A $1,500 million dollar emergency line is needed to rescue South Australia from renewable blackouts. Image: Marcus Wong Wongm
Why do so few see the enormous subsidy cost of keeping the South Australian electricity experiment alive?
Having got too much intermittent, unreliable electricity, the state is still in danger of another statewide blackout. One third of the solar panels on homes are being switched off automatically because the electricity they provide is not just useless, but dangerous. What the state needs is baseload power, but the solution we’re told is to spend another incredible $1.5billion dollars on an interconnector with NSW, presumably so SA gets a lifeline to the reliable coal power in Queensland.
That’s a $1,500,000,000 repair bill for an unreliable system that cost a fortune to build, but is unsustainable without a giant bandaid.
Price rises coming in NSW and QLD:
As more unreliable generation and random green electrons infect the NSW and Qld grids, their cheap baseload providers will also find it harder to compete. The increased downtime will chew out some of their profit margins, but their costs will be almost the same. So, as sure as the sun rises, they will have to raise their charges during the shorter profitable time they operate. Thus costs for electricity per kilowatt hour will rise in NSW and QLD thanks to the increase in useless electricity coming from SA.
The subsidized interconnectors will make property developers and renewables investors happy though. They will profit from the giant transmission lines, paid for by hapless consumers. The new lines will open up vast arid zones where land is cheaper and investors can now afford to build a few more solar and wind plants that were otherwise uneconomic.
Instead of spending $1.5b to subsidize renewables, SA could afford 5 new gas power plants, or could put it towards a new HELE coal plant which would make industry and manufacturing affordable again in the post covid world.
The South Australian government wants to prevent further statewide power blackouts by developing an interconnector with New South Wales.
Energy Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan said the interconnector was critical to the long-term security of SA’s electricity system.
“We are still at a real risk of another statewide blackout. We have identified the problem, we’ve asked for expert advice and we’re going to follow that,” he said.
278,000 solar panels on homes threaten to dump too much electricity on the SA grid.
Mr van Holst Pellekaan said an area of concern was that the amount of electricity going into the grid from the 278,000 homes with solar panels could outweigh what was drawn out. “We’re not far away from that. That could create a statewide blackout.
“Up to one-third of all (solar) inverters used in SA have already been cutting themselves off in response to voltage changes. We weren’t aware of that so we’re going to fix that.
Despite getting subsidies and being the cause of the problem, Solar Citizens Campaigner Stephanie Gray, said that curtailing the solar panels needed to be the “last option”. Solar home owners have no idea what a burden their panels are on other electricity consumers. Until the media, or some politicians start to discuss that awkward fact, solar panels owners will remain in the dark and continue to insist on more subsidies and bigger handouts.
The numbers are still the conversation stoppers they always were. Ponder that China uses half the worlds coal. While the USA closed 32 GW of coal plants over the last two years, China added 43 GW just last year.
China has promised a few meaningless deck-chair-type vows which it then ignores anyway. The government vowed to cut the number of coal mines, as if that matters. It’s just closing the smaller less efficient mines and opening larger ones instead. As it happens, the number of coal mines was 3,373 in 2018 but now China is aiming just to cap it at 5,000.
The Chinese government has outlined a plan aiming to make its coal industry more efficient by continuing to reduce “outdated” production capacity, while simultaneously raising capacity in major producing regions.
A batch of “outdated” mines should be shut permanently this year, China’s main economic planning agency NDRC said in a document released today to reduce the number of coal mines to no more than 5,000. This will help raise production at major mines so that they account for more than 96pc of national output this year.
Right at the end we find that even despite the major pandemic crash that is 2020, Chinese coal production is up nearly 1%.
China’s national coal production reached 1.47bn t during January-May, according to the national bureau of statistics, up by 0.9pc from the same period last year.
China consumes more than half the world’s coal. Today, it has almost as much new coal generation in planning or construction (206 gigawatts) as the United States has in operation (235 GW at the end of 2019).
But no country matches China’s appetite for new coal. The country added 43 GW of new coal capacity last year, up from 32 GW in 2018, according to Global Energy Monitor. Almost 100 GW is under construction and another 105 GW is either permitted or applying for permits. China permitted nearly 8 GW of new coal plant construction between March 1 and March 18, or more than the 6.3 GW permitted in all of 2019.
By comparison, the United States has retired 32 GW of coal capacity since 2017, according to an E&E News analysis of federal statistics. America last built a coal plant in 2015.
Australia can’t even add one new 2GW coal plant. China effectively added twenty times as much.
A glut of new coal-fired power stations endangers China’s green ambitions
The Economist, May 21st 2020 (paywalled)
China is home to half the world’s coal-fired power stations, the most polluting type of generator. Their share of the country’s electricity market is shrinking as nuclear plants and renewables slowly elbow them off the grid. But Chinese investors and local governments are still keen on them. Last year coal-fired generating capacity expanded in China by 37GW (factoring in plant closures)—more than the amount by which it grew globally.
China has been relaxing curbs on building such plants. That suggests more to come.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China added 194 million tonnes of coal mining capacity in 2018, data from the energy bureau showed on Tuesday, despite vows to eliminate excess capacity in the sector and to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
However, the total amount of coal mines in China declined to 3,373 in 2018 from 3,907 in 2017, the NEA said in the statement, as Beijing has been phasing out small and ineffective coal mines in eastern regions and expanding capacity in the west
China produced 3.55 billion tonnes of coal in 2018, up 5.2 percent from a year ago, while generating 4.979 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity from coal-fired power plants, up 6 percent from the 2017 level, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.
There are more skeptics in the USA than anywhere, followed by Sweden, Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Canada, Finland, and Germany. And in the same large report, we find that Australian “trust” in the media has fallen yet again from 44% last year to 38% this year.
As well as those listed dismissively as “deniers” (see the graph below) another 10% say climate change is “not very serious”. So about 1 in 5 people, are outspoken skeptics — which doesn’t add up with the “Four out of five news consumers say they consider climate change to be either somewhat, very or extremely serious (79%).” They had to rule out those who aren’t “news consumers” to get the figure up to 79%. It also doesn’t fit with many past surveys that show that half the people in Australia, and the UK and the US are skeptics. (See “Polls“)
They don’t say how many people were neither concerned, nor unconcerned. Where is that data?
Skeptics, country by country. USA, Sweden, Australia lead list of “deniers” | Click to enlarge.
From this report we can see why censorship is the main tool of the climate believers. People exposed to both sides of the story (even partially, such as The Australian does) is enough to enable more to shift to sensible positions. Only the poor sods who watch the ABC or read The Guardian, and Fairfax papers have no idea and little courage to form their own views.
Summary: This year’s survey shows that Australian news consumers are more than twice as likely than their counterparts in other countries to think that climate change is ‘not at all’ serious. The data reveal that perceptions of climate change reporting are strongly divided along generational and political lines.
It’s divided on predictable lines. The left believe in climate change and also believe the media tell the truth:
Those on the left of the political spectrum are more concerned about the issue and think the coverage is more accurate and informative, whereas those on the right are less concerned about it and view the reporting about climate change less favourably. Older generations are also less concerned, pay less attention to the coverage and are less likely to view reporting about it positively. While the distinction is most prominently seen in those aged 74 and over, Baby Boomers are also less concerned about climate change and pay less attention to news about it.
This survey was done in late January in the glowing embers of the summer heat and fires. This would have been Peak Believer Time downunder:
The number of climate deniers in Australia is more than double the global average, new survey finds
…new research …surveyed 2,131 Australians about their news consumption in relation to climate change. The Digital News Report: Australia 2020 was conducted by the University of Canberra at the end of the severe bushfire season during January 17 and February 8, 2020.
On the good side more than half say they want impartial news and 62% think independent journalism is important for society to function. Scarily — that means 38% don’t think independent journalism matters.
Those who access news via commercial AM radio (i.e. 2GB, 2UE, 3AW) (35%), Sky News (35%) and Fox News (32 %) are less likely to think climate change is serious.
So one third of people think the news is giving them the whole story, one third don’t know, and one third are sure the news is fake:
News consumers are evenly divided in their opinion about the accuracy of reporting on the issue with one-third (36%) saying it is accurate and one-third (33%) saying it is not.
At least 1 in 5 admitted they just want news to reinforce their world view. At least they are honest.
more than half (54%) of news consumers say they prefer impartial news, but 19% want news that confirms their worldview
two-thirds (62%) of news consumers say independent journalism is important for society to function properly
around half (54%) think journalists should report false statements from politicians and about one-quarter don’t
news consumption and news sharing have increased since 2019, but interest in news has declined
only 14% continue to pay for online news, but more are subscribing rather than making one-off donations
Trust in media is falling
These are Australian statistics, not global ones. Trust is in rapid decline.
Trust in news generally is falling across all platforms that participants said were their main source of news. Trust among those who mainly use print newspapers and magazines has fallen the most, dropping by nearly 20% since 2018 to a low of 39% in this year’s survey (see figure 6.3).
Trust in news is falling. page 73.
Who do they blame?
Naturally, the believers consider everything except the possibility that the skeptics might be right. The report highlights a journalist who also happens to be an academic. Not-so-independent, eh?
Greg Jericho, Journalist, Guardian Australia/ Lecturer, University of Canberra, thinks it’s a conspiracy of “major media groups”:
IN SEEKING BALANCE, THE MEDIA FAIL TO COMMUNICATE THE SERIOUSNESS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
““So much of a journalist’s job when reporting on climate change is devoted to correcting falsehoods.””
“….the big problem with climate change is that major media groups are also behind the clouding of the truth. It is hard enough to convey scientific knowledge to the lay person without having to compete with news organisations who devote large space and time to those who push the view that climate change is a conspiracy. It is so very easy to fake reports about climate change – to suggest scientists in the 1970s believed we were about to have an ice age (they didn’t), that scientists ignore a multitude of factors such as sun spots and volcanic activity (they don’t), or to argue that the world hasn’t warmed since 1997, 2001, 2010 (it has), or that it has but not significantly (it has) and then throw in reference to hacked emails and “hiding the decline”. And such columns can be regurgitated, and once again the demand comes from readers for you to correct or answer them.”
So Jericho won’t even consider that his answers fail to persuade anyone because they are weak, wrong, badly researched, or just ignore the most serious skeptical positions. And despite his assertions, newspaper records show scientists claimed we were headed for an ice age. The IPCC models don’t include anything on solar magnetic cycles, solar wind changes, or solar spectral cycles. And no sane adult believes that honest scientists would “use tricks” to “hide declines”. Since the Guardian hasn’t ever acknowledged that or tried to expose corrupt and inept scientists, everyone who knows about “hiding the decline” also knows that Greg Jericho doesn’t care about the climate or “the science”.
Only 37% of rightleaning consumers think climate change is very serious.
The interesting question that Jericho doesn’t even think of: When right leaning voters don’t care about climate change, why are right leaning parties pandering to left leaning voters so much?
Audiences expect there to be political debate across media outlets over aspects such as the efficacy of a tax cut – in a sense there is a balance that can be found when covering such issues. But the climate change debate, despite over 30 years of extensive coverage (Time Magazine named “The Endangered Earth” its “Person” of the Year in 1988), remains largely stuck. The finding of this report showing that 82% of leftleaning news consumers regard climate change as very or extremely serious compared to just 37% of rightleaning consumers is bad enough. But that only just over half of those who class themselves as politically “centre” are very or extremely concerned suggests those journalists attempting to seek a balanced path are mostly doing so by underplaying the issue.
The answer is that right leaning parties are cowering in fear that the left leaning journalists will be petty, nasty and target them spitefully. Fear and bullying can control politicians up to a point, but in the privacy of a ballot box, the voters keep choosing anything-but-climate-propaganda. Shall we have another “climate change election”?
A lot of the audience just isn’t listening
Jericho is baffled that even believers can’t be bothered with climate news.
And while you might expect that 36% of those who do not at all regard climate change as a serious problem to say they do not pay attention to any news on the issue, more worrying is that 27% of those who see it as “somewhat serious” also do not pay any attention to such news. That suggests a major media failing – especially given a higher likelihood for such people to live in rural areas that are at the sharp end of climate change impact.
While it may be right to put a majority of the blame on those political parties and media companies which seek to sow doubt about climate change, these results also suggest other media organisations perhaps should reconsider how they are telling the stories, and think more about how to reach those who are not currently listening.
My reply:
Dear Greg Jericho,
People on both sides stopped listening because one-sided repetitive news with no debate is stone-boring propaganda. If you want to learn how to reach those who are not listening, you might start by listening to them, instead of preaching at them. (Call it “interview and research”, eh?)
You could try treating readers with civility. Calling them petty names like “denier” marks you as an unprofessional, ignorant writer, who hasn’t done his homework, and doesn’t know what skeptics think. The people you call “deniers” are engineers, doctors, geologists, meteorologists and some even have Nobels, and others walked on the Moon.
The “undereducated” older folk you mention are streetwise farmers, business owners, truckies and taxi-drivers. They know a con when they see one. Only the babyface snowflakes are easy to fool.
If you told both sides of the story, people wouldn’t be reading blogs.
Thanks for sending traffic my way.
Jo Nova
Details of methods: The survey included 2,131 Australians out of nearly 90,000 in a panel. It may be well be very self-selecting. It’s only online, and bizarrely 7% were excluded because they hadn’t “consumed” news in the last month. (Why don’t they count?) People who don’t use the internet were 100% excluded by definition.
The survey was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire between 17 January and 8 February 2020. The sample is drawn from an online panel of 89,850 Australians. The final sample is reflective of the population that has access to the internet. To be included, respondents must have consumed news in the past month. As a result, 7% of the initial survey respondents were excluded.
The most popular drug with doctors all over the world will seemingly now not even be allowed in the US for Covid related treatment:
HCQ No Longer Approved Even a Little for COVID-19
Molly Walker, MedPage
The FDA rescinded its emergency use authorization (EUA) of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat COVID-19 patients, citing concerns about efficacy and risks associated with its use, and saying the drug no longer meets the criteria for an EUA, the agency said on Monday.
Moreover, the FDA now says the benefits of the drug “no longer outweigh the potential risks,” citing the serious cardiac adverse events associated with the drug.
Comments underneath reveal just how contested this will be.
It’s a strange situation where patients in many poorer nations are being offered drugs that patients won’t be able to get in the richest nation in the world:
Substantial fractions of physicians treating Covid-19 patients in Europe and elsewhere report use of HCQ+AZ: 72% in Spain, 49% in Italy, 41% in Brazil, 39% in Mexico, 28% in France, 23% in the US, 17% in Germany, 16% in Canada, 13% in the UK (45), much of the non-US use in outpatients.
Yet strangely, despite the thousands of people using HCQ, there are not many (or any) ideal trials. Most are non-randomized, but the few that are, usually started too late, or are not combined with zinc or the right antibiotic.
A few weeks ago, a Yale expert made the case of why the US should be using HCQ as early as possible. He calculates that at the current death rate, by the time the results of the right trial is known 180,000 people will have died.” In this context, we cannot afford the luxury of perfect knowledge…”
Prof Harvey Risch insists HCQ needs to be tried in patients before they get to hospital
Harvey Risch is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. He compares the two top treatments in the USA — the anti-malarial drug HCQ (Hydroxycholorquine) and the anti-Ebola drug — Remdesivir. In a 29 page review he concludes that with the US reopening, and 10,000 people dying each week, they don’t have time to wait for the randomized controlled trials — but that they urgently need a drug that can reduce the rate of hospitalization, and there is already enough data to warrant the use of HCQ + AZ (Azithromycin) and Zinc.
US officials are recommending Remdesivir but there is no randomized controlled trial on that yet either for outpatient use. Instead, it’s a newer drug with mainly lab and animal research. HCQ, on the other hand, is an old cheap drug with very low and well-known risks. It’s being used in poorer countries all over the world, and many doctors on the frontline are convinced it helps, even though there are not yet the proper studies to show whether it does or not.
There are five trials on the ClinicalTrials.gov database for HCQ and Az in the outpatient setting. Risch discusses all of them.
One French study is small, but shows a 50 fold benefit when started early, and only (!) a 25 fold benefit when waiting until it has progressed to the lower respiratory tract.There was a seven-fold benefit from taking the antibotic (AZ) at the same time. He works through all the criticisms below, pointing out that even though the study is small, the magnitude of the effect is so large, it is still obvious the combination is beneficial.
This point has been argued forcefully by the French doctors (20). The first study of HCQ+AZ (24) was controlled but not randomized or blinded, and involved 42 patients in Marseilles, France. This study showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ+AZ vs standard-of-care, with P-value=.0007. In the study, six patients progressed, stopped medication use and left the trial before the day-6 planned outcome measure of swabsampled nasopharyngeal viral clearance. Reanalysis of the raw study data elsewhere (25) and by myself shows that including these six patients does not much change the 50-fold benefit. What does change the magnitude of benefit is presentation with asymptomatic or upper respiratory tract infection, vs lower respiratory-tract infection, the latter cutting the efficacy in half, 25-fold vs standard-of-care. This shows that the sooner these medications are used, the better their effectiveness, as would be expected for viral early respiratory disease. The average start date of medication use in this study was day-4 of symptoms. This study has been criticized on various grounds that are not germane to the science, but the most salient criticism is the lack of randomization into the control and treatment groups. This is a valid general scientific criticism, but does not represent epidemiologic experience in this instance. If the study had shown a 2-fold or perhaps 3-fold benefit, that magnitude of result could be postulated to have occurred because of subject-group differences from lack of randomization. However, the 25-fold or 50-fold benefit found in this study is not amenable to lack of randomization as the sole reason for such a huge magnitude of benefit. Further, the study showed a significant, 7-fold benefit of taking HCQ+AZ over HCQ alone, P-value=.035, which cannot be explained by differential characteristics of the controls, since it compares one treatment group to the other, and the treated subjects who received AZ had more progressed pneumonia than the treated subjects receiving HCQ alone, which should otherwise have led to worse outcomes. The study has also been described as “small,” but that criticism only applies to studies not finding statistical significance… page 8 ,9
A second study of the Marseilles group (27) involved 1061 patients tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and treated with HCQ+AZ for at least 3 days and followed for at least 9 days. The authors state “No cardiac toxicity was observed.” Good clinical outcome and virological cure were seen in 973 patients (92%). Five patients died, and the remainder were in various stages of recovery.
In Brazil, 412 patients were treated with HCQ plus deoxycycline (a different antibiotic). Those treated before day 7 had about one third the chance of ending up in hospital, as those did who started treatment later. (29)
Adding zinc to the combination cut mortality in half again:
HCQ+AZ has been standard-of-care treatment at the four New York University hospitals, where a recent study showed that adding zinc sulfate to this regimen significantly cut both intubation and mortality risks by almost half (46).
As far as side effects go, the FDA FAERS database (34) contains 1064 adverse events for HCQ, including 200 deaths, but this goes back the full 50 years of use involving millions of patients. Many of these patients were not using HCQ for five days (as Covid patients are) they were using it for months on end.
Doctors are very well aware of the long QT problem with hearts, and know which people HCQ is not suited too.
For those interested in this debate, his conclusions make for interesting reading. See the PDF.
Watching the photos and twitter feed from China it was obvious something terrible was happening and the official numbers did not add up.
For example, there were reportedly 90,000 hospital beds in Wuhan in 2018, yet another 100,000 beds were suddenly urgently added in schools, hotels, and pop-up new hospitals, even though there were only 30,000 official cases. Some 169,000 ventilators were supplied to Wuhan, which was inexplicable if there were only 50,000 total cases during the whole pandemic.
Remember on February 6th when keen observers noticed that the Tencent Virus tally board had been flickering with a ghostly alternate count that was ten times higher than official numbers (and 80 times higher in deaths). We wondered if someone was trying to leak out the real situation.
Three months after all these discrepancies, CNN, BBC and co. would still be treating Chinese figures like they meant something. Most media institutions were reporting meaningless “sombre moments” as one country after another overtook a mythical Chinese data point. “Italy has overtaken China”, Spain has…. None of the news giants looked further or even said “alleged figures”.
The new study by Mai He et al (USA) tries to estimate the real Chinese death toll from cremation data and finds it was at least ten times higher, and the case load was possibly up to 30 times larger. But they hint that the numbers may be even higher still. So much is unknown.
There are eight crematoriums in Wuhan, which normally operate for just four hours a day each morning as is customary in China. But by January 25th, 2020 — these were operating around the clock, working at six times their normal speed. The researchers estimate they were disposing of between 800 and 2,100 bodies each day. Some 36,000 urns were also tracked to Wuhan. But even above and beyond all this, it’s estimated there were also 40 mobile crematories which were brought to Wuhan after February 19th. The study team writes that ‘the mobile crematory stations can each process five tons of “medical waste”, including “animal dead bodies” per day’.
Their estimate of 36,000 dead in China, does not include any from the mobile crematories.
By late January, Wuhan’s hospitals were already reportedly under severe strain. They offered 90,000 beds. Another 100,000 beds were activated in hotels and schools. Yet Beijing’s figures reported only 33,000 COVID-19 cases.
By March 23, 42,600 doctors and healthcare workers had been rushed to Wuhan from other provinces to support the 90,000 already there. But Beijing reported only 50,000 cases.
Before Beijing’s crackdown, China’s bureaucracy had been conducting business as usual – analysing, assessing and reporting on everything about its citizenry. The researchers from Washington University and Ohio State University say they have tracked down this early government data and combined it with reports in state-controlled and social media.
The problem is, that in a secretive nation of 1.3 billion, a million people could die and it might not easy for outsiders to keep track.
In Table 3: the largest estimates for cases of Covid19 in Wuhan were 2.2 million — but that is only up to February 7th, and does not include other areas in China.
Fascinating. Could one shot of radiation calm Covid infected lungs and stop the severe cytokine storm?
In a trial in the US, five very sick Covid patients with a median age of 90 were given a “low dose” (which is not so low) of 1.5 Grey (150 Rad) of Photon beam radiotherapy (in a front and back beam configuration.) It took only 10 – 15 minutes, and four of the five showed “rapid improvement” in 24 hours. Their oxygen levels and alertness improved. They were sent home from hospital 12 days later.
The good thing about this is that apparently most hospitals already have this equipment, so they could start helping people right away (assuming it works, which we don’t know yet).
In theory, the shot of radiation is not “killing the virus” but is changing the immune response — and may be able to stop the deadly cascade of the cytokine storm. It calms the immune system in at least three ways (see the chart).
Anti-inflammatory treatment for Covid-19.
The curious thing about this is that it is an old treatment, and an old idea. “Hormesis” is a phenomenon where low grade damage elicits a healthier response than no damage. It’s the idea that our bodies are adapted to low grade toxins and healthy repair mechanisms have evolved to deal with them. When we eat toxic plant molecules, we now know it ramps up our liver “detox” pathways — which means for example — that garlic and broccoli up-regulate phase II enzymes of cytochrome p450. The activated enzymes then also remove other toxins faster, so the net effect of low dose toxins is beneficial. People have been suggesting for years that low dose radiation might not only be safe, but useful. Though in all things “hormesis” the dose is everything. Too high a dose has the opposite effect of a lower dose.
These studies indicated possible mechanisms by which low doses of radiation mitigates inflammation and facilitates healing, one being the polarization of macrophages to an anti-inflammatory or M2 phenotype. The M1 type tends to overstimulate the immune system which can lead to a cytokine storm, while the M2 type tends to suppress the overreaction of the immune system.
We kind of knew this would work because we did the same thing 70 to 80 years ago. Dr. E. J. Calabrese at the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health & Health Sciences and Dr. Gaurav Dhawan at the University of Massachusettsreviewedhow X-ray therapy was used during the first half of the 20th century to successfully treat pneumonia, especially viral pneumonia like that caused by this coronavirus.
According to this site, a normal background radiation dose is 0.00365 Gy (3,650 µGy or microGray). So a 1.5Gy dose is about 400 years of normal radiation. That doesn’t sound “low” to me! Though it’s only equivalent to 15 years of living in Ramsar, Iran, and 8 years on a Brazilian Monazite beach.
A full body 5 Gy dose will kill 50% of people within a month. So this 1.5Gy dose is rather serious. The docs report that there were no apparent side effects in these very sick 90 year old people.
Using radiation to treat pneumonia is an old treatment
The investigators were inspired by the historical use of low dose chest radiation to treat pneumonia 100 years ago, citing research from the early 1900s that demonstrated improved survival as high as 90 percent treating patients with pneumonia in the pre-antibiotic era. Khan and Hess say the research also shows that pneumonia patients got better within a few days of receiving low dose chest radiation.
The therapy involves a single treatment with whole-lung LD-RT delivered on a quarantined linear accelerator, followed by a one-week observation period in which clinical, radiographic, and immune outcomes will be tracked for safety and benefit. Depending on the safety and benefit demonstrated by the first cohort, investigators expect to launch a second cohort of five patients. According to investigators, the inherent risks of LD-RT are low.
Given the not-so-low doses here, this is not a treatment I would want to rush into myself. But if I were 80+ and my choices were mechanical ventilation, or this, this trial would look pretty appealing.
Where is the data?
Frustratingly the sole report of this is the Forbes news story and it’s not explicitly stated if all 5 were sent home or only 4 were. Since the doctors were “excited” and no deaths were mentioned we presume that the fifth patient did recover, though even a 20% mortality rate in late stage severe Covid patients is not necessarily an awful outcome. Mortality rates are as high as 50% in this age group if they end up in ICU on a ventilator. No one is going to pretend a study this small is numerically significant, but the doctors obviously felt the results show great promise. Other doctors must be excited too. Trials are currently starting in the US, Italy, Spain, Iran and India (see the ClinicalTrials.gov website).
Clearly this is an interesting idea to toss about. Looking forward to some data…
It’s just another day in the death of investigative journalism
Notice the way the words shift. The ABC told us tonight that a new “Atlas” will “chart” the temperature for wine growing regions in Australia, as if charting is what we do when we are taking a blind guess with a broken model at the future. Once upon a time, atlases mapped things that already existed. The ABC and Uni Tas are just staring right into the future. Neat advertising eh?
Makes you wonder why we bother with thermometers.
The ABC News is like reading Harry Potter. The Hunter Valley is not predicted to get warmer, it’s “destined” to. Gone are the qualifiers: where once people might have to adapt, now they’ll be forced to. In gushing form, the ABC quotes shocked farmers saying “It’s pivotal”, “a line-in-the-sand body of work” a “wow moment” and a “world first”, as if Tasmanian scientists discovered the magical Marauders Map itself. It’s also like no group on Earth has ever tried to predict the climate of wine regions before. If the ABC interviewed a skeptical farmer it would have broken the camera.
If Uni of Tas hired an agency to run an advertising campaign, they couldn’t have done better than the prime-time, supposedly “investigative” segment on what we used to call news.
Pity the poor viticulturist who changes grape varieties, irrigates, or buys up a cold farm.
There is no mention of “uncertainty”, “projection”, “estimate” or any hint that there might be one living scientist in the world is not flat-out-drooling with excitement.
The ABC could have interviewed one of the greatest viticulturalists in Australia, but they wouldn’t like what he has to say. If you know someone growing wine, tell them to read John Gladstones, Wine, Terrior and Climate Change. Gladstones wrote The definitive text for the industry 30 years ago. He’s very much the industry guru, and not surprisingly — also a skeptic.
Watch this story on ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm or on iview if you can bear.
Save the children, and our Australian wine industry. Sell The ABC.
A world-first research document about to be released has detailed how Australia’s famous winegrowing regions will be forced to adapt due to climate change.
It charts an 80-year course for climate change, including temperature, rainfall, aridity and frost for each of the country’s 71 wine regions.
Lordy! They’ve discovered data from the future!
“It’s pivotal; I think this will be a line-in-the-sand body of work,” said Hunter Valley viticulturist Liz Riley, one of the first industry insiders to analyse the data.
With the Hunter destined to become three degrees warmer by 2100, with more intense and frequent heatwaves and more rainfall, Ms Riley is concerned for the health and safety of workers who will need to endure hotter, more humid conditions during the harvest season.
Shh. Nobody mention how reliable models are with rainfall OK? As in, “skillless”.
All eight wine regions in Tasmania will become hotter, some will become drier and others slightly wetter, but the water availability will be reduced, measured by an aridity index.
“It’s going to get hotter and drier in most Australian regions,” said lead author Tom Remenyi, from the University of Tasmania’s Climate Futures Group.
“That warming, drying trend is because as the temperature increases, there is more evaporative demand, so there is this drying pressure on the landscape which would require it to increase in rainfall to maintain the same balance we have at the moment.”
May the Lord have mercy on farmers who rely on UTas:
They do not have any irrigation, but concede they may need to in the future if, as the data suggests, the region becomes more arid.
“To have really detailed numbers and projections for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it’s hugely beneficial,” Ms Lipscombe said.
“We can make really concrete plans on what we need to do and how we need to approach the next few decades.”
The PDF is not even available yet. We must wait til Monday to read the legal fineprint declaring that they will take no responsibility for losses or damage caused, or lives ruined, or investments wrecked.
Remenyi, TA , Rollins, DA, Love, PT , Earl, NO , Bindoff, NL and Harris, RMB 2020 , Australia’s Wine Future – A Climate Atlas , University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/32250/
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
The BBC news mentioned that there were a lot of imported cases, that the biggest variety of genetic variants came from Spain, France and Italy and not China. But one tantalizing finding was that the UK transmission lines now appear to be “very rare or extinct”. Which surely implies that the lockdown is working, the UK lines are dying out, and that … by golly, the new infections must be regular incoming virus?
Three Key Conclusions:
The UK epidemic comprises a very large number of importations due to inbound international travel2. We detect 1356 independently-introduced transmission lineages, however, we expect this number to be an under-estimate.
Many UK transmission lineages now appear to be very rare or extinct, as they have not been detected by genome sequencing for >4 weeks.
We estimate that ≈34% of detected UK transmission lineages arrived via inbound travel from Spain, ≈29% from France, ≈14% from Italy, and ≈23% from other countries. The relative contributions of these locations were highly dynamic.
Instead, according to the BBC the big surprise in this study was that there was “no patient zero” who went on to give 300,000 people in the UK Covid, though it’s hard to believe anyone older than six thought that was even possible.
In February a quarter of million people flew into the UK — that’s not in February “the month”, — it’s every single day. In a world of exponential rising infections surely even preschoolers can figure out the odds that millions of travellers were flying in from a world of sick, and somehow were not sick themselves.
In March, 20,000 people a day were flying in from Spain, where the infection was running rife. Many of these would be British people returning home. The study shows the incredible folly of keeping borders open.
James Gallagher, BBC, Health and Science Correspondent
The study, by the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium (Cog-UK), completely quashes the idea that a single “patient zero” started the whole UK outbreak.
They found the UK’s coronavirus epidemic did not have one origin – but at least 1,356 origins. On each of those occasions somebody brought the infection into the UK from abroad and the virus began to spread as a result.
“The surprising and exciting conclusion is that we found the UK epidemic has resulted from a very large number of separate importations,” said Prof Nick Loman, from Cog-UK and the University of Birmingham.
“It wasn’t a patient zero,” he added.
The big surprise for me was that the number was so small. But the full study shows this is the tip of an iceberg. They analyzed data from 16,506 UK genomes, and another 12,000 genomes from other countries. So they looked at about 5% of the known coronavirus infections in the UK (which is still an impressive sample). So when they say 1,300 separate infections arrived, the researchers admit “We expect the number is an underestimate”. But it could be that 30,000 cases arrived across those open flowing borders. The researchers certainly don’t say that. They add that they do not attempt to measure the contributions of importation versus local transmission, nor to model the impact of the public health interventions. There are many caveats, and many assumptions. They have to estimate how fast the mutations are happening, how quickly they spread, how long it took to detect them, and how many of the subsequent transmissions they sampled.
The graph shows that the variants detected in early March have largely disappeared
…..
Most of the 1,356 lineages lasted for a month or so and died out. If those variants had successful spread and mutated they would look different to what they did on March 1 but there would still be a continuous chain of changes. The lineage wouldn’t have died out.
Figure 5: Estimated total number of inbound travellers to UK per day (black line) and the estimated number of infectious cases worldwide (dashed red line).
New cases in the UK are about 1,300 per day
How many of these new cases are from planes, trains and cars? How low would this tally be if instead the UK had put in border controls at the same time as it started major restrictions at the end of March? Mobility trackers show the UK was slowing down for most of March, and by the last week of March reached a full lockdown.
Even though, as of this week, the UK government is demanding all arrivals self-isolate for two weeks, they are only collecting names and addresses and promising to check on some of them. There’s a £1,000 fine for breaches, but only a £100 fine for people not filling in the form. (Seems like a cheap alternative to two weeks quarantine). The isolation is not only not enforced, it is not even a full 100% requirement — as those in self isolation are asked not to visit pharmacies and what not, unless they absolutely have to, and can’t find a friend to do it for them.
Individuals quarantining will be permitted to shop for food essentials and medicines but only if it is not possible to rely on others, and will be able to take public transport to their designated accommodation.
About a fifth of people are expected to receive a spot-check to ensure that they are staying at the address or addresses they have provided to the authorities, the Guardian understands.
As I’ve said before, and this study shows, the biggest mistake the UK Swamp made — apart from being unprepared was leaving the borders open. Which are still not closed. The UK aimed for Herd Immunity (that was the excuse for keeping the borders open, while the rest of the world closed them), a deadly mistake that killed tens of thousands of people who didn’t need to die, and also cost billions upon billions of dollars in pointless damage to the UK economy.
Have you got Coronavirus, do you live in the third world? Where’s the best place you could fly for safety and healthcare? — London.
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will shrink, so the price of those products will rise. It’s not possible that this change would increase the Australian GDP.
It’s all being rushed in to start in October 2021*, presumably because no one has the confidence that the Australian Grid will survive the next two summers without either price bonfires or a major blackout.
Big conglomerate generators and retailers don’t want this change, because it’s partly aimed at them. They like the price spikes and this threatens their profits:
The shift, which will begin in October 2021, has been adopted by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) despite opposition from big energy generators and retailers, who were using the COVID-19 crisis to pressure for delaying the rule changes.
Instead of making the market fairer and more transparent by removing all renewable subsidies, and asking renewable generators to pay fair prices for transmission costs, stability costs and back up of their unreliable product, this is a desperate workaround that leaves former agreements in place but adds a new layer of complexity to try to get rid of the spikes so the generators can’t game the system.
This is a change to enable the forced transition to renewables.
Head of energy policy at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre Craig Memery said it was “a critical reform that will bring much-needed benefits to consumers, and a key part of a secure, zero-carbon energy system”.
The propaganda makes out this is a win for all:
[AMEC] argues it will reduce electricity prices for consumers and improve reliability on the network, by allowing demand response to compete with “peaking” electricity generators that typically receive very high prices for supplying additional electricity during times of heavy demand.
“The benefits of wholesale demand response will flow through to all households and businesses through lower electricity bills and improved network reliability.
Obviously, the ABC repeats the propaganda and doesn’t ask any hard questions about how Australian citizens get richer by doing less.
Nobody mention the real costs:
Instead of “earning money” consumers will pay via their shareholding and superannuation losses, and via the increased prices of products. Some consumers will gain jobs, but more will lose their jobs as the net efficiency of a Greener economy means companies produce less, move overseas, generate less profit and thus employ fewer Australians. Less profitable companies will also pay less tax. Meaning that individual taxpayers will have to make up for lost tax income or the government will have to offer less services.
And so yet again, the cost of a green economy is buried so deep not even a PhD can unravel “who pays”.
They call it a win for environmental groups, which tells us it’s there to prop up the renewables industry, but of course, the only parts of the “environment” that will benefit from this are the unintended parts. Wind Turbines are the new top predator in the ecosystem. So lizards living under wind farms will be happy because predatory birds will be killed off.
Complexity breeds corruption:
Somehow we have to estimate what customers would have used to pay them for what they didn’t. This is a market of nullities again.
Under the change, large electricity users (such as big farms, factories and commercial enterprises) will be able to bid reductions in demand into the wholesale market and get paid for taking their demand out of the system.
Over time, demand response is expected to be extended to households and smaller businesses who sign up with companies that “sell” power reductions from thousands of customers into the market at times when wholesale prices are high.
Obviously all complexity comes at a price and provides more loopholes for dishonest players to profit just as China and others did when naive Western governments started paying companies to “save carbon” based on guesstimates of infrastructure changes they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Hands up who thinks companies will adjust their useage to game the system and imply they are taking out more demand than they actual did?
h/t David B
*Corrected, thanks John Hultquist. Not 2020 but 2021
Tucker Carlson asks whether the insane, unpopular idea to “defund the police” means getting rid of the current police and bringing in a new BLM-compliant “force”? Is this just The March through yet another Institution?
No one is allowed to say anything against this ideology. People are losing their jobs for the merest hint they they don’t wholeheartedly adopt an activist supporting role. But bullies thrive on grovelling obedience.
NEW ZEALAND EASES ALMOST ALL CORONAVIRUS RESTRICTIONS AMID NO ACTIVE COVID-19 CASES
— New Zealand has no active cases of the coronavirus, and no new positive cases reported in the past 17 days, according to CNN. For the past 12 days, there are no patients in the hospital receiving treatment for COVID-19 and for the past 40 days, there is no evidence of community transmission, according to CNN. Now, New Zealand is lifting almost all of its coronavirus restrictions, while still encouraging social distancing, keeping borders shut to non-residents and requiring that residents traveling into the country to quarantine for 14 days, according to CNN. New Zealand will be under “alert level 1” rules which means there will be no restrictions on domestic transport and no restrictions on workplaces or services, according to CNN and New Zealand’s government website.
— One third of all hospitalized cases also affected in NYC data
New data from two health systems in New York City — where hospitals struggled to keep up with dialysis demands as they were flooded with COVID-19 patients — detailed a high rate of acute kidney injury among infected patients.
In the first 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 33.9% developed acute kidney injury. Of the 236 who ended up in the ICU, 78% developed AKI, Ruijun Chen, MD, and colleagues reported in The BMJ.
In another study of 5,500 patients the rate was 36% of those hospitalized, and 89% of those in ICU on ventilators. Quite a few of these people went on to die, so, to put it bluntly, they wont be in need of dialysis or further care. But some part of the population in a post corona world will need ongoing care and won’t be able to work at their former level.
Docs are not sure if the kidney injury is from the virus or a side effect of the treatments. As we get better at treating this we may prevent this damage happening. Though, any disease involving mass clotting could cause damage in most organs, some of which can be repaired, but some of which will cause scarring that may be permanent. If Coronavirus is like a stroke-machine, the cognitive damage may be significant.
By Reed Abelson, Sheri Fink, Nicholas Kulish and Katie Thomas, New York Times.
April 18th, 2020
“Nothing like this has ever been seen in terms of the number of people needing kidney replacement therapy,” [said Dr. David S. Goldfarb, chief of nephrology at the New York campus of the New York Harbor VA Health Care System].
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a powerful display of their care for love and justice, protesters in Minneapolis burned the word “LOVE” into the city, arranging the inspiring message with homes and businesses set ablaze by their riots.
Be aware, the Bee’s point is very serious, but the reporting isn’t.
* * *
Commentators, due to Section 18C in Australia it’s illegal to discuss race or color since it may offend someone somewhere. Therefore the words black, white, yellow, red, skin, color, indigenous, indian, african, eskimo, asian, european, sub-saharan, BLM, WLM, ALM, will go straight to moderation, and can only be published after Section 18C is repealed in 2073AD or thereabouts. We can have a no color conversation. Which means, we here, have arrived in Martin Luther King’s world, ahead of the protestors and looters:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream that one day political parties will not seek to divide and segregate nations by skin color.
The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant
Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved.
It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile. Obviously Ecoworriers want to take that failure and do more of it.
…the data reveals that two months of significantly reduced human activity did not make a dent in the damage we’ve done to the planet. It ultimately confirms that nothing short of wholesale systemic change will do – with the rejection of fossil fuels at the heart of that transformation.
“Surprised” is not the word. When the punters realize that empty streets and skies makes no difference, there could be a monumental crisis of motivation coming. Games up?
“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak hasn’t done more to influence CO2 levels,” Ralph Keeling, a geochemist who runs the Scripps Oceanography CO2 program, said in a statement.
Daily emissions of CO2 were cut by an average of 17% worldwide in early April, but as COVID-19 lockdowns eased, the fall in emissions for the year as a whole is likely to be only between 4% and 7% compared to 2019.
Let’s just double this for five times as long, and never stop?
According to Scripps scientists, such small differences won’t reverse the devastating climate change course that the planet is currently on. However, if emissions reductions of 20% to 30% could be consistently achieved for six to 12 months, then the rate of CO2 increase on Mauna Loa would likely slow.
We discussed the inadequacies of the large Lancet study of hydroxychloroquine supposed used on 96,000 Covid patients from 671 hospitals. It was largely useless because it ignored zinc, wasn’t randomized and was mainly used on people who were already very ill, with a terrible 12% death rate. But it is far worse than that and has now been retracted. The number of deaths listed in Australia was higher than the official Australian tally on April 21. The number of Covid cases in Turkey was 80 times higher than official numbers.
The Guardian investigated the company that came out of nowhere with this enormous dataset which was used in both The Lancet paper and a New England Medical Journal paper. It turned out to be small, with a handful of employees and that include a science fiction writer, an adult content model, and few scientific qualifications. When The Guardian contacted the Australian hospitals that were supposedly included, they denied any role in the database. The firms CEO, Sepan Desai was listed as a co-author. When asked how the company accumulated so much data so quickly, Desai said it was with AI and machine learning.
But look how obviously dodgy this data was. After the Lancet study swept through the media like a breaking wave, will the media now work as hard to undo that news?
by Elizabeth Hlavinka, and Amanda D’Ambrosio, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Alarms were first sounded about a recent Lancet study on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and chloroquine for COVID-19 that appeared to have surprisingly high mortality rates overall. Researchers were also concerned that Surgisphere’s number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia exceeded the country’s published total.
Questions have been raised about Surgisphere, a data collection company founded by Sapan Desai, MD, PhD, that says it gathers and stores de-identified electronic health record data from 1,200 healthcare organizations in 45 countries.
Similar questions were raised about a New England Journal of Medicine study that found common blood pressure medications were not associated with in-hospital death among hospitalized patients with COVID-19, assuaging concerns about a possible harmful association. In that study, the number of COVID-19 cases Surgisphere counted in Turkey in mid-March was vastly greater than official numbers at the time — by a factor of about 80, according to a series of Twitter posts by Mike Johansen, MD, of Grant Family Medicine in Columbus, Ohio.
“At this point, there appear two viable options: the analysis and/or data were of such poor quality that it would render the studies unsuitable for publication, or the studies are derived from falsified data,” Johansen told MedPage Today in an email. “Two of the world’s most prestigious medical journals published studies by the same group of authors that are, at best, of no value with numerous obvious errors.”
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
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