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 Skeptics have known for years that Nature was more about fashion than science. A parody from 2019. When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting? It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk. And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science. Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth. A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited moreThe authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member. This may be the source of the “replication crisis,” first discovered the early 2010s. So much for the theory that peer reviewed journals are supposed to be the rigorous guardians of modern science.  .. What a trap:The more interesting and surprising a science paper is, the more it is likely to be published and cited. But the more cited it is, the more likely it is that no one will be able to replicate the results. Since “interesting” is judged through Big-Government-feeding-troughs, what’s interesting is often political activism. A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more
“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?'” Their possible answer is that review teams of academic journals face a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility. The link between interesting findings and nonreplicable research also can explain why it is cited at a much higher rate — the authors found that papers that successfully replicate are cited 153 times less than those that failed. “Interesting or appealing findings are also covered more by media or shared on platforms like Twitter, generating a lot of attention, but that does not make them true,” Gneezy said. Only 60% of Science and Nature papers could be replicated: Serra-Garcia and Gneezy analyzed data from three influential replication projects which tried to systematically replicate the findings in top psychology, economic and general science journals (Nature and Science). In psychology, only 39 percent of the 100 experiments successfully replicated. In economics, 61 percent of the 18 studies replicated as did 62 percent of the 21 studies published in Nature/Science. Keep reading → May 25th, 2021 | Tags: Peer Review | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, Logic & Reason, Science, Science Communication |  Print This Post | |
This abdication of global charity leaves the path clear for the largest funder of foreign coal plants, the Chinese Communist Party. China can win even more favours and UN votes by being the only supplier of coal fired assistance to a desperate third world. That’ll suit President Xi. He thanks the G7 patsies who limit their gifts to dinky unreliable solar panels and wind towers. Ten or twenty years from now, those gifts will be so much landfill. The coal plants will power on. This was another nothingness press release just to look like a “win”, like progress was happening, and to give irrelevant former PMs a chance to grandstand. And the ABC and SBS bored us with another advert for Green-Fantasy-Island and didn’t mention that this was largely a repeat of a 5 year old agreement. Nor did they mention that China is the largest funder of foreign coal, and it’s going to keep doing that. G-7 countries commit to restrict international coal fundingYahoo News, Environment and climate leaders from Group of Seven (G-7) countries, made up of several advanced economies, said Friday that they will aim to put restrictions on funding for international power produced from coal. The officials from the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan also reaffirmed their country’s 2016 commitment to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. The “news” was just a form of advertisingGiven who benefits from the big non-announcement, it would be good foreign policy if the CCP were funding the likes of Greenpeace and co, or sending some “1000 talents” professors to help the IEA. Maybe someone should look? China is not even pretending to feel pressured or follow suit. This is China a month ago: Why China Is the Odd Man Out on Overseas Coal Financing April 21, 2021, AsianPolyglotView President Xi Jinping reiterated at the summit that ecological cooperation is a key aspect of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—China made no promises to end coal financing abroad, even as Japan and South Korea, the second and third largest financiers of overseas coal power plants, take ambitious steps to stop funding overseas coal plants… Indeed, China is working directly against the Paris accord, flagrantly, openly, on a massive scale, and the coal plants it is providing are not even the cleaner sort: How China’s Big Overseas Initiative Threatens Global Climate Progress Jan 3, 2019, Yale Environment China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a colossal infrastructure plan that could transform the economies of nations around the world. But with its focus on coal-fired power plants, the effort could obliterate any chance of reducing emissions and tip the world into catastrophic climate change. *Only* 70 nations have signed the Belt and Road program: China has over ten gigawatts of overseas coal power in the pipeline, and the central government has indicated coal will continue to be a part of the country’s overseas financing strategy for the foreseeable future. Chinese officials claim the country’s foreign direct investment and development financing for coal are simply meeting the demands of other countries. Yet comparing China’s financing side by side with Japan and South Korea, China has been willing to fund coal-fired power plants that use less efficient, higher-emissions technologies, even within countries that have also received Japanese and South Korean financing.  … Do we forgive China for this intransigence because it’s a developing country? How does that work? It’s like they’re too poor to cut coal power at home, which means they have to build it in Africa? Meanwhile the advert meant a former PM and father to a hedge-fund-manager known-to-invest-in-renewables, got prime time publicity to lecture us on how far we are behind the rest of the world, despite that Australia doesn’t fund coal overseas either, and we’ve cut emissions per capita more than nearly anywhere on Earth. The public broadcaster is just an advertiser for whatever policy journalists want to see forced on the people that pay their salary: Australia accused of being ‘out-of-step’ on climateFormer prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has warned that Australia is more “out-of-step” with its allies than ever on the issue of climate change after G7 countries agreed to stop international funding for coal-fired power. The world’s seven largest advanced economies agreed on Friday to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and phase out such support for all fossil fuels, to meet globally agreed climate change targets. Australia doesn’t finance overseas coal projects, but Mr Turnbull said Australia’s “coal-hugging gas-loving sentiment” made it an outlier. “I cannot recall Australia ever being so out-of-step with our friends and allies as we are today on climate,” he tweeted. Time we built coal plants for the third world, starting with Australia. Chairman Mao poster: Wikimedia public domain. Keep reading → … The Tomago smelter uses more than 10% of the entire New South Wales electricity grid supply. But the price spikes in electricity are so crippling the industrial giant could not afford to keep running on three occasions in the last week. Welcome to Venezaustralia. And it’s not even winter yet: Prices were spiking in four states on May 17th.. Thanks to WattClarity. Tomago aluminium smelter powers down three times in a week due to electricity shortagesA massive 35,000 per cent spike in wholesale power prices due to supply shortages has forced a NSW aluminium smelter to shut down three times in the past week to keep the lights on in Sydney. The Tomago smelter, which supports more than 1800 local jobs, has had to power down multiple times since May 12 to ensure households across the state have enough power for heating as winter sets in. Tomago chief executive Matt Howell said the sudden power price hike to $14,500 a megawatt hour was the equivalent of petrol prices going up to $400 a litre. This time it was mega-price-spikes but other days Tomago plays Electricity-Saint for NSW, saving it from blackouts because it can dump 630MW in five minutes. Rafe Champion, Catallaxy Tomago provides critical energy security to NSW and the National Energy Market (NEM) because it has the largest interruptible load in the NEM. It can reduce load by as much as 630MW in as little as five minutes to ensure blackouts are averted when there is a system security risk. By way of comparison, the next largest interruptible load in NSW is 50MW. The grid cannot currently operate without the fallback option of being able to request that big industry users power down. It says something about an economy that uses its largest capital infrastructure as a sort of random battery back up for a dodgy grid. Once upon a time, the job of companies was to make products for customers and money for shareholders. The effects of the fixation with weather-control are pervasive. Thanks to the Glorious Green Energy Quest, the Deep State Octopus can reach right into the private world and sucker a thousand tons of jelly on the conveyors of civilization. Keep reading → May 22nd, 2021 | Tags: NSW (New South Wales), Renewable Energy | Category: Australia, Cost, Electricity, Global Warming, Grids | Print This Post | | Did any of them even give up their pocket money this week? When you can’t talk adults and real voters into marching en masse or losing pay in an actual strike, the only protesters left are children — the cheapest “Rent-a-crowd” around. Is there any audience easier to find on a weekday than school children told they can skip school for a walk in the park? There are 4 million school students in Australia, and less than 0.5% may have turned up today. #ClimateStrike: Why not let ten year olds set national energy policy?. What are these students learning?  Advanced grid management? We all know why they don’t hold these protests on the weekend:  … These students are learning that old people are selfish and dumb, and that 80 year olds don’t realize “there is no spare planet”. Let’s teach them humility, and history and why Autocrats always use children to sell their agendas. Chumpy cliches make for cute TV moments as long as journalists don’t ask any hard questions. But they don’t solve the high maintenance costs of collecting low density energy across vast square kilometers of wilderness. Let’s teach our children what inertia and 50Hz frequency stability means instead, and why intermittent renewables can’t provide either. Let’s take them on tours of coal plants run by actual engineers. Let’s use government funding to make computer games where students have to design national electricity grids with real costs (not subsidies). Let them figure out how to go “net zero” on a 10GW grid, when every system blackout costs a billion dollars, battery storage lasts 3 minutes, and fuel makes up only a tiny part of the total bill. There is still no evidence CO2 will cause a catastrophe. Bragging, so soon? This kind of talk will not endear: The comments were made by Chen Ping, a Senior Researcher at The China Institute of Fudan University, a CCP affiliated think tank, and a professor at Peking University. The video, which appeared online recently, was translated by New York-based Chinese blogger Jennifer Zeng:
Ping states in the video that “In 2020, China won the trade war, science and technology war, and especially the biological war.” …“the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the CCP has won and ‘will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution’ after the 2020 CCPVirus (COVID19) pandemic.” The achievement is unprecedented. This is an epoch-making historical record,” he continues, adding “So for the liberal, America-worshiping cult within China, their worship of the U.S. is actually unfounded.” When will the West find its feet and stop hating itself? Speaking of Biological war: There’s fruit from the Chinese 1000 Talents Plan: Song Guo Zheng was part of a team collecting $4m from the US NIH while he was also drawing in funding from the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation — something he failed to mention. He was caught attempting to fly to China with suitcases packed with laptops, memory sticks, silver and paperwork for what looked like a “new life”. May 14th 2021: A former Ohio State University professor, renown for his research work, was sentenced to 37 months in prison after admitting he did not disclose his China affiliations when securing federal grant funding for medical research. Song Guo Zheng, 58, of Hilliard, also will have to make restitution of $3.4 million to the National Institutes of Health and nearly $414,000 to Ohio State under a sentence announced Friday by Chief U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley. Acting U.S. Attorney Vipal J. Patel said in a released statement. “Stealing is stealing, but stealing at the behest of a foreign government’s concerted effort to pilfer our nation’s innovations and technology takes things to a new and significantly worse level.” Meanwhile, the Seychelles, which is already 60% vaccinated, is getting its first wave of Covid infections. Two vaccines were used, the Sinopharm Chinese vaccine, and an Indian made version of AstraZenica. While other vaccines may have higher efficacy, it’s a reminder that vaccines aren’t going to easily save us from a mutating pandemic which is a cluster spreading disease from a family of viruses that don’t seem to create lasting immunity. In the Seychelles, vaccinated people got infected at about half the rate of unvaccinated people. We’re told they have a lower chance of being hospitalized, which is good. But they can still infect others, and we’re risking the awful immune escape potentially leading to nastier mutants, plus other side effects like Antibody Dependent Enhancement, and Original Antigenic Sin which could both misdirect our immune responses so we a more severe disease. Antivirals could change all that, but they are too cheap, and out of patent, for Big Pharma to profit from, hence, banned in “rich markets” but used in the third world. To expose this scandal, where are our publicly funded universities? What exactly do we pay them for? h/t Charles M, Lance, David. Keep reading → May 21st, 2021 | Tags: China, Coronavirus | Category: China, Property Rights, war | Print This Post | | … Things are turning around in India — starting within days of increasing the use of Ivermectin again. But where is the media? Who is reporting that the turnaround in some states of India has started within a couple of weeks of the expanded use of Ivermectin — the 50 cent old drug that has been used for 3.7 billion prescriptions worldwide, given to children to treat headlice, scabies and worms and is used by the ton on cattle and sheep farms. Hallalujah? Or read and weep — how much of the ghastly debacle could have been stopped before it even started?  Ivermectin starts again in India (shaded dark grey) @jjchamie On April 20th, New Dehli, AIIMs reccommended Ivermectin be added to the take home care package. So people getting tested would be able to start early treatment. Cases started slowing down almost immediately.  ….
On May 10th the Health Minister for Goa recommended the use of Ivermectin in Goa. Indeed, he offered it to the entire adult population. The next day, the WHO, ever so helpfully, warned against the use of Ivermectin in India.
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Sadly Tamil Nadu is going the other way, they used Ivermectin for three days, then stopped it, and bought up Remdesivir instead (a Gilead drug that costs around $3000 a patient.) Still, it’s handy to have a control group. Shame the people of Tamil Nadu are part of the experiment. Hard to believe the Chief Minister in Goa is M K Stalin.  … Twenty thousand doses of Remdesivir cost 60 million dollars, while 20,000 doses of Ivermectin go for a few hundred. Where is a developing country getting the 60 million dollars a day to purchase the Remdesivir? Why is their leader throwing away a cheap drug, Ivermectin, that has saved lives in other countries? India started using Ivermectin back on August 8, 2020 at the peak of the first wave. It’s not easy to find out when or if the use of Ivermectin slowed or stopped. Indeed it is strangely difficult to find anything on most search engines apart from fact checks that warn against the use of Ivermectin. There are claims that the use of the drug stalled in January, but very little official confirmation.  From Twitter Could the media get the situation more wrong?Back on April 28th at the peak of new cases in India the geniuses on Business Insider said it was the perfect storm for India and blamed, among other things, the slow roll out of the vaccine. Nameless experts even blamed Ivermectin. Experts said some doctors in India have – whether due to a lack of training or sheer desperation – tried administering medications that don’t work against the virus, like ivermectin, a prescription used to treat parasitic infections. “I’ve heard stories of people getting three, four, five, six meds prescribed to them, medications that have not been shown to be effective at all,” Kuppalli said. “I think people are just grasping for straws and that just adds to the chaos and the anxiety.” The message from one doctor in India: Keep reading → Imperfect storm on the way?
Adam Gaertner has posted a zinger of a provocative article, to say the least. Thanks to David Archibald author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia for pointing me at it. A New Mutation threatens a Fragile Recovery What if mass vaccination with imperfect vaccines could promote the survival of nastier strains of Covid? What if the leaky vaccines act like a filter for more dangerous versions of SARS2? This doesn’t happen with most vaccines, only “leaky” ones. But it has happened in chickens with a virus called Marek’s disease. Leaky vaccines generate a half-baked immune response — one that stops illness, but allows transmission, so a vaccinated person can theoretically infect others. This is bad but not awful — as long as the virus gets eliminated in a timely fashion. But if the virus can cloak itself from the immune system, and hide in protected cells, then it can keep replicating for a long time, and eventually, randomly, it will escape the imperfect immune response. Those mutants will be resistant to the antibodies or t-cell tricks. Thus newer strains of Covid may arise that are already pre-loaded with goodies to get around our immune system. This is not how pandemics normally work In most pandemics, after a few years, the nicer strains out-compete the nastier ones. Natural selection favours viruses that don’t kill or disable their human shedders. A sick body on the move is a more efficient spreader than someone flat out on their back in bed. It takes two things to break that pattern. One is a leaky or imperfect vaccine. The other thing is that this virus appears to have the ability (like Marek’s disease) to cloak itself from our immune system and hide in protected cells. This combination could make for a perfect storm, where vaccinated people feel OK, but viruses hidden away within keep sending out copies that test the half-baked immune response in a holding pattern until one lucky mutant virus escapes the net. The new variant is nastier and trickier than the last one and we need to redesign a new vaccine. Repeat, rinse, recycle a few times and we might be breeding a virus that is more easily spread and has a higher mortality rate — especially for unvaccinated people. This process is called immune escape, and once you know where to look, it seems virologists have been warning of it (and here, and here). But not necessarily expanding on just how bad it could be. They only mention that we might have to produce a new vaccine. (Gosh, darn, won’t Big Pharma be disappointed?) But there are reports of new “immune escape” variants, like the one in West Bengal. Look at what happened to chickens and Marek disease Photo by William Moreland. Who knew? In the last six years it’s been confirmed and accepted that vaccines played a role in creating a much nastier and deadlier form of Marek disease in chickens (MDV). Over the last 50 years, we’ve made vaccines that stop the chickens getting cancer and dying, but don’t stop them shedding virus and infecting other chickens. Unlike most viruses MDV can sit latent “for life” and slowly churn out copies while also suppressing the immune system. So each chicken becomes a kind of slow slot machine in a game of viral poker. The chickens immune system holds it at bay, but sooner or later, the virus finds an escape route around the immune system, becoming more infectious, more virulent, and effectively bypassing the current vaccine. This process started in 1970 with the first vaccine which at the time stopped 99% of Marek’s disease. The disease originally had a low mortality but after 50 years, the MDV virus has become a kind of monster, and is considered to be 100% fatal to unvaccinated chickens. For a chicken, the odds are worse than Ebola. What have we done? How imperfect vaccines created the conditions to select for a nastier disease Andrew Read et al, in 2015: MDV became increasingly virulent over the second half of the 20th century [19,21–24]. Until the 1950s, strains of MDV circulating on poultry farms caused a mildly paralytic disease, with lesions largely restricted to peripheral nervous tissue. Death was relatively rare. Today, hyperpathogenic strains are present worldwide. These strains induce lymphomas in a wide range of organs and mortality rates of up to 100% in unvaccinated birds. So far as we are aware, no one has been able to isolate non-lethal MDV strains from today’s commercial (vaccinated) poultry operations [19,23]. Quite what promoted this viral evolution is unclear. The imperfect-vaccine hypothesis was suggested as an evolutionary mechanism by which immunization might drive MDV virulence evolution [2], but there has been no experimental confirmation. Our data provide that: by enhancing host survival but not preventing viral shedding, MDV vaccination of hens or offspring greatly prolongs the infectious periods of hyperpathogenic strains, and hence the amount of virus they shed into the environment. Andrew Read proposed this imperfect-vaccine idea in 2001, but it was purely theoretical until he was able to test and confirm it in 2015. His work was described by Ed Yong, National Geographic: The duo infected vaccinated and unvaccinated chicks with five different strains of Marek’s virus, of varying virulence. They found that when unvaccinated birds are infected with mild strains, they shed plenty of viruses into their surroundings. If they contract the most lethal strains, they die before this can happen, and their infections stop with them. In the vaccinated chicks, this pattern flips. The milder strains are suppressed but the lethal ones, which the birds can now withstand, flood into the environment at a thousand times their usual numbers. So don’t mix vaccinated and unvaccinated chickens, right? I can’t see this working in humans… Read and Nair also found that the “lethal” strains could spread from one vaccinated individual to another, and that unvaccinated chickens were at greatest risk of disease and death if they were housed with vaccinated ones. The chicken industry has learned to live with Mareks disease. Unvaccinated chickens though, have not. And the industry loses $2b a year as well. Chicks are reared separately from mum and dad apparently, so they can survive long enough to get the vaccine and get protection before they risk catching the disease. Some people keep unvaccinated backyard flocks, but those chickens don’t go on holidays, or to weddings or funerals and rarely meet other chickens. None of this translates too well to homo sapiens. Dystopia 2025? Look at the mutations in just one patient alone: To get an idea of how big a problem this could be, consider that one particular transplant patient who had Covid and was on immunosuppressants, was infected for 170 days last year before finally clearing the infection. Weigang et al 2021, followed him closely. They identified the different mutants as they arose, and also testing them to see if they could infect live cells in a lab. For those of us who like genetic engineering, this paper is like a reality TV show with live sequencing. Hot The patient developed mildly symptomatic COVID-19, and tested positive for 145 days. The daily swabs showed the virus was developing an array of substitutions and deletions of amino acids in the spike protein, which were partly resistant to neutralizing antibodies. Did remdesivir save the day? Using antivirals to stop extended infections makes sense, given the risks. (But why wait til Day 140 when we could start on Day 1?) The aim was to allow the body to mount a more effective antiviral response. On day 140 the patient remained RT PCR positive, and was put on remdesivir for 10 days. From day 149 to 189, all subsequent tests were negative, and the pathogen could no longer be isolated, indicating viral clearance. Do the math: There are 1-2 new mutations per month, per infected person? The typical rate of mutations is about 1-2 mutations a month, and this was confirmed in the present patient, with the relative stability of the viral genome over the early period of the infection. From day 42, mutations began to accumulate, including the D614G substitution that is now globally dominant. The researchers tested the various versions of SARS2 in mice and found that the mutations made the virus less deadly between days 35 and 105. But the virus was also picking up mutations that meant antibodies were not binding as well to it. The study thus supports the emergence of new variants that evade immunity in chronically immunosuppressed patients, as also reported with patients treated repeatedly with antibody cocktails and convalescent plasma. The variants in this study resemble the current UK, South African and Brazil variants, with escape mutations in the same spike region. (Weigang et al 2021). Those were some pretty serious mutations in just one guy? This doesn’t happen with all leaky vaccines. For example, Poliovirus vaccine allows some leakage but after fifty years of use, the virulence hasn’t increased. However shedding of poliovirus only lasts for two weeks, not months, not long enough to generate mutations perhaps? Where to next?If vaccinated people are or start to produce more deadly variants, there will be even more calls (if that’s possible) to vaccinate everyone on Earth plus their cats. People may use the term “herd immunity” but it doesn’t apply. Herd immunity means immunized people protect the vulnerable by not transmitting the virus. And even if we could and did vaccinate everyone (ignoring all the risks and ethical questions for the moment) that isn’t a solution. It’s just a temporary stop-gap until the next and nastier round in the arms race. Obviously we are not going to live like chickens with a highly fatal disease knocking off the unvaccinated. (Surely?!) Things we can do:
In a bioweapons arms race (with a virus, if not a nation) all the West should be setting up bigger and better biotech labs. A bonanza of discoveries will come out of these medical advances, but every month matters. We may be on the cusp of the new glorious antivirals era, much like the transformation we saw after World War II with antibiotics. Feeling sick, just pop in to the doc and get an antiviral on the way to work? Why waste another dollar on fake green energy if we can be biotech leaders instead? It’s possible that our immune system may have some extra tricks we don’t know abou Keep reading → …. Political correctness is the correct way to lose every election. By its very nature, virtue signalling is almost guaranteed to be an electoral disaster. The whole game is to get to the top of the pecking order and mark yourself as being above the unwashed riff raff. A long time ago, if your brain wave was a good idea, the riff raff would adopt it too, which was all fine and good, except then you need another different good idea. And when all that’s left are more absurd signalling displays: Can you control the weather with your plastic shopping bag? Can you set people free by vandalizing statues? Labor Parties all over the world suffer from the same thing. They stopped listening and caring what the workers think. h/ t David E Look at the massive disconnect here: Poll proves wokery lost Labour ‘red wall’ seats:Glen Owen, Mail on Sunday Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion on woke issues, a Mail on Sunday poll has found. The survey revealed that the party was overwhelmingly associated with support for politically correct issues – such as pulling down statues of historical figures – that are not backed by voters. The figures will add to concerns among Labour strategists that the party’s metropolitan image is alienating its working-class base, particularly among its former supporters in the North.  …. The Labor Party have an image problem. They tried to look politically correct and everyone believed them. At least the conservative government is trying to make it harder to cheat in the election: UK government to introduce criticised voter ID law this year …Britain’s government will introduce a new law this year to crack down on the potential for voter fraud and intimidation by including rules requiring voters to prove their identities, a move critics said could deter people from casting ballots. “Stealing someone’s vote is stealing their voice. We must go further to protect and modernise our precious democracy,” Chloe Smith, minister for the Constitution and Devolution, said in a statement. POST NOTE: And this is not a good thing for Western democracy. When the opposition party is captured by Wokeness there is no one left in the centre to argue for better policies. The so-called Conservative party slides toward political correctness too. Always better to have two strong major parties than none.
May 18th, 2021 | Tags: Elections, Political Correctness, Polls, UK, Woke | Category: Global Warming, Ideology, Politics, polls, UK, Woke | Print This Post | | We panic about the next half degree of warming (above the 1.5 we’ve already had) but the depth of the ice age was savagely cold. For years the experts told us what Earth’s temperature was then, but apparently they were wrong. And yet corals and rainforest survived. Plus turtles, whales, kittens — lots of things. And all without research grants.  …  Nice line on the Nobel gas calibration with ground temperatures. Nice proxy. Two studies have come out in the last 10 months both showing that at its coldest point about 25,000 years ago, the Earth was on average six degrees cooler Celcius than it is today. And this new study includes estimates of temperatures of tropical land near the oceans which ought to be more stable and less prone to big extremes. This comes from a newer style of proxy based on noble gases dissolved in ground water. It appears to be quite an accurate proxy, judging by the graph to the right. And it solves a lot of problems with other proxies. We can take samples from all around the world instead of just the polar ice caps (like we can with ice cores). And it’s not dependent on living things which like higher CO2 levels and inconveniently move location as the climate changes. It’s always worse than we thought“The real significance of our paper is that prior work has badly underestimated the cooling in the last glacial period, which has low-balled estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases,” said paper co-author Jeffrey Severinghaus, a professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. “The main reason that prior work was flawed was that it relied heavily on species abundances in the past. But just like humans, species tend to migrate to where the climate suits them. The real significance is that 1. Experts are often wrong. 2. Real climate change is brutal. and 3. We don’t know when the next one is coming. If this is right, all the other big experts were not. But what’s two or three degrees between friends?
 Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of AP2 LGM cooling estimates to literature values. The worst cooling was in the Northern hemisphere in Europe and Canada. Horizontal scale is in degrees latitude. ie 40 = 40N and -40 = 40S.
So the study finds that natural climate change is larger than anyone thought, and the next ice age is more scary than anyone realized, but this apparently means CO2 is more awful than ever. It seems the tropics can cool more than anyone thought, therefore they can also warm more than anyone expected. Got that? Because whatever happened, CO2 did it. “The rather high climate sensitivity that our results suggest is not good news regarding future global warming, which may be stronger than expected using previous best estimates. In particular, our global review reinforces the finding of several single noble gas case studies that the tropics were substantially cooler during the last glacial maximum than at present. The unpleasant implication for the future is that the warmest regions of the world are not immune to further heating,” commented co-author Werner Aeschbach, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany. Of course, it all comes down to how these proxies are then used to guesstimate the effect of CO2 (while ignoring the effect of every other climate variable). Don’t get the idea that I’m 100% sold on the deep cold and the new proxy. It’s not confidence building when researchers announce results in terms of CO2 when they didn’t have to. Confirmation bias? Would you like more circular reasoning with those green colored glasses?Thanks to obsessive Government funding, the point of every new proxy is to recalculate the “climate sensitivity” of CO2, never to test the climate models, or calculate the effect of the sun, the moon or the effect of space weather on Earth. But they effectively are using a model to find a number that “shows models are right”. If solar-magnetic-wind-or-cosmic-factors affect the climate, the models (and researchers) are oblivious. Instead of finding “the sun did it” they will auto-attribute most of the Sun’s driving force to CO2 instead, because the models assume all those solar effects have zero effect on Earth’s weather. And because the magic stardust of CO2 will always explain all the gaps, researchers will never find out how much influence the solar factors have because they aren’t looking. Keep reading → May 16th, 2021 | Tags: Glaciers, Global Temperatures (last 2000 yrs), Ice Age, Ice Cores, Paleoclimate | Category: Cryosphere, Geology, Global Warming, Holocene, Paleolithic | Print This Post | | … This week a mild Coronal Mass Ejection off the sun blasted past Earth. It was only a mild CME with solar winds at 500km per second, which is a medium kind of speed. The experts were all predicting a G1 class Geomagnetic storm, and were a bit astonished when we got much bigger G3 storm instead. (NOAA’s G scale runs from G1 up to G5). This occurred near the minimum weak point of the solar cycle, and we’re going to get much bigger blasts as Cycle 25 ramps up. But if mild CMEs can rattle the Earth’s magnetic field this much, things might get much more exciting when moderate or strong CME’s shake the cage. Satellites and networks could be in trouble. “Grid’s Away”… Is Earths magnetic field weaker or more vulnerable than we thought? How could we miss that? As Cap Allon of Electroverse said: “Nobody saw the KP Index hitting 7. …when I say nobody, I mean nobody predicted this: not NASA, NOAA, ESA or IPS in Australia.” It was not dense, and the filament released was hardly cause for concern. “There is absolutely nothing in the history of space weather that advises the expectation of a strong geomagnetic storm off a mild CME produced by the eruption of a small plasma filament,” says Ben Davidson of SpaceWeatherNews.com. What happens when the next one hits on the heels of a coronal hole stream? Or if the filament was bigger? What happens when that X-class solar flare is launched in our direction? Keep reading → May 14th, 2021 | Tags: Magnetic Field, Solar Flares, Solar-Magnetic | Category: Astronomy, The Sun | Print This Post | | In 2020, the WHO did not protect even one country, but now says they just need more money and more power. The WHO should be disbanded, it failed at the one most important job it was set up to do — stop pandemics. It’s only a year too late, but the WHO is finally telling people they could avoid deadly pandemics. A new report is out, with former New Zealand PM Helen Clark admitting only that the World Health Organisation was a week too late in calling it an emergency. After that tiny mini-culpa, then she blames slow nations for “wasting the month of February”. Though Clark seems to have forgotten the same stupid nations were all following WHO’s advice at the time. This is what failure looks like — Tedros, the WHO Director General on Jan 29, last year When he could have saved the world, he was being a one man Xi Jinping fan club. Listen to this shameless rave: …Tedros said it is admirable that the Chinese government has shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic. President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability, Tedros said. He said that China has released information in an open and transparent manner, identified the pathogen in a record-short time and shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in a timely manner with the WHO and other countries. China’s measures are not only protecting its people, but also protecting the people in the whole world, he said.  Tedros Adhanom So the WHO was the main enabler of bioweaponsThe West wastes $5 billion dollars every year on an organization so corrupt it has been captured and turned into a Chinese advertising agency that directly works against the interests of the Western nations that fund it. Here’s Helen Clark, forgetting: “The WHO didn’t get enough information quickly enough. “ If only they had a twitter account, they could have seen the carnage live? “So many delays but we also looked in our report at the month of February when most countries took a wait and see approach rather than aggressively moving to either keep the disease out or contain the spread and that proved to be very, very harmful as well.” As it is, Helen Clark has 1,000 words on the ABC and doesn’t say “border” once. And Leigh Sales helps her get away with it. Admitting they failed (a tiny bit) is only a tool they use to demand more moneyWHO ‘needs more powers’ says independent panel co-chair Helen Clark For the world to prevent the next crisis, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response recommends a more independent World Health Organization, a new council that would maintain a political commitment to pandemic preparedness and response, and a financing facility that can disburse $50-$100 billion at short notice. Tedros is up for re-election and wants another five years to cover up for China. As I said on Feb 1, there were $13b reasons why Tedros went out of his way to praise President Xi of China… Follow the chain, or rather the Belt and RoadThe WHO Director General is Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia. From 2012 – 2016 he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the one party government that rules Ethiopia. This is the same party that borrowed billions from China to build a railway line, then struggles to pay it back. In Africa, Ethiopia is the second largest debtor nation to China — owing $13 billion. As Foreign Minister Adhanom praised China for African loans, looks like he was the man to line them up. We also note that the one-party ruling party of Ethiopia is called the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front which was once a Marxist Lenninist far left group — labels it dropped after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Thanks Maurice for these tips). A million people signed a petition to sack him but he’s still there. Give us our money back!
TdeF in comments: It’s time to “Defund the UN”If Democrats can demand the disbanding (defunding) of the police force and ICE for immigration, surely the world can demand the defunding of the massive so called United Nations. It has metastasized into an another evil group seeking world domination, as has the EU. We need UNEXIT. The only thing which should remain is the Security Council. The other 80,000 people can go home. Including Helen Clarke and the other Carbon Tax queens. …
Surely the UK government must be working out that electricity supply is a major tool for foreign disputes. Currently about 10% of the UK electricity comes in via undersea cables*, but that is set to rise to 25%, according to the Daily Mail. Surely alarms are ringing? This is not even the first time this outrageous threat was made. Macron himself threatened it last October too. See “Hands Up! Your money or your Fish!“ There is a very uneasy power balance here: The right to fish in British waters is worth about 650 million euros to EU fishermen, but European energy markets were worth up to £2.3 billion for the UK. Not only does it leave the UK in a weaker negotiation position, but a selfish foreign player could also ambiguously twist the knife with well timed, deniable, cable accidents costing millions of dollars and wreaking havoc. A blackout in 2017 left many travellers trapped in underground train systems for hours, with many resorting to mobile phone “torches” to find their way out. Chaos. Smart political players lecture gullible patsies on setting “net zero” targets to change the weather, while making sure they use nuclear power or just repeatedly fail to meet their own targets. In this case both leaders are playing a popular vote-winning card for their domestic audiences. There is a lot of puffery theater going on. But underneath that are very real vulnerabilities that will matter when things unravel due to pandemics, wars or economic crashes. Who knows, what if a third party submarine decided to target those cables? Could they get away with that in the Channel? Greater military minds than I will know more about what’s possible with submarines in the Channel — remembering that it doesn’t need to be a big sub to damage a power cable, or perhaps, even a sub. How about fishing boats, anchors or divers? h/t GWPF UK faces electric shock: Jersey fishermen row shows our reliance on Europe for power could land us in big trouble, expert warnsby Harriet Line, UK Daily Mail Tony Lodge, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said the UK is setting itself up for ‘almighty trouble’ by the end of the decade. He warned that Britain is offshoring its energy security and emissions to Europe, leaving it vulnerable if the Continent’s surplus of power is reduced. On Tuesday French maritime minister Annick Girardin said Paris would cut off electricity to Jersey – which gets 95 per cent of its power supply from France – if the dispute was not resolved. Mr Lodge yesterday said this had ‘inadvertently exposed’ the ‘very dangerous’ threat of being too reliant on a foreign supplier.
Shutting off electricity to a foreign country is nothing short of international gangsterism. The very idea of it shames a great democratic nation such as France. It would be a hostile act that would put lives in danger. Without electricity, Jersey’s hospitals and many other vital services would be impaired. *The UK Daily Mail said “8%” but last October the Times said 10% with a lot more detail. Half of the total incoming supply is from France.
 … We already knew the CCP were acting guilty, destroying all the samples and telling us it was like the flu when it wasn’t. They were blocking it from flying around inside China, but exporting it internationally. Sharri Markson, at The Australian, has received documents from the US State Department showing that in 2015 Chinese Military scientists were chatting and strategizing in fairly malevolent ways, about how useful bioweapons could be. As far as weapons-of-mass-destruction go, bioweapons are as cheap as chips, could overrun hospitals, strike fear into the hearts of soldiers and people, and wreak chaos on the economy. Tick, Tick and Tick. These weapons are self replicating, as long we feed them new bodies. Think of them as like miniature F-111s that can disassemble the enemy infrastructure and turn our ploughshares into their F-111s so to speak.  Image: Scientific Animations The question for the last year, was not so much whether it was a man-made creation, but whether it was released deliberately or not. To that end, we don’t know, but if a hostile state was going to release it deliberately, you’d think they would aim for somewhere other than “next door” to the virology lab it was created in. That military chiefs may have been discussing this is not unusual. Probably teams in every major nation have run wargame scenarios with coronaviruses as bioweapons — the thing that makes this different is that it can be traced to people at or near the top, and no one appears to be pretending to be a good global citizen. It’s all in the phrasing… Chinese military scientists discussed weaponising SARS coronavirusesThe Australian Chinese military scientists held talks on bio-weapon benefitsThe paper describes SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and says they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”. Titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bio-weapons, the document outlines China’s progress in the research field of bio-warfare, saying a third world war would be fought using biological weapons. It’s a bargain WMD: … bio-weapons could be mass-produced at 0.05 per cent of the cost of traditional weapons when compared to the cost per square kilometre of damage. The study also examines the optimum conditions under which to release a bioweapon. “Bioweapon attacks are best conducted during dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather because intense sunlight can damage the pathogens,” it states. “Biological agents should be released during dry weather. Rain or snow can cause the aerosol particles to precipitate. “A stable wind direction is desirable so that the aerosol can float into the target area.” There were 18 authors, and one Xu Dezhong, a top level scientist was reporting to the top honks of the CCP, especially during the first SARS outbreak. Curiously, he thought the first SARS was a bioweapon and one of his 50PhD’s wrote a thesis on that. In a chilling echo of many states’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors note that the release of a bio-weapon could have secondary effects by placing enormous burdens on a country’s healthcare system. Using the example of an attack on a city of five million with 10 per cent of the population requiring hospitalisation, the document notes it could “cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse”. Some of China’s senior public health and military figures are listed among the 18 authors of the document, including the former deputy director of China’s Bureau of Epidemic Prevention, Li Feng. Ten of the authors are scientists and weapons experts affiliated with the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, ranked “very high-risk” for its level of defence research, including its work on medical and psychological sciences, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Defence Universities Tracker. Whatever we do, don’t let Tedros or the WHO run the “investigation”:World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has previously said there needs to be further investigation into the possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan, criticising his own team’s inquiry — that claimed a lab leak was unlikely — for not being thorough or extensive. Tedros could have saved the world but worked for President Xi instead. As I reported on Feb 2 last year, this is the WHO Chief who told us to keep the borders open so the virus could infect the world. As I reported on Feb 4 this is the same man who was Foreign Minister of Ethiopia around the same time that nation became the largest African Belt and Road debtor. Tedros is probably angling to run the second WHO investigation just to keep control of the process, stop other investigations and create another whitewash. Right now, the rest of the world needs to form the G199 or something “Everyone but China”The world needs to band together to stop China getting away with anything, and to get it to behave like a good global citizen. Sharri Markson has written a whole book — What Really Happened in Wuhan, soon to be released. It’s not clear why an Australian journalist got the info before US ones, but given the US had a role in setting up the lab at Wuhan, and US journalists have religious objections to discussing anything that might show Donald Trump in a good light (especially at the expense of the Guru-Fauci), it may have been easier to release in Australia. There is some small consolation in knowing that if the CCP accidentally let this cat out of the bag, it will only help the West get ready for the next one. h/t to GlenM
May 12th, 2021 | Tags: Bioweapon, China, Coronavirus, Virus | Category: China, Microbiology, war | Print This Post | | … |
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