide pandemic, but ABC propaganda writers don’t miss the chance to push their ultimate fantasy, that coal has turned a magical point in a terminal decline. Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for the “First Time On Record”. Hyperbole knows no bounds.
How excited can someone get over a decline of one sixth of one percent? This much:
The world’s combined coal power capacity has fallen for the first time on record as the closure of generators outstripped stations being commissioned. That’s good news for global emissions.
Note the numbers:
Coal power capacity fell by 2.9 gigawatt in the first half of 2020 — a small though significant drop of about 0.14 per cent, according to US research group Global Energy Monitor, which monitors fossil fuel developments.
By comparison, the global coal fleet had grown by an average of 25GW every six months over the previous two decades, from 2000-2019.
In a nutshell, or just a nut, coal power grew by 50GW every year for 20 years, but “coincidentally” fell by 3GW during a pandemic and therefore this is the start of the spiral of doom? Oh Yessity:
The reported drop confirms 2020 will be a “pivot point” for global electricity supply and mark the long-term decline of coal-fired generation, said Tim Buckley, from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. [IEEFA]
“It’s unbelievable watching this space, it’s moving so bloody fast,” he told Hack.
“So bloody fast” sayth Tim from the IEEFA which is an institute whose “mission is to accelerate the transition”. Not that the ABC tells us that he is an industry hack paid to promote unreliable energy.
The ABC advertising copywriter could have interviewed a coal industry analyst but it was against his religion.
The only other person interviewed was Christine Shearer from the group that wrote the report. That’s GEM or the Global Energy Monitor which is an NGO activist group “in support of fossil fuel phase out”. How’s that for balance? Two anti-coal activists get taxpayer funded free adverts, no hard questions asked.
She gushes too:
India has also shrunk its coal-fired capacity in 2020, “an unthinkable prospect just a few years ago,” Ms Shearer said.
They do concede that the pandemic might have something to do with the decline:
“The decline is not entirely to do with the technological obsolescence of coal — the pandemic is definitely a major factor,” Mr Buckley said.
Spot the long term trend in Indian emissions:
Is that red line a meaningless pandemic blip or a real long term trend?
Indian coal use is in sudden decline?
The little detail about global industrial might is quietly buried:
At the same time, China has boosted its coal generating capacity — in the first half of 2020 it built 86 per cent of new coal generation.
“These shifts mean China is for the first time now home to half the world’s operating coal fleet,” Ms Shearer said.
Right. All the rest-of-the-world’s coal fired electricity generation combined is now less than China’s. The CCP controls most of the cheapest source of electricity in the world. Maybe that matters?
Author: China map User:DrRandomFactor and Dragon: Nyo.
A telling incident in Western democracies about borders
The electoral power of strong borders is vastly underestimated.
Western Australia has hard borders at the moment, and no coronavirus — other than a few cases getting caught in the mandatory quarantine. That’s 2.5 million people who are almost living a normal life. This is not to boast (we wish you could be here), but to point out how politically popular closed borders are in the current pandemic. The Premier is wildly popular, polling close to 90%. To all the people who said “states can’t close borders” the message is that it’s bonkers not to close borders. When the Commonwealth government joined the bizarre High Court push to force them open, the pushback was ferocious. A poll today showed that West Australians are fed up. The West Australian collected 245,000 signatories to a petition supporting the border closure.
Not only do 96% say the borders should stay shut, but when asked, a whopping 34% of Western Australians said the state should secede. How fast did it come to that?
Never, have I seen such vitriol towards the Commonwealth from WA. …the Commonwealth’s decision to effectively join hands with Palmer in the Federal and High courts risked making Morrison and the Federal Liberals public enemy No.1 here in WA. It beggars belief that the Morrison Government would ever let it get to this point, that the Federal Government would ever be part of any legal action to force WA to open its borders.
Exclusive polling conducted by The West Australian showed 34 per cent of the 837 people surveyed this week support the move for WA to become a separate nation.
Close to three quarters of West Australians said that since the COVID-19 pandemic the Federal Government has put the needs of the eastern states ahead of West Australians. More than 35 per cent of those canvassed by Painted Dog Research strongly agreed with the statement that Canberra is too focused on the needs of the eastern states which has been to the detriment of WA.
Only last week Scott Morrison was saying he was sure WA would lose in the High Court and he had some mealy mouth words about doing it to protect us. But faced with a Liberal Party wipe out coming in WA elections, and the growing debacle of “open borders” on the East Coast, where infections are spreading, he finally backed down. The question is, what was he thinking in the first place?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Commonwealth will no longer participate in Clive Palmer’s court fight to open WA border
In a stunning development, the Prime Minister informed Premier Mark McGowan by letter that the Commonwealth would not continue to participate in Mr Palmer’s court fight to force WA to open up its interstate border.
“Having taken into account the changed state of the pandemic that has worsened since these matters were first brought to the High Court, the high level of concern regarding public health in the Western Australian community, and our desire to work with you cooperatively on a constitutionally sustainable way forward, I consider, on balance, that we must set aside the normal convention in these circumstances and not continue the Commonwealth’s participation in this case.”
To understand what a huge backdown this was — consider that only a few days ago Morrison was using weasel words, strawmen and intimating he might withhold the Australian defense force:
Scott Morrison has warned the McGowan Government’s stance on WA’s border has opened it up to being put in a “weakened state” against the coronavirus.
He said WA needed to abide by the Constitution if it wanted to make the most of national resources like Australian Defence Force personnel.
“It is the Commonwealth Government, in response to the request from the WA Premier is providing ADF resources to bolster their (WA’s) hotel quarantine,” he said. “The Constitution doesn’t provide for unilateral decisions to close borders, without there being a proper basis of advice. That’s our state of mind.”
Mr Morrison said the WA Government needed to open its border up to States like South Australia where “incidence of cases is lower than it is in Western Australia”.
Every single case in WA is an incoming traveller in hotel Quarantine — doesn’t Scott Morrison know anything?
Let’s hope the debacles in NSW and Victoria haven’t send cases across the borders to spread in all the other states.
WA represents a peak case of border anger. It is more isolated, and has fewer divided families split across state lines. It’s not dependent on tourism dollars the way Queensland or Florida or Spain would be. It’s also easier to block the border when there aren’t twin towns straddling the line as there are on Vic-NSW-Qld borders. To put this is perspective, WA has an 1,874 km state line, but only two sealed roads across it. There are a few dirt tracks, but nothing a spotter plane couldn’t cover.
For baffled foreign baffled readers, Clive Palmer was the theoretical-billionaire-coal-miner and politician who suddenly befriended Al Gore in 2014. He helped create the legal back-door for an Emissions Trading Scheme when Tony Abbott axed the Carbon tax. Supposedly Palmer got knocked back when he asked to cross the border into WA, and enraged, he took his battle to the High Court, saying that closing borders was unconstitutional. But it now turns out Palmer didn’t even put in a serious application to enter WA. The three applications by his pilot were so dodgy, claiming Carlo Fingergi was a female, and with fake entries for his wife, the officials dismissed them as a hoax. McGowan has asked Palmer to listen to the people and dump the case.
“No one had ever spent that much to influence an Australian election but political pundits remain unsure of its real effect.”
“While Palmer’s United Australia Party was singularly unsuccessful at the election, its preferences went 65.14 per cent to the Coalition, in contrast to just 54 per cent as the Palmer United Party in 2013 when he also favoured Coalition candidates in every seat.”
One of the reasons Western Australia isn’t opening borders to SA, the NT, Tas or QLD is only because it can’t be sure the others will maintain their walls. No one wants to outsource border management.
ADDENDUM: As a last sorry note to the saga, McGowan now unnecessarily claims he knocked back Palmer because he was going to come to support hydroxychoroquine “which was dangerous”. If so, McGowan’s kicking an own-goal. Palmer has bought millions of hydroxycholoroquine doses and donated them to a national stockpile. To disallow Palmer for this reason is a free speech failure on a grand scale (what was he thinking?) and also scientifically pathetic, because there are many studies showing HCQ is almost certainly useful, especially if used early and in combination with zinc. There are also thousands of doctors who want to use it and swear by it.
“He’s accepted the Donald Trump view of hydroxychloroquine, which no-one with a medical degree, as far as I’m aware, accepts.”
No wonder the Chinese lockdown a million people with every outbreak. Two thirds of these cases were not hospitalized.
These studies are small and need confirmation, but the medical specialists are asking if it is possible that Covid infections create new cases of heart failure which may trigger problems long after infection?
A study from the University Hospital Frankfurt looked at the cardiovascular MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from the coronavirus and compared them with heart images of people who hadn’t been infected.
Most of the patients hadn’t been hospitalized and recovered at home, with symptoms ranging from none to moderate. Two months after recovering from COVID-19, the patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group. Up to 78% of them had structural changes to the heart, while 76% had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60% had signs of inflammation.
The Puntmann study was based in Germany, and the average age of cases was 49. Troponin is a marker used in standard hospital blood tests to find out if people have had heart attacks.
We don’t know how long it takes this inflammation and damage to return to normal, or if some damage is permanent.
Compared with healthy controls and risk factor–matched controls, patients recently recovered from COVID-19 had lower left ventricular ejection fraction, higher left ventricle volumes, higher left ventricle mass, and raised native T1 and T2. A total of 78 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (78%) had abnormal CMR [Cardiac Magnetic Resonance] findings, including raised myocardial native T1 (n = 73), raised myocardial native T2 (n = 60), myocardial late gadolinium enhancement (n = 32), and pericardial enhancement (n = 22).
These findings don’t tell us what’s happening in the roughly 45% of cases which are asymptomatic. Nor do they apply to severe ICU cases or the under 18s.
Another study by Lindner et al looked at 39 autopsies of Covid cases and found 60% had viral RNA in their heart tissue. Most of these patients, who were older, had died of pulmonary failure. In 40% there was no sign of the virus infiltrating the heart. But the heart inflammation wasn’t associated with the presence of the virus. In cases where there was virus, it wasn’t in the heart muscle cells but in the immune cells of the heart. I think all we can say from Lindner is that we really need to understand this disease better. Is it more an immune system disease than a vascular one?
Our findings from in situ hybridization revealed the most likely localization of SARS-CoV-2 not to be in the cardiomyocytes but in interstitial cells or macrophages invading the myocardial tissue.
Yancy and Fonarow write in JAMA that they hope doctors will check for ongoing heart inflammation, and that these findings need to be confirmed. They ask whether heart failure might be the next chapter in the Covid crisis:
When added to the postmortem pathological findings from Linder et al,4 we see the plot thickening and we are inclined to raise a new and very evident concern that cardiomyopathy and heart failure related to COVID-19 may potentially evolve as the natural history of this infection becomes clearer.
We wish not to generate additional anxiety but rather to incite other investigators to carefully examine existing and prospectively collect new data in other populations to confirm or refute these findings. We hope these findings represent that of a select cohort of patients. Yet, if this high rate of risk is confirmed, the pathologic basis for progressive left ventricular dysfunction is validated, and especially if longitudinal assessment reveals new-onset heart failure in the recovery phase of COVID-19, then the crisis of COVID-19 will not abate but will instead shift to a new de novo incidence of heart failure and other chronic cardiovascular complications.
My simple rule for new likely bioweapon releases is (and always was), just cut it off at the border until we learn how nasty it is. We can always and easily restart the flights, but we can’t undo the damage or rewind the clock if it runs wild. Will Western nations adopt this policy in the long run (like most of China’s neighbouring countries already do)?
Lindner D, Fitzek A, Bräuninger H, et al. (2020) Association of cardiac infection with SARS-CoV-2 in confirmed COVID-19 autopsy cases. JAMA Cardiol. Published online July 27, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3551
Puntmann VO, Carerj ML, Wieters I, et al. (2020) Outcomes of cardiovascular magnetic resonance in patients recently recovered from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol. Published online July 27, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
A guy called Dave does his first interview ever, with another guy called Donald Trump.
Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports achieves something none of the Pullitzer prize winners have.
What are the odds the ABC would play this?
“It’s the retweets that get you in trouble.”
Dave wonders if Trump regrets winning because he was living the dream — he had a great life.
“The best day in my life in terms of business and life and everything was the day before I announced I was running for president,” Trump said. “Everything was good…Now I’m really glad I did but I was treated very unfairly.”
Trump recalled a time soon after announcing his presidential bid when he was publicly booed, saying he had “never been booed before”.
“[Before that] I had a popularity rate … I was close to 100 percent popular.” –– The U.S. Sun
How much does he want to win in 2020? A billionaire could walk away and holiday for the rest of his life.
As for “delaying the election???” — Surely it’s bait. He wants people to talk about mail in voter fraud, or perhaps not talk about other news.
Censorship trumps everything else. Without free speech, there are no free elections, and no progress in politicized science. The base temptations of the human condition thrive in the dark.
Ten years too late, the House Judiciary Hearing on antitrust laws is on:
For more than five hours the world’s richest man, Bezos; fourth-richest, Zuckerberg; CEO of the world’s most valued corporation, Cook; and its key search engine, Pichai; were repeatedly ripped as copycats, liars, bullies, drug dealers and traitors.
…big tech’s out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch. That’s a fact,’ Representative Jim Jordan asserted at the top of his opening remarks.
‘We’re 97 days before an election, and the power – as the previous chairman and ranking member have said – the power these companies have to impact what happens during an election, what American citizens get to see before their voting, is pretty darn important,’ he said.
Trumpissued an Executive Order to prevent social media giants from altering or editorializing free speech. He declared that if Congress won’t act, he will.
Apparently, the internet high speed revolution doesn’t mean more information, it means better, faster filtering and light speed censorship. Yesterday the news was full of doctors being censored in the US (more on that later). Lord help the world if groups of dangerous doctors were seen supporting a position Donald Trump also held? People are dying in a pandemic but the censorship is so extreme it has become the story.
Silencing people is the main weapon of those who want to vote themselves the Treasury, or guard their Golden Monopolies. And it’s running rampant, not just in social media, but in tea rooms around the West the silent majority are scared to say what they think.
When I asked about the election mood in their communities, they reported that political realities are increasingly hidden from view. One said, “Right now journalists seem ignorant of what most people are thinking, perhaps willfully so.” When I pressed him about why that’s the case, he replied, “In all fairness, most people won’t say what they’re thinking. It’s too dangerous.”
This censorship is not just in the searches, and the news, but in workplaces and dinner parties. And it’s moving fast — people are losing jobs for saying inane truths that were fine 12 months ago. “All lives matter” is ending careers, in media and Universities. It’s not enough to say quiet either, only vocal endorsement will do: “Silence is Violence”.
Tucker Carlson interviews Donald J Trump Jnr about his twitter ban
Google Executives told us they would do this. Google is practically a wing of the Democrats. After Trump’s election the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, two Vice Presidents and the two men who founded Google got together for groups hugs and tears, said the election went the wrong way. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was ‘Deeply Offended’ by Trump’s Election and asked what they could do about it.
What they can do is suppress articles criticizing Democrats and crush search results of conservative sites.
‘On April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top ten search positions (i.e., on the first page of Google search results) for 355 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only one search term. And, on April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 100 search positions for 16,820 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top 100 search positions for only 55 search terms.
Google Just Killed All Search Traffic to Breitbart for Joe Biden and Joe Biden-Related Searches
After Google’s May core search update on or about May 5, 2020, Google search impressions and search traffic to Breitbart for “Joe Biden” and other Biden-related search terms has gone to zero. Zero. The following graph clearly illustrates the foregoing.
On May 1, Google searches for “Joe Biden” generated approximately 30,000 impressions (views, used as a metric for advertisers) for Breitbart links. After May 5, both impressions and clicks went to zero.
Breitbart News spoke to an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert, a 25-year industry veteran, whose job consists of analyzing traffic data from Google’s own website performance portal, Google Search Console.
The expert, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had never seen anything like this graph — and that it indicates highly probable manipulation on the part of Google.
Isn’t this exactly what the anti-trust rules are supposed to stop?
In the most damaging moments, lawmakers unveiled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s internal emails boasting about buying competitors, saying Instagram was a threat as he plotted to purchase it, and talking about a ‘land grab’ on other competition.
Democratic Representative Joe Neguse bluntly told Zuckerberg he was running a monopoly in the tech marketplace as he read from the emails.
‘You did tell one of Facebook’s senior engineers in 2012 that you can, quote ‘Likely just buy any competitive start up, but it will be a while until we can buy Google.’ Do you recall writing that?’ Neguse asked of the Facebook co-founder.
Free Speech is the only way to solve disagreements without violence.
For Peter Ridd, it would have been so much easier if he had gone quietly. This battle is not for him, but for our Australian Universities. He shouldn’t need to take this to the High Court, or even the Federal Court. The Scott Morrison government could turn off the tap to every institution which won’t guarantee free speech and enshrine it in their employee contracts. Dan Tehan is reviewing the university model code, but they don’t need a review. They know, we know, everyone knows, without free speech our universities are just Big Government advertising agencies, or victims of the latest FashionThink trend. Those funds could be frozen tonight, and watch how fast the universities can rewrite their contracts. At the speed of light…
Donations are already flowing in for the High Court Battle. Thank you to all who can help his GoFundMe Campaign.
Sacked James Cook University professor Peter Ridd will go to the High Court over his controversial sacking for publicly criticising the institution and his colleagues over their climate change science.
A week after the Federal Circuit Court overturned an earlier court decision awarding him $1.2m, the marine physicist has confirmed the next front in his legal battle that has already cost more than $1m. Professor Ridd, who has personally spent $300,000 in his fight, has rallied his supporters in a fresh fundraising bid aimed at amassing $630,000 to bankroll his appeal to the highest court.
Professor Ridd told The Australian on Tuesday he had already spent $1.15m on his legal campaign, $860,000 of which came from donations.
For the scientist, 59, the fight is about more than the loss of potential earnings from a stalled academic career. “This is about principle,” Professor Ridd told The Australian. “We’ve got to have it that academics can speak.
“The fact is that because it was justified to fire me, any academic who wants to speak out about the Great Barrier Reef or any controversial issue will know it’s not worth the risk.”
Professor Ridd said he was “quite encouraged” by federal Education Minister Dan Tehan’s commitment last week to review the new university model code, developed by former High Court chief justice Robert French, aimed at protecting freedom of speech on university campuses.
“Anything he (Tehan) does has to be put into the (enterprise) agreement,” Professor Ridd said.
“As soon as there is any doubt, the university will win because the academic knows they can’t afford the legal battle.”
Ridd case must go all the way to the High Court
Joe Dowse, Mosman, NSW, Letters, The Australian
The recent Federal Court decision on the sacking of Peter Ridd is a victory for intellectual timidity, collegial double-speak and institutional cowardice by the ironically named James Cook University. Reading the judgment, I was reminded of the way the majority judges in the Pell case came to their conclusion. That miscarriage of justice was fortunately reversed by the High Court.
New research shows that families with teenage children were three times more likely to get Covid (odds of spread , 18%) than families with children under ten (5%). It appears that it’s more dangerous to live with teens than to live with adults (12%). It may be that teens are more likely to be asymptomatic which means people don’t realize they need to isolate from them.
The question of opening primary schools is potentially very different to high schools. Quite possibly puberty affects immune systems in ways that make teens effectively young adults.
The results also showed up something unexpected, however. When index patients were categorised by age (0–9, 10–19, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and >80 years), households with older children (index patients of 10–19 years) had the highest rate of infection spread to household contacts, with 18.6 percent of household contacts later showing the infection.
By contrast, young children (index patients 0–9 years of age) seemed to confer the least amount of spread of the virus, with just 5.3 percent of household contacts contracting the infection, which is less than half of the 11.8 percent average of all age groups (most of whom represent adults).
The study in South Korea involved nearly 60,000 contacts of 5,700 Covid patients. The spread was six times more likely at home than outside home with 12% of household contacts catching the disease at home, but only 2% of contacts outside home catching it. Since this is Korea it’s likely that people wore masks outside the home. The researchers say “the role of masking within the home, especially if any family members are at high risk, needs to be studied.” For the record — schools were largely closed in South Korea during the test period. They remained open for essential workers children and were limited to very small class sizes. So the study doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the spread at school.
Donald Trump has at least conceded that schools in hot spots should delay reopening. The spread of coronavirus hurts his campaign and helps Democrats in so many ways. Getting on top of this spread should surely be a top priority.
UPDATE: Ponder how unusual this epidemiology is:
Traditionally the under fives are the wildly dominant spreaders of any disease. Hands on everything. This is very different from the flu. While the under fives are short, and therefore “breathing lower in altitude” we pick them up and carry them and face to face contact is common. Not so with 12 year olds.
Teenagers (older ones) are out and about and may pick up the disease through careless behaviour. But it may be that teens are larger asymptomatic shedders of virus, and for some reason the youngest children aren’t. Perhaps the youngest wipe this virus out fast with innate immunity and therefore are not big shedders for long. In any case, the implications are that primary schools could be reopened more easily — which will help parents go to work. But teens could learn from home. It might be the lowest impact way to slow the virus with the smallest impact.
There is still no vaccine to typhus, but overcrowded ghettos of partially starving people managed to stop the spread in 1941. The Nazis crammed some 450,000 people into a 3.4km2 area in Warsaw. In the first round, typhus spread rapidly, infecting 120,000 people and killing 30,000. But the Jews got organized and just as everyone was expecting rates to rocket with winter approaching, the exponential curve fell off suddenly “to extinction”. A new paper claims they beat it with social distancing, hygiene, and home quarantine.
Typhus is due by a bacterium transmitted by lice and fleas. It causes a fever, headache and rash. It was such a scourge that in 1759 one estimate suggests as many as a quarter of all prisoners in England died from typhus. Infection rates were so bad in prison that the disease was called ‘gaol fever’ and prisoners on trial would even infect court members from time to time. In the early 1600’s more than 10% of the total German population may have been killed by typhus. Currently it is infrequent except for in a few African and South American nations. There were less than 50 cases in the US during the 35 years up to 2010.
RMIT via MedExpress,
“Fortunately, many of the anti-epidemic activities and interventions are documented, and it turns out that Warsaw Ghetto had many experienced doctors and specialists,” he says.
Stone found evidence of well organized training courses covering public hygiene and infectious diseases, hundreds of public lectures on the fight against typhus and an underground medical university for young students.
General hygiene and apartment cleanliness were encouraged and sometimes enforced. Social distancing was considered basic common sense, and home quarantining was not uncommon. Many volunteer soup kitchens were opened up in the period before the epidemic’s decline.
“In the end, it appears that the prolonged determined efforts of the ghetto doctors and anti-epidemic efforts of community workers paid off,” Stone says.
“As those in the Warsaw Ghetto demonstrated, however,” Artzy-Randrup explains, “the actions of individuals in practicing hygiene, social distancing and self-isolating when sick, can make a huge difference within the community to reduce the spread. It is the cooperation and active recruitment of communities that beat epidemics and pandemics, not government regulations alone.
Typhus was largely controlled around the world in the 20th Century because in 1909 Charles Nicolle realized that lice were the vector. In World War I, delousing stations were set up on the Western Front, though typhus killed thousands on the Eastern Front, and by 1922 it was raging in Russia with some 25 million cases. After World War II major outbreaks were quelled, largely with personal and public hygiene and a lot of DDT.
The Rickettsia bacterium is not the same as coronavirus which can spread through the air, but it’s kind of inspiring that community compliance and public health measures can stop deadly killers even in crowded impoverished ghettos.
We can’t stop coronavirus with the exact same measures, but it’s still possible to extinguish transmission lines with determined dedication. It’s harder to stop an airborne spread but we have so many more tools at our disposal than imprisoned Jews did in 1941. What we seem to lack is the will. Coronavirus is only a fragile string of chemical code that will decay in two weeks if it doesn’t find any new bodies to live in. Thankfully it’s nowhere near as deadly as typhus, but ironically, if it were that deadly, it’d probably kill less people in the West overall. We’d be shutting borders, wearing masks, and we’d be galvanized into action, not squabbling.
How much damage has already been done to our formerly high-trust societies?
When universities like James Cook Uni sack their whistleblowers and turn themselves into Government PR machines, the price is far more than the billions it costs to keep the “safe spaces” working. The real price is that, on the odd occasion, even when academics give good advice, people don’t believe them.
There is remarkable footage coming out of flooding in China #Chinafloods.
I can’t verify the authenticity, or dates, but it seems likely that terrible things are happening in China. There are shots of levees being deliberately broken to allow waters to flood fields to take the pressure off the dams, and some say the flooding is done without warning and even at night. One shot shows a barge with people on board crashing into bridge pillar and breaking apart. Lord help them. There are reports that the grain crops have been hit hard. “Agriculture wiped out”. There are multiple other reports of thousands going without food or water, with no attempts to rescue them. And there are scores of videos of ferocious torrents raging through streets.
Watching the Three Gorges Dam
According to the Taiwan News this video of a simulation of the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam has gone viral in China, as the rain continues and towns are being sacrificially flooded to reduce the risk of the Three Gorges Dam breaking up. The initial flood will supposedly be 100m in height and moving at 100km and hour. Ten hours later, by the time it reaches the hapless Wuhan the water will “only” be 7m deep.
On Tuesday, the Chinese financial news site Caijing Lengyan released a controversial video that simulates the devastating flooding that would occur if the vaunted Three Gorges Dam collapsed.
According to Chinese government statistics, 45.2 million people have been affected by the floods that have ravaged 27 provinces along the Yangtze River, Huai River, and Yellow River, as well as southern China since the start of June. Many have cast doubt on the integrity of the Three Gorges Dam as it faces the greatest test in its history, while others have questioned the structure’s purported purpose of flood control, given the extensive flooding recently seen both above and below the dam.
A new study near Sicily shows the sea surface temperatures were a whole two degrees Celsius warmer then. The worst-case scenario of the Paris Agreement has already happened, and it was nearly 2,000 years ago. And instead of being a baked-earth apocalypse, the Roman empire flourished during the warmth and declined as it cooled.
A formanifera with the awkward name of Globigerinoides ruber apparently likes to live near the sea surface around 10 to 50 m down. Depending on the temperature, it ends up with slightly different ratios of calcium and magnesium. At some point it dies, sinks and sits in a mud layer on the sea floor 475m below. Eventually, for this lucky mud, someone digs it out and analyses it. This new study suggests the Mediteranean warmed up during Roman times from AD 1 to AD 500.
This was the Roman Climatic Optimum — an era we are spending trillions to avoid.
The researchers suggest that cooling and drying conditions helped bring down the Roman Empire. Though, judging by the current state of civilization, it appears vandals can work with any kind of weather.
The media’s take on this is not to take the obvious headlines like, say, Rome was once hotter than now — man-made climate change is irrelevant. OR:
Climate change has happened before. So What?
Instead this new study is a reminder of how climate can alter the course of civilization. That serves two purposes. It bolsters the sense that climate change is all doom and gloom, and Very Important. Secondly, it distracts people from looking at other reasons that Roman civilization collapsed — like corruption, complacency and currency inflation.
The greatest time of the Roman Empire coincided with the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, from the Nature group. The climate conditions derived progressively towards arid conditions and later colder ones coinciding with the historical fall of the empire,
Previous studies had related the fall of the Roman Empire to some natural factors (climate change, volcanic eruptions, etc.). With a large-scale regional view, the study provides high resolution and precision data on how the temperatures evolved over the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean area. “For the first time, we can state the roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years”, notes Isabel Cacho, professor at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics of the UB.
‘For the first time, we can state the Roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years,’ said Professor Isabel Cacho at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, University of Barcelona.
The Mediterranean is a semi-closed sea, meaning it is surrounded by land and almost only connected to oceans by a narrow outlet, and is a climate change ‘hot spot’ according to a previous paper.
Antibody tests versus PCR tests: PCR tests are nose or throat swabs that amplify up short fragments of viral RNA. They only detect infection in the day or two before symptoms show, and for a few days to a few weeks later. The PCR tests cannot show past infections. Antibodies take around a week or two to rise so don’t show active infections, but will show up past ones, though — in the case of Coronavirus, may still produce no result after a few months in some people as antibodies decline.
Test results like these must finally have convinced Donald Trump to change course. It’s long past time the US got serious about this disease, but hopefully rapid action now — masks and distancing and more testing can prevent the trainwreck of rapidly rising infections across the US in two months time as winter and the US election approach.
This study shows that most people in the US have not had this virus, and herd immunity is unattainable without hundreds of thousands more deaths. It also shows how inadequate testing is in the US.
Many antibody studies have tried to estimate the true extent of the Coronavirus infection. Some were ludicrously high (as I said they would be and these new results confirm), but this new study is better. Blood tests (called serology tests) can detect antibodies from past infections but few of the past studies were randomized which means they were doomed to wildly overestimate the rate of infection due to their selection bias. Infected people are much more likely to volunteer to get tested, and uninfected people are much less likely to roam to shopping centres or respond to ads to get tested. This study tested 16,000 people, and used leftovers of blood at large commercial pathology laboratories. In other words, these were people who got blood tests done for some other reason. Not randomized, still biased, but much better than past efforts.
The serum was collected from March 23 through May 12, so biased low in that they don’t contain infections from the latest outbreaks. But it was also biased high because people getting blood tests done are still more likely to be infected people turning up to get blood tests. The peak of NY infections was April 4, so the testing here relates to the week before that NY peak. Thus infections may have been easily twice as high in NY. But — healthy people were also much more likely to be avoiding routine blood tests during the peak week of the pandemic. So double it, halve it, chuck in a guesstimate. All we know for sure is that the 7% result here is not 25% which might have indicated NY was on its way to herd immunity. Cuomo is right to try to close the borders. There are still too many people at risk in NY.
Assuming that the low scorers here (like Florida) may now be up at NY levels, they still need five to ten times the infections to slow the spread. And we are still not sure if people can re-catch Covid a year later.
Ridd loses: Federal Court rules that science is whatever the JCU Vice Chancellor says it is.
JCU wins the appeal on all 17 points that Justice Vasta scathingly awarded to Peter Ridd.
If, hypothetically, fraud was happening at JCU and a staff member reported it, the Australian Federal Court decision has just declared that its fine for JCU to sack that whistleblower for being uncolliegiate.
As I said, this is a case so pointless that even if JCU wins, it loses. And it has spent a fortune to win the legal battle and prove that we cannot trust anything anyone says from JCU.
This win doesn’t just tarnish the VC and admin, it taints everyone who works there. No matter what any good academic says at JCU, the world will wonder what they didn’t say. We can’t know whether they would have preferred to say something else, but couldn’t out of fear that they will be sacked because the VC might not like it.
After this ruling, nothing any academic at JCU says can be trusted. Are they censoring what they really think? Is JCU riddled with incompetence but the staff won’t dare say so because they are frightened to use their emails? Is the evidence fraudulent? Could be. JCU doesn’t care if it is. They only care if they look good. Unfortunately, they look terrible. JCU has spent a fortune defending the indefensible.
It’s time the The Hon Dan Tehan explained why taxpayers should fund research at JCU which has no quality control, wastes money on lawyers, doesn’t investigate fraud, and does not enshrine free speech in employment contracts.
Academic Freedom is “historical” because “the internet”?
The judges reasoning is essentially that academic freedom doesn’t mean freedom in academia because J S Mill, John Locke and Isiah Berlin didn’t have any facebook trolls.
From Gideon Rozner at the IPA:
… this decision has proven how serious the freedom of speech crisis on campus is. You can read the judgment here, but this part in particular – found at paragraph 94 – is absolutely unbelievable:
There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts and definitions of academic freedom. Whatever the concept once meant, it has evolved to take into account contemporary circumstances which present a challenge to it, including the internet, social media and trolling, none of which informed the view of persons such as J S Mill, John Locke, Isaiah Berlin and others who have written on the topic.
The judges argue that academic freedom is indispensable to universities, but is dispensable enough to toss to the wind. The right of Professors to speak is now determined by students who are demanding safe spaces where their favourite delusions can hide. The judges admit they are in uncharted territory.
Australian law is now set by teenage twitter mobs.
The court went on to quote a passage from an academic textbook that endorses the view that intellectual freedom is an outdated concept:
Academic freedom plays an indispensable role in fulfilling the mission of the university… But a host of new challenges have arisen in recent years in response to the changing norms and expectations of the university. With the increasing role of the Internet in research, the rise of social media in both professional and extramural exchanges, and student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces, the parameters of, and challenges to, academic freedom often leave us in unchartered territory.
Today the University won in the Federal Court. In the judgement, Peter Ridd’s academic freedom is portrayed as his ‘personal opinion’.
It is not Peter Ridd’s personal opinion that the corals are alive, and the Great Barrier Reef resilient to climate change. It is fact. I’ve seen the coral reefs whose health is contested with my own eyes: they are very much alive.
What is dead is academic freedom in Australia.
This is not a one off. JCU has a pattern of evicting, blackbanning, and ousting people who disagree with the bureaucrats pet fashions (vale, Bob Carter!). In this culture, more funding means more strangling. So just stop.
Welcome to the Era of the Anti-Virals. They’re everywhere.
A legacy of the coronavirus pandemic is the dawn of new ways to stop viruses. Here’s another new (old) one — it’s only a small trial, but if it can stop 4 out of 5 people developing the severe form of the disease it will be a gamechanger. If this gets similar numbers on larger trials, then we still need mass production. But national policies will swing on a dime if a safe drug with this much potential appears.
After Coronavirus we might not be so content to accept the annual seasonal virus scourge.
Postenote: These are preliminary results, not a large trial, but at least it is placebo controlled and randomized.
In a randomised trial of 100 patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, those who received an inhaled formula of the protein interferon beta were at 79 percent lower risk of developing severe disease compared to those who received a placebo.
They were also more than twice as likely to make a full recovery compared with the control group.
The firm behind the treatment, known as SNG001, said the preliminary results suggested “a major breakthrough” in the pandemic.
Interferon beta is a natural cytokine — our bodies produce it during infections, and some think that older people are just not producing enough of it. We may be just replacing something that was meant to be there, or indeed we might be replacing something that the virus has suppressed.
Interferon beta is a naturally occurring protein, which orchestrates the body’s antiviral responses. There is evidence that deficiency in IFN-beta production by the lung could explain the enhanced susceptibility of these at-risk patient groups to developing severe lower respiratory tract (lung) disease during respiratory viral infections. Furthermore, viruses, including coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV, have evolved mechanisms which suppress endogenous IFN-beta production, thereby helping the virus evade the innate immune system.
The current market for Interferon beta is already $5 billion a year. At the moment the cost is reportedly about $7,000 USD per 30 mcg vial. (Not that I can tell you what size the normal dose is).
AIDS wasn’t solved by a vaccine, but by three anti-virals. Unlike AIDS, coronavirus patients won’t need to take the medicine for years. Thankfully RNA viruses don’t insert themselves into our genes the way retroviruses like AIDS do.
It’s possible viruses may find a way to adapt and grow resistant to individual antivirals which is why AIDS patients take the triple cocktail.
REFERENCES
A Randomised Double-blind Placebo-controlled Trial to Determine the Safety and Efficacy of Inhaled SNG001 (IFN-β1a for Nebulisation) for the Treatment of Patients With Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04385095
The global economy has been sucker punched by a world wide pandemic, but ABC propaganda writers don’t miss the chance to push their ultimate fantasy, that coal has turned a magical point in a terminal decline. Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for the “First Time On Record”. Hyperbole knows no bounds.
At the same time, China has boosted its coal generating capacity — in the first half of 2020 it built 86 per cent of new coal generation.
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