Overnight, people woke up to the real threat and markets crashed appropriately. Unless we take massive action immediately, the exponential curve is about to lift off. And if we don’t act now then massive action is coming anyway in a month, along with major disruption, pandemonium, and worse.
There are now 5,300 cases outside China. If it doubles every 5 days (as it just has) then 40 days from now 5 million people will be infected.
What does massive action look like? A bit like this:
In Japan some are in uproar — they’re the ones who don’t understand how 226 infections becomes a national hospital crisis in weeks. Japan (like most nations) is theoretically only 19 doublings away from 100% infected.
Lies are killing people in Wuhan. We don’t know the real situation, not even the situation of our own residential building. But we deserve the right to know everything, which can only help us to control the contagion. We were told that buildings with red tape indicate that no residents are infected by the virus, but the ones with white notices posted outside indicate infections. But our building has no such notices, and we have no way of knowing who’s infected.
On the lockdown:
The first problem, however, is that the rules for the isolation facilities have been loosely applied, which I can still observe today [Feb. 18] from my apartment, a high-level unit. The second problem is that security measures have turned out to be a mere formality. I saw with my own eyes that security guards were often absent from their posts. Many of them let people through…
WHO says 1% mortality rate in China
The high mortality rate is not the tip of the iceberg — it is the iceberg.
At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with Covid-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.
A virus with a 1% case fatality rate– that’s ten times worse than The Flu — could kill 70 million people.
The WHO is rarely worth quoting, (because of this kind of conflicts of interest) but they’ve been playing this disaster down. When the team run by an apologist for Xi says “1%” and it matches the shocking stories on #Covid2019, it’s time to pay attention.
As bad as it is, its a relief after weeks of watching this build while leaders were asleep the wheel. Finally, some action. If a few major economies launch into action — others will suddenly follow. Like fish flipping from “don’t want to look alarmist” to “don’t want to look inept”.
The non-binding unenforceable Paris agreement was always a theatre show on the international stage, where most countries promise to do nothing, and the rest make promises they don’t keep. But it’s an excuse for the domestic Deep State to do whatever they want.
The zero carbon goal by 2050 was also a Grand Theater Promise. But here the two symbolic acts of nothingness met like anti-matter and threaten to blow up an economy.
Controversial plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport have been thrown into doubt after a court ruling.
The government’s decision to allow the expansion was unlawful because it did not take climate commitments into account, the Court of Appeal said. Heathrow said it would challenge the decision, but the government said it would not appeal.
The judges said that in future, a third runway could go ahead, as long as it fits with the UK’s climate policy.
Since when were Judges appointed to decide if an elected government stuck to its policies? Isn’t that what the voters are supposed to do?
British ambitions of becoming a global economic power after Brexit suffered a major blow yesterday after a court ruling suggested future airports, motorway and energy projects could all be blocked to prevent global warming.
Join these dots. Our universities took a huge bet on Chinese students that is falling apart. They’ve creamed the profits, but taken no insurance and stand to lose billions if they can’t get students to Australia — An extraordinary 65,000 of whom got caught in China by the quarantine. In China, travel agents are marketing 14 day holiday stopovers in Thailand to students, who are then flying on to Australia to get around the ban. But this is not quarantine. Thailand is open to China, and considered so risky that Israel has already banned flights from Thailand. What’s next? Australia imports the virus, tens of thousands may die, and all so the ivory tower smug academics can make their profits, while weak politicians sell out the nations citizens — especially the senior, longest serving ones?
How long before Israel bans Australian planes? We could be one the highest value clean nations in the world, waiting out our first winter of this pandemic until there is a treatment. We could be a place that wealthy tourists come to stay safe (after a two week real quarantine) and spend months of money. Perhaps we still can? Some students in Wuhan are offering to pay for a Charter Flight to Christmas Island if we’ll let them.
Martin North interviews Salvatore Babones and he is eloquently savage about the “mindbogglingly illogical” move of Australia to allow Chinese students to come in without proper quarantine. h.t David E.
Is Scott Morrison selling out the nations health for arrogant academic investors?
Read Australia’s gloriouspreparedness plan for Coronavirus it’s as Babones said — “56 pages of platitudes” — the plan Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt waved so passionately today is a recycled seasonal flu plan. It lacks almost all useful details barring advising people in Aged Care to get their Wills in order. (h.t Bill H)
Where are the Labor Party? Whining about sports allocations (minor junk pork barrelling). They could be scoring major points for senior citizens, the sick, the vulnerable. Or are they under the thrall of the Big-Government-loving universities even more than the Liberals are?
Salvatore Babones is an expert on the academic sector and points out how extreme the gamble has been by Australian universities. The most “Chinese” university in the US is Uni of Illinois, with 5,700 students. Uni of Sydney has four times as many students as this. The Uni of Illinois were so worried about that exposure they took out insurance with Lloyds of London against exactly this kind of event. He warned Uni of Sydney six months ago, but they didn’t buy the insurance. And there are many universities in Australia in a similar position. They took the taxpayer dollar, and took the profits but now that trouble has come, they want the government and the people to bail them out and foot the bill — with their health, even their lives.
The mineral sector is not putting public health at risk…
The Tourism sector was highly dependent on China, but no one is talking of rerouting tourists through secondary nations to keep that alive.
The people pushing hardest on the politicians to risk Australians health are the smug ivory tower academics who recklessly bet too much on this.
The two week unsupervised holiday in Thailand is not a quarantine. Thailand is not wealthy, but is one of the only countries still allowing Chinese flights. It’s only kept its border open because of pressure from China. Australian universities are exploiting that “loophole”.
Chinese travel agents are marketing bespoke “14-day, 13-night” packages to third-country transit destinations to help Chinese students enrolled at Australian universities get around the federal government’s coronavirus ban for as little as $2700 each.
Agents said the packages, which are being micro-targeted on Chinese social media, are selling well, as almost 65,000 Chinese students look for ways to get around the federal government’s travel ban on all non-Australian citizens and non-permanent residents coming from mainland China. “Thailand and Malaysia are the top two choices. Next is Cambodia,” said an education agent in Beijing.
Scott Morrison imposed the travel ban on February 1, when almost two-thirds of the 109,000 Chinese students enrolled in Australia were in China for the Lunar New Year break. Estimates suggest the ban could cost universities up to $2bn in deferred fees.
Stopping flights for a few more weeks — and from other locations too — will buy us time to find out more about this virus before we decide what to do for winter. Singapore and Hong Kong appear to be managing the virus, and we were containing it, perhaps with some help from summer — which ends today.
Do the maths
Look behind the marketing — for most people it’s like a cold. True – but for 5 – 10% it’s a hospital stay, and for 70 – 79 year old people in China it’s an 8% case fatality rate. In the 80 plus cohort 15% passed away. The death rate will be lower — the Chinese didn’t test the non serious cases who stayed home. The air is polluted in Wuhan and rates of smoking are high. But the rate of hospitalization for health workers was 15% too. Even a few young healthy nurses and doctors have died (which happens with the flu sometimes too). Does this virus leave lasting lung damage or scarring? We don’t know. Can people develop immunity to it? Another mystery. Is the Iranian version more deadly?
Flu kills 0.1% but we have antivirals, vaccines, and partial immunity thanks to other strains. This is not the flu.
So the virus is on its way. Even though Australia has no known community transmission we are choosing to slow down the spread by actively importing it even though we are surrounded by a moat, and are pretty much self-sustaining. We have thousands of high risk people and the disease that’s coming is largely unknown — today there are reports a Japanese case of a woman medical experts had thought had recovered who tests positive again. Is this a biphasic disease like anthrax? That’ll be fun.
Winter is twelve weeks away for Australians, and we know the coronavirus potentially threatens to overwhelm our medical systems and could be a GDP-type hit on national economies. It’s highly infectious, and between 5 – 17% of current cases outside China require hospitalization, and probably 1 -3% will need intensive care. Inviting the virus to start spreading now will mean it will peak during winter — the worst possible time in Australia.
Australia is one of the easiest countries to protect from this scourge, yet we are obediently following policies of northern hemisphere nations in a different situation. Hmm?
As I keep saying, it’s easier to import a deadly virus than to bring in cut flowers to Australia.
Most people won’t get very sick, but China is still reacting somewhat like the it has the Black Plague.
Scott Morrison says “the pandemic is upon us” but also says don’t cancel large public events, you can still go to the footy. How to reconcile the two; is it coming, or isn’t it?
Based on all these things, the only logical approach is to close the borders temporarily until we know more. The medical experts I’ve talked to privately agree. Thousands of Australians agree (see the last essential survey). Yet despite that, almost no medical official, commentator or expert even discusses that as an option. Are they all afraid of being called a scaremonger? Is namecalling worse than being the person who decided to let the virus run rife, or do they know something they are not telling us? Perhaps, behind the scenes, the experts know that too many cases are already circulating without diagnosis? Officials are acting as if that’s the case. Somehow we shifted from “low risk” to “100% chance sometime soon”. Germany has just announced six new cases and says “it’s facing an epidemic”. Trump has said “the risk is low” but warned schools need to be prepared to close. One US case with no known source has just been announced. Ominously, they acquired it before Feb 19th, but only just got tested. Evidently undiagnosed coronavirus was spreading a week and a half ago around Sacramento.
LATE NOTE: The US untraceable case suggests the virus has been circulating possibly since Feb 12th or so. Perhaps this isn’t as dire as it sounds. Whoever he caught it off may not have triggered a wave of deadly pnumonia instead perhaps just triggering colds and flus. That may mean the virus is already loose, and most infections are not severe. Then again, since no one is testing these kinds of cases, who knows? I hope someone is tracking pneumonia cases in Sacramento and starting to test them.
Latest claims are the Ro (rate of reproduction of the infection) was a 7.05 in the early days in China. The draconian quarantines have reduced this to to 3.2. (by Jan 23rd, so it’s even lower now, hopefully). We have to bring the Ro below 1 to stop this. Every person has to infect less than one other.
How many will need a hospital?
Based on Worldometer stats, and bearing in mind there is an eight day delay between detection and progression to “severe” — the latest stats from semi-reliable countries on Feb 19th, the rate of progression to hospitalization is: (severe cases/ total cases 8 days ago). Bear in mind that with the lack of current broad testing, these numbers may bear no resemblance to the actual number of cases.
Japan (13/76) 17%
Singapore (7/53) 13%
Germany (2/16) 13%
Hong Kong (6/62) 10%
Diamond Princess (36/542) 7%
Thailand (2/35) 6%
Taiwan (1/22) 5%
UAE (2/13) 25%
France (1/12) 8%
There are zero cases progressing to “serious critical” from Australia (15), USA (29), UK (9), Macao (10), Canada (8), Malaysia (22), Vietnam (16), India (5). That’s 114 cases with good outcomes. Many countries have had only one or two cases and complete recovery: Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Egypt, Belgium, Russia, Philippines. Things are moving too fast in South Korea, Iran and Italy to make their statistics meaningful. Obviously all three had far wider spread a week ago than they knew of.
Is there any data on how this affects different racial groups, or is that information being kept quiet because everyone is too afraid of offending an ethnic group?
Singapore and Hong Kong appear to be doing good jobs of controlling the spread. Iran is a basket case, so is Indonesia (with no reported cases, but little testing and their medical policy is “it’s in the hands of Allah”. )
While graphs show exponential growth outside China, it appears (probably falsely) localized to South Korea, Iran and Italy. Presumably coronavirus has been headed via 747 out of all three for at least a week, which may be why officials have given up. They know outbreaks will occur next week, they just don’t know where. What I can’t explain is why they won’t even try tracking and isolating these cases now and stopping further imports. The success of Singapore and Hong Kong suggests it might still be possible.
Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.
James Hamblin M.D., The Atlantic
The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. … it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”
… even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work. Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses.
At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”
Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.
The Australian asks “should you travel” and says “Yes, No, Maybe”. Jo Nova says “Why risk it?” — who wants to chance catching it on a plane or overseas — even if you only get the common cold, you may end up facing quarantine for two weeks. Of course, if you are away from home, it might be time to get back.
This may all look so much better (or worse) in a few weeks. We just don’t have the numbers yet.
The Optimist says: Perhaps this is a bad flu season and as long as we can stop the cytokine cascade in the vulnerable, or get some anti-viral working, we may not be looking at large deaths or mass quarantines. The Pessimist says: do the math, stop the flights, and wait for the data.
UPDATE: The Hon. Craig Kelly MP was so appalled by this story he has taken this to the Australian Parliament already where The Labor Party was so afraid they interrupted his allocated 15 minute speech just to stop him finishing. They even called a formal Division which means the bell is rung and all the missing MPs have to return to the Chamber to vote. See that on Kelly’s Facebook page. Who cares about our climate and who covers up for incompetent bureaucrats?!
For generations it was a Guinness Book of Records type thing. Now it’s gone.
In 1924 Marble Bar set a world record of the most consecutive days of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or above, during an incredible period of 160 days starting in 1923. It was legend — but thanks to the genius homogenized adjustments, we now find out all along it was wrong. It’s another ACORN triumph, rewriting history, extinguishing the hot days of days long gone. The experts at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) have reanalyzed the temperatures from 4000 km away and nine decades in the future and apparently it wasn’t that hot.
Chris Gillham wonders how the bureau figured out the Marble Bar max was one whole degree too warm on 18 Nov 1923, but it was 0.6°C too warm on 19 Nov 1923, 0.3°C too warm on 20 Nov 1923, 0.2°C too warm on 21 Nov 1923, and 0.8°C too warm on 22 Nov 1923? He points out the sky was totally clear every day, the screen didn’t get shuffled around every day, etc, so where’s the logic? The world record was extinguished because on 8 March 1924 the ACORN adjustments magically cooled the temperature from 38.2°C to 36.5°C. What caused the thermometer to be 1.7°C too warm on that particular day? That adjustment is twice the size of the entire century long trend. Check out those “daily changes” of raw versus “ACORN.”
Ponder the bad luck of scientists Saving-The-World who constantly have to battle against all the thermometers which cruelly and overestimated temperatures from Stevenson Screens in sites probably unaffected by concrete and bitumen so long ago. Those falsely high readings lulled the world into thinking that the world has always been hot and that CO2 was an irrelevant, minor and beneficial gas. What are the odds that so much equipment was non-randomly, dastardly conspiring to hide the True Catastrophic Effect of CO2!
But never fear, the brilliant minds of the BoM are correcting past mistakes with secret methods they cannot explain to mere mortals outside the sacred guild of weather druids. Luckily for us, the new super sensitive small box electronic gizmos that record one second spikes of warmth from passing trucks and radiated heat from tarmac and walls is The Truth Hallalujah Brother. In another ten years, the climate of Marble Bar circa 1924 will be so much cooler. I bet the dead will be delighted.
I can’t imagine why the BoM didn’t issue a press release to let the world know that Australia now doesn’t hold the longest hottest record which now goes to Death Valley.
Thanks to the volunteer number-crunching dedication of Chris Gillham for doing what the million-dollar-a-day BoM hasn’t found time to do — tell Australian we no longer have our long-standing heatwave world record at Marble Bar and that distinction now goes to America. Perhaps if we paid them less, they’d be more informative? — Jo
If the Bureau of Meteorology’s Australian Climate Observation Reference Network (ACORN) accurately corrects historic temperature observations, it means that Marble Bar in the north of WA can no longer boast it had a world record heatwave in 1923/24.
Marble Bar has been world famous for decades because of the 160 consecutive days in which it recorded maxima at or above 37.8C (100F or a “century” in the Fahrenheit days).
The Marble Bar thermometer in a Stevenson screen topped 100F every day from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, and nowhere else on earth is known to have recorded 160 century days in a row without a break.
Marble Bar is now a runner-up
The BoM website used to have a Climate Education page explaining Marble Bar’s heatwave record. The National Library of Australia considered it to be of national significance and has archived it for posterity.
In 2020, the BoM website still has a page that explains: Marble Bar, in the Pilbara, holds the Australian record for the longest sequence of days over the old century mark (100°F or 37.8°C). This occurred during the period from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924 when the maximum temperature equalled or exceeded 100°F for 160 days in a row.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics acknowledges the world record and Australians have heard about the Marble Bar heatwave record for many decades :
Temperature dataset downloads from the BoM website show that ACORN has cooled 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924 so much that the Pilbara town can no longer boast that it had a world record 160 consecutive days above 37.8C.
ACORN 2, which is described as a world-class homogenisation network, has reduced the 160 days to just 128 – from 1 November 1923 to 7 March 1924.
From 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, the dates during which the 160 days of 100 or more were recorded, there’s now 153 days at or above 100F.
And the winner is … America Wikipedia’s Death Valley page states that “The greatest number of consecutive days with a maximum temperature of 100 °F (38 °C) or above was 154 days in the summer of 2001.” This data is confirmed by the American Meteorological Society, which also references 134 consecutive days at Furnace Creek in Death Valley that were above above 37.8C during the summer of 1974.
154 days is less than 160 days but a lot more than 128 days, so it seems that America now holds the world record heatwave of consecutive 37.8C+ days at Death Valley – thanks to ACORN.
On its archived Climate Education page, the BoM states that “The highest temperature recorded during the record spell was 47.5°C on 18 January 1924.”
This is correct in the original RAW temperature dataset (see below), but ACORN 2 cools 18 January 1924 to 47.3C.
An Excel spreadsheet (499kb) with columns of daily maximum temperatures at Marble Bar from October 1923 to April 1924 in ACORN 1, ACORN 2 and RAW can be downloaded here.
Politicians and climate change skeptics are often scorned for suggesting that the BoM adjusts temperature data to fit a global warming agenda or to cool the past (e.g. Media Watch), and in late 2019 SBS News reported that the bureau denied it has rewritten Australia’s climate record.
The animation below uses the daily temperature datasets for RAW, ACORN 1 (introduced 2011/2012) and ACORN 2 (introduced quietly with no BoM announcement in early 2019) to compare the number of days each year from 1910 to 2019 that Marble Bar recorded a very hot day (defined by the bureau as at or above 40C) :
Marble Bar very hot day trends
This animation demonstrates that temperature data has been adjusted, with Marble Bar just one of many examples where Australia’s climate record has been rewritten to cool the past.
The slides show that very hot days were far more frequent according to the original RAW thermometer observations in the first half of the 1900s, but ACORN 1 cooled many of these and ACORN 2 has trimmed them even further to create an upward trend in the occurrence of 40C+ days at Marble Bar since 1910.
Rain = clouds = fewer very hot days
The bureau’s archived 2009 Climate Education page helps explain why Marble Bar had the world’s longest heatwave in 1923/24: “The town is far enough inland that, during the summer months, the only mechanisms likely to prevent the air from reaching such a temperature involve a southward excursion of humid air associated with the monsoon trough, or heavy cloud, and/or rain, in the immediate area.”
Marble Bar averaged just 9.9mm of rain per month from November 1923 to April 1924, compared to the 1910-1964 Nov-Apr average of 43.4mm per month. Just 71.1mm of rain fell in 1924, compared to an average 325mm in 1910-1964. The town had 132 very hot 40C+ days in 1924, compared to the 1910-1964 average of 112.3.
It’s no surprise that the frequency of rainfall strongly influences how hot it gets in Marble Bar and how often the town exceeds 40C. In the absence of cloud data, rainfall is a proxy for cloudy days that keep temperatures below 37.8C or 40C.
Confining the data to months when very hot days occur, the animation below shows the correlation between annual November to April rainfall at Marble Bar and the number of very hot days in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 daily temperature datasets :
RAW very hot day (40C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 112.3 1965-2019 98.7
ACORN 1 very hot day (40C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 93.2 1965-2019 94.5
ACORN 2 very hot day (40C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 90.7 1965-2019 95.1
Rainfall November to April monthly averages: 1910-1964 43.3mm 1965-2019 56.5mm
The animation demonstrates that the frequency of very hot days increased when rainfall and cloudy days were relatively sparse at Marble Bar in the early 1900s, and how very hot days decreased when rainfall and cloudy days increased from the 1970s.
However, the correlation between very hot days and rainy days is ignored by ACORN 1, and even more so by ACORN 2. For example, ACORN cools 8 March 1924 from 38.2C to to 36.5C at Marble Bar, ending the world record, but there was no rainfall on 8 March 1924 so what caused the thermometer to be 1.7C warmer than it really was on that particular day (according to ACORN)?
1,187 fewer very hot days
Marble Bar had 6,178 very hot days of 40C or more from 1910 to 1964 in the original RAW observations, and ACORN 2 cuts this to 4,991 – a 19.2% reduction.
If this homogenisation is an accurate adjustment, it must be assumed the BoM identified a significant recording error in the standardised equipment and/or Stevenson screen, or an influential site move, in the first half of Marble Bar’s temperature record – sufficient to diminish the ability of rain clouds and clear skies to keep the daily temperature below or above 40C.
Alternatively, the daily ACORN adjustments are due to area averaging based on daily temperatures at “neighbouring” weather stations. In 1923/24, the closest known weather stations with digitised daily temperatures were Port Hedland Post Office, a coastal site almost 140 kilometres away, and Broome Post Office about 440 kilometres to the north (long-term Nov-Apr average maxima : Port Hedland 34.6C; Broome 33.9C; Marble Bar 39.7C). Nullagine, about 120 kilometres south and without digitised daily temperatures, is an influential station (long-term Nov-Apr average maxima 37.6C).
Although ACORN 2 substantially reduces the frequency of very hot days in the early 1900s at Marble Bar, both RAW and adjusted ACORN 2 maxima show the average temperature of the very hot 40C+ days was 42.4C in 1910-1964 and 42.3C in 1965-2019.
As at most weather stations, Marble Bar’s temperature history has been influenced by shifting rainfall patterns rather than CO2.
ACORN homogenisation of Australia’s temperature history doesn’t alter readings at the rainfall gauges since 1910, and seemingly ignores the correlation between cloudy days and very high temperatures.
Averages
The cooling adjustment of Marble Bar’s early observations affects both the frequency of very hot days and the yearly average maxima. Below compares average annual maxima in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 datasets :
Average maxima 1910-1964 – ACORN 1 34.90C / ACORN 2 34.77C / RAW 35.45C 1965-2019 – ACORN 1 35.16C / ACORN 2 35.18C / RAW 35.25C
ACORN 1 warmed 0.26C / ACORN 2 warmed 0.41C / RAW cooled 0.20C Average change per decade : ACORN 1 0.10C / ACORN 2 0.12C / RAW 0.03C
The maximum averages show that ACORN’s reduction of very hot days in the history books is typical of broader adjustments to maximum temperatures on all days at Marble Bar before the 1970s.
Not just very hot days
ACORN adjustments to historic daily observations affect not only the frequency of very hot days (40C+) but also what the BoM defines as hot days (35C+).
Since 1910, Marble Bar has recorded daily maxima at or above 35C every month of the year. The animation below shows annual hot 35C+ days at Marble Bar in the RAW, ACORN 1 and ACORN 2 datasets from 1910 to 2019, as well as annual rainfall :
RAW hot day (35C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 206.5 1965-2019 196.7
9.8 fewer hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 1 hot day (35C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 196.3 1965-2019 194.2
2.1 fewer hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 2 hot day (35C+) annual averages: 1910-1964 191.2 1965-2019 194.8
3.6 more hot days per year in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
RAW hot day (35C+) annual average temperature: 1910-1964 40.1 1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature 0.2C cooler in 1965-2019 than 1910-1964
ACORN 1 hot day (35C+) annual average temperature: 1910-1964 39.9 1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature the same in 1965-2019 as 1910-1964
ACORN 2 hot day (35C+) annual average temperature: 1910-1964 39.9 1965-2019 39.9
Average hot days temperature the same in 1965-2019 as 1910-1964
Because annual rainfall can include downpours concentrated over just a few days and there isn’t necessarily any rainfall on cloudy days, another way to identify the correlation between hot or very hot days and cloudy rainfall days is to compare the average number of actual rainfall days each year, rather than total annual rainfall, since 1910.
This clarifies the influence of downpours over a few days but can’t account for cloudy days without rainfall.
The table below shows the averaged number of 35C+ and 40C+ days at Marble Bar in years when 10 to 19 days, 20 to 29 days, 30 to 39 days … 60 to 69 days of rainfall were recorded from 1910 to 2019:
Marble Bar is also noteworthy for recording 200 consecutive days of 35C+ from 5 October 1923 to 21 April 1924, averaging 41.7C, which ACORN 2 has reduced to 179 days from 19 October 1923 to 14 April 1924, averaging 41.5C.
Which dataset do we believe?
Marble Bar, widely considered to be the hottest place in Australia, nowadays has cooler weather and its residents endure fewer scorching hot days than was the case a hundred years ago.
ACORN’s rewriting of Marble Bar’s climate history has warmed the town and encouraged the belief that CO2 is responsible for more hot and very hot days.
If the BoM still believes its 2009 Climate Education web page and argues that Marble Bar retains its heatwave world record because the original 160 consecutive days of 37.8C+ in 1923/24 were valid and accurate, the credibility of ACORN is destroyed as a homogenisation process that persistently cools historic temperature observations around Australia.
But If ACORN is touted as a world-class network that produces accurate historic temperatures, Marble Bar can no longer boast that it holds the heatwave world record.
Either the original observations were accurate or the ACORN cooling adjustments are accurate, and the bureau can’t claim it’s both.
• Further details here, a page with links to further analysis of hot and very hot day frequency in different Australian regions.
If official stats are correct the death rate is 20%. It almost certainly isn’t, but either this virus is deadlier than ever, or Iranian officials are hiding a broader spread. Either way, every nation with high risk people (say, people over 60 years old) might consider suspending the flights til we know more. We would all probably be dealing with what Iran is right now if we had not closed flights to China weeks ago.
The US CDC says it’s OK to fly to and from Iran, though older people should “consider” postponing their trip. Travellers should stay away from sick people and use hand sanitizer etc. That’s Alert Level 2. They have raised the alert to level 3 for travel to South Korea. “Avoid non-essential travel” — but hey, go if you really want to. There is seemingly no warning on CDC Travel Notices that people traveling to these countries risk getting caught inside them if flights are stopped or internal borders shut. Will we do rescue flights in plastic wrapped planes?
Australian authorities say“reconsider your need to travel”and sternly warn “If you travel to Iran despite our advice, you will be screened for coronavirus (COVID-19) at airports. ” Which means someone will check your temperature, but not whether you have taken a panadol 2 hours ago and not whether you are an asymptomatic carrier.
Apparently, Iranian health officials think quarantine is too old fashioned. For that reason alone we should stop all flights from Iran from entry.
Amirabadi-Farahani [Qom lawmaker, who spoke in Parliament] said Qom should be quarantined, while also suggesting that nurses and other health-care workers lacked the necessary protective gear to treat coronavirus patients.
[Deputy Health Minister Iraj] Harirchi told journalists that a quarantine in the holy city — where many senior ayatollahs and thousands of religious students are based — is unlikely to be efficient in controlling the spread of the disease that emerged in China in December.
“We do not agree with quarantining Qom; the practice of using a quarantine is pre-World War I for the plague and cholera and Chinese [officials] are also unhappy with the quarantines imposed [in their country],” Harirchi said.
The son of an 83-year-old woman who died in Qom over the weekend after being infected with the coronavirus told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that she died while in quarantine in a hospital.
He said doctors did not test him even though he had taken care of his mother before she was transferred to the hospital. “They asked me if I coughed and asked a few other questions,” the man, who identified himself as Reza, said. “Then they said, ‘You can go.'”
David D. Kirkpatrick, Farnaz Fasshiki and Mujib Mashal, NY Times
Experts worry that few Middle Eastern countries are ready to respond effectively to the threat posed by the virus.
“How ready are these countries?” asked Dr. Montaser Bilbisi, an American-trained infectious disease specialist practicing in Amman, Jordan. “In all honesty, I have not seen the level of readiness that I have seen in China or elsewhere, and even some of the personal protective equipment is lacking.”
In Jordan, for example, he said that he had not yet seen a fully protective hazardous materials suit. “So health care workers would be at very high risk for infection.”
In Afghanistan, officials said the first confirmed case of the virus was a 35-year-old man from the western province of Herat who had recently traveled to Qom. Health officials declared a state of emergency in Herat. The government on Sunday had already suspended all air and ground travel to and from Iran.
But the border is difficult to seal. Thousands cross every week for religious pilgrimages, trade, jobs and study — about 30,000 in January alone, the International Organization of Migration, an intergovernmental agency, reported.
“In the past two weeks, more than a 1,000 people have visited or traveled to Qom from Herat, which means they come into closer contact with the virus,” the Afghan heath minister, Ferozuddin Feroz, said on Monday at a news conference in Kabul.
Australians are paying record prices, risking blackouts, buying batteries and synchronous condensors, building new billion dollar interconnectors, losing companies overseas, and suffering voltage spikes. We’re playing chicken with our smelters, and party games with PeakSmart timers and extra domestic circuits so that electricity companies can manage our pool pumps and our air conditioners.
And this is all we get?
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
After adding so many wind farms and solar panels the electricity sector decreased emissions by only 1.2% on the year before.
Electricity sector emissions decreased 1.8 per cent in the June quarter of 2019 on a ‘seasonally adjusted and weather normalised’P 8 P basis (Figure 6). This reflected strong increases in hydro and wind generation (42.0 and 14.8 per cent) and decreases in coal and natural gas generation (5.7 and 21.3 per cent) in the National Electricity Market (NEM). Over the year to June 2019, emissions from electricity decreased by 1.2 per cent compared with the year to June 2018.
The electricity sector is Australia’s largest single source of emissions, and some of the gains in the last decade have come from efficiency, not from renewables, and from making electricity so unaffordable that it scares people into not using their air conditioners.
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
Given all this, you might think the team at Reneweconomy might worry that renewables won’t save the planet and were a dismal and useless way to spend environmental money, but not so. They were pretty happy with a 2 percent fall in electricity emissions from Sept 2018 to Sept 2019.
They were not impressed that as our electricity emissions had fallen, our diesel emissions have gone up the other way. Mostly for truckers, they say.
How much of this is due to electrical generators?
….
Per capita Australians are using 40% less CO2 than they were 30 years ago, and this is what the Opposition calls, “a policy vacuum”. Perhaps it is a vacuum — of achievement.
Australia has almost the fastest growing population in the West. Fifty percent population growth in 30 years, and we are aiming to cut emissions 27% on top of that?
Over the period from 1989-90 to June 2019, Australia’s population grew strongly from 17.0 million to around 25.4 million.P 16,17 P This reflects growth of 48.8 per cent.
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
The best way to keep Australian emissions down (apart from nukes) is to cut immigration, but left leaning politicians don’t want to discuss that, and nor apparently do left wing activist websites. Importing new left-leaning voters seems to be more important.
By picking the most expensive and ineffective methods it’s almost like none of the people driving renewables even care about the CO2 emissions.
This is the danger of too many open borders and not enough testing. If things are this far advanced in Italy and Iran and South Korea what’s happening under the veil in Africa and Indonesia, and so many other places?
Choices for the West include closing risky borders now, or later perhaps closing schools, events, football matches, movies, parties, and maybe elective surgery.
Italy –a lesson in how fast things move
Current tally: 2 dead, 134 infections and 26 are severe (that’s 19%, and who knows what the lag is, or if this will get worse?)
International quarantines are no fun, but domestic quarantines are worse
Look at what’s happening in Italy (let alone China):
Italian authorities have implemented draconian measures to try to halt the coronavirus outbreak in the north of the country, including imposing fines on anyone caught entering or leaving outbreak areas, as cases of the virus in the country rose to more than 130. Police are patrolling 11 towns – mostly in the Lombardy region, where the first locally transmitted case emerged – that have been in lockdown since Friday night.
The Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said: “We have adopted a decree to protect the health of Italians, which is our priority and which ranks first in the list of constitutional values.” He urged people to “have faith in the political and scientific institutions, which are doing everything possible”.
Locals wearing facemasks were already lined up outside a supermarket in the town of Casalpusterlengo, a 10-minute drive from Codogno, on Sunday morning. Shoppers were made to wait, then allowed to enter in groups of 40 inside the store to stock up on provisions.
Three days ago the people living in these areas probably didn’t think they would suddenly be quarantined.
As I said a week ago we have a choice. A two week mandatory quarantine is not the end of the world, and rocks and hard places are all around us.
We could start building emergency hospital ICU rooms like China has, or we could start building quarantine cabins which are infinitely cheaper and ask all entrants from countries with uncontrolled cases of Covid 19* (or SARS CoV 2, whatever it is called) to go through a two week quarantine. This will limit traffic drastically, affecting weddings, conferences, holidays and all kinds of business. It will be costly and inconvenient, but it will possibly save people and quite a lot of money. (ICU care is $5000 a day). Separated families can still be reunited after the two week delay. Am I mad, stopping all flights to nations at risk seems like the cheap conservative option?
Hope: Singapore infections are only growing slowly — but 5% need critical care
Singapore did exhaustive thorough tracking and testing with isolation and have slowed the exponential curve significantly. Perhaps it’s possible to avoid closing borders, but it is a risky game, and Singapore hasn’t defeated it yet, though this curve is about as good as we might have hoped for last week.
The problem with this reactive approach is that if it doesn’t work, we risk running out of hospital beds, as well as domestic quarantines.
Consider the ICU “critical” rate — there have been no deaths in Singapore so far, but fully 30% have been hospitalized, and 5% are critical.
Singapore has about 12,000 hospital beds (of all sorts). With a ten day doubling rate all the hospital beds will be taken in about nine weeks and that’s just with coronavirus patients. It’s not clear how many of those beds are ICU. But it is clear that we need to put our thinking caps on.
The range progressing to severe after an 8 day lag now ranges from 0 – 25%.
Worldometer statistics with calculations of the proportion who need severe hospitalized care, with and without an 8 day lag.
The China figures are underestimates because it’s China.
The short not-good news: It’s looking like early exponential growth outside China
The cases outside China have reached 1,500. South Korean cases leap to 156, 204, 340, mostly centred on one church and one hospital. In China, prisoners were discovered to be infected and a 29 year old doctor has died. The first death in Italy is confirmed, cases jump from 4 to 17, and the health minister there has cancelled or closed schools, events and shops in ten towns. The Iranian death toll has risen to 4, and Iraq has closed flights to Iran. Improbably Canada’s ninth case turns out to be a woman who flew from Iran, raising the worrying possibility that the virus is spreading undetected. Lastly, panic is spreading too. There were attacks in Ukraine to stop a bus of evacuees from China for their 14 day quarantine. It was triggered supposed by an email hoax.
Wise people might like to stock up the pantry just in case. As the people in some Italian towns just found out, there may not be a lot of warning.
The extraordinary rise in South Korea:
Four days ago South Korea had 30 cases. Now, 346. Where the percentage progressing to “severe” was nought, now it’s hard to calculate. How many infections did the country really have eight days ago? Officially, South Korea had 28, and of those, supposedly now 17 have recovered, 9 have progressed to severe and of those, 2 have died. It’s shifted from being the good news outlier to the place to watch.
In South Korea many cases revolve around the Shincheonji Church which is considered to be cultlike. According to the NY Times people sit on the floor packed together, with no glasses or facemasks, they come when they are sick and are taught “not to be afraid of illness”. So the sudden freaky rise may not reflect bad luck but a kind of amplified “superspreader on steroids” visits a “virus farm in waiting”. Unfortunately the authorities can’t find about 700 of the 1,000 worshippers who were there to check them. If only patient #31 in South Korea had not turned up there with mild symptoms.
Raw twitter tales of a country in seige
On the twitter feed of #Coronavirus (if you dare) it’s tough. There are one or two images of people jumping out of windows in China, some mass killing of farm animals, plus even footage of pet cats and dogs being killed (it’s not clear they can catch this virus, as most viruses are species specific). It’s a warzone, and checkpoints are run with disturbing military efficiency. There are many shots of people are being forcibly dragged away by the Hazmat police. It’s a poignant kind of thing. Some of these people may not see loved ones again and if they don’t have coronavirus there would be much to fear from being incarcerated with those who do. One (see below) shows people being led in a roped long line. Another shows masses of people allegedly waiting to get their money from a bank in China. Is this the first bank run? (UPDATE Probably not — comments under it suggest it is not a bank). In others, people appear to be collapsing on trains, or sometimes in the street. It’s all unverified, and hard to know whether it’s one freak event or even a fake, but it’s a strange land. If people are going door to door to kill pets in China, it may be just a sign of a desperate (and possibly pointless) panicked reaction by some local authority? (It didn’t appear to be for food, but then, there are tweets talking about starvation.)
How many progress to “Severe”? Still 0 – 11%
Trying to track nations (or cruise ships) with an 8 day lag from diagnosis to the “severe” state has become even harder with the numbers changing so fast that estimates change by the hour.
The most meaningful early guesstimates of how many cases will need medical attention are still ranging from 0 to 11%. Hong Kong 11%; Thailand 6% Singapore 9%; Taiwan 6%. But no cases have progressed to severe in Australia, USA, Malaysia, Germany, Canada and the UK (which together had 92 cases on Feb 14th). It’s not all bad news.
The numbers matter because it not only tells us how many people might get quite sick, it also gives us some idea of how many hospital beds we might need, especially of the Intensive Care kind. Severe cases need some assistance, or supplemental oxygen and estimates are around 1 in 6 severe cases will need the ICU.
Transmission: Aerosol or not?
Chinese officials say it is spread via aerosol but the US CDC still says “droplet”. Aerosol borne viruses carry on air currents, and are much harder to contain. It would explain why the Diamond Princess disease control of standing 6 ft apart on deck was futile, as was confining people to cabins possibly with shared air conditioning. Though one US medico warns that it looks just like influenza spread – airborne. For a month twitter has shown Chinese medical experts behaving as though it was an aerosol.
…one US infectious disease expert cautions that, overall, the epidemiologic data continue to point to airborne transmission being the driver of the COVID-19 outbreak. “It’s almost a rewrite of the influenza playbook,” said Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Given how little is known, stopping flights to these nations would seem wise, even just for a week or two.
On the plus side, if we believe communist statistics of no fixed definition, then the worst province in China is plateauing, “peaking” and the quarantine is having some effect. Ponder how draconian and difficult it is and how long they may need to maintain it for. If they have managed to stop millions from being infected in Wuhan and surrounds, they still have a vulnerable population, and even if they could theoretically extinguish the virus in those regions — there will be the continuous threat of reinfection from other provinces and other nations. What then, a new local lock down each time one breaks out? Having given the virus to Africa, it will be difficult not to get it back in return…
Many books are going to be written about what is happening in China at the moment
We feel for the people of Wuhan. Fofllow The @EpochTimes (some images here don’t load in Firefox.)
Barricaded homes.
#Chinese authorities forcibly sealed off households to #Quarantine the people inside.
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— The Epoch Times – China Insider (@EpochTimesChina) February 22, 2020
Internet cut off to most affected areas
The #Chinese-language @EpochTimes spoke with a number of #Wuhan residents and found that some neighborhoods, where there are large numbers of reported #COVID19 infections, have had their internet cut off. https://t.co/AyUCZ1ReHm
— The Epoch Times – China Insider (@EpochTimesChina) February 21, 2020
Inexplicable scenes.
In #China, those suspected of having the #Coronavirus are bound & marched through the streets like prisoners.
[UPDATE: Reading the comments underneath this Prof Hanke’s tweet, no one really knows what was happening. Were these people caught selling illegal masks? Did they break the “wear a mask” rule? Was it a mass arrest of a pyramid marketing scam? Was it the arrest of people playing poker, which apparently is now illegal during the outbreak. ] [Deleted the unlikely “bank run” tweet. Wait to see if there is any corroboration. ]
The Optimistic Mantra (repeated): Covid 19 will almost certainly be less severe outside China due to cleaner air, healthier lungs, better diets, lower population density, possibly genes (ACE2 receptor), cultural habits, more sun, better nutrition, lower rates of smoking, and better medical systems. We also got a head-start. Estimates in China suggest 82% of people have only a mild infection, and we can still hope that the rate of mild infections turns out to be a lot higher in the West, or that some anti-virals in the multiple trials turn out to be useful and can be mass produced.
More lies by omission from the Bureau of Misinformation
When a PM gets it totally wrong, where is the BOM…
“What this royal commission is looking at are the practical things that must be done to keep Australians safer and safe in longer, hotter, drier summers.” — Scott Morrison. — ABC
Looks like extra CO2 “causes” Summer rainfall in Australia to increase
Apparently, we should burn fossil fuels to stop fires. You know it makes sense…
Australian rainfall trends, Bureau of Meteorology,
But wait, what about Southern Australia?
To cover every last caveat, it’s possible that “climate change” could change where rain falls, or when rain falls — so lets look at the BoM’s own rainfall records.
CO2 apparently makes summers wetter across Southern Australia too
Australian rainfall, Bureau of Meteorology, Southern Australian rainfall totals, long term trend. Source
It’s also possible that the rainfall could increase but fall in a more variable pattern which increases floods and droughts, but in 178 years of data, that isn’t happening either.
How about the South East corner of Australia
Nooo…
Summer rainfall, Australia, South Eastern region, trend, graph. Source: BOM
As Prime Minister, there is no excuse, it is Scott Morrison’s fault that he’s wrong and he needs to fix it
It’s Morrison’s job to make sure he asks hard questions, trusts the right people, and gets good advice. A leader cannot say “I just accepted what the experts said”, or “I assumed they would correct me”.
This is high school type science. It is “just basic chemistry” that the world will become a hotter-wetter place. Sadly, the BOM, CSIRO, ABC, and most of lower and higher Education have been eroding public scientific knowledge for 3 decades — undoing anything useful that people learnt in high school science lessons.
Time for skeptics to write to the PM and all the rest: Let the “hotter wetter summer” campaign begin.
On another note: When will the Press Council investigate the ABC for publishing repeated misinformation that serves to promote Labor Party policy, increasing the odds of Australians voting for the type of governments that increase ABC salaries. Is it incompetence, or self serving culpable negligence?
It’s a flip on a flop. After all the media headlines, a new paper suggests that some climate scientists are not just wrong, they got cause and effect mixed up, and that the wandering “blocking” jet streams are not caused by warmer arctic, but may be causing the temperature changes instead.
“”The well-publicised idea that Arctic warming is leading to a wavier jet stream just does not hold up to scrutiny,” says Screen.
“With the benefit of ten more years of data and model experiments, we find no evidence of long-term changes in waviness despite on-going Arctic warming.””
The truth is that most big models loosely predicted that global warming would make the jet streams less wiggly, but from the mid 1980s the jet-stream-trend was the other way. As the Arctic warmed the “waviness of jet streams increased”. So in 2012 a few modelers came up with a post hoc rationalization of why, really, truly, actually a warmer Arctic meant that the jets streams would wander more. The media enthusiastically repeated it, though it was contentious and disagreed with most models. But oh dear, by golly, by 2015 the trend started to reverse again. Now in 2020, Blackport and Screen are resolving the latest inconsistency by discovering the data going back 40 years and the longer trends. They explain (quite sensibly) that temperature changes in the Arctic have no significant effect on the jet streams, though the opposite might be true.
Welcome to the world of climate modeling where long monotonic trends can be explained in a jiffy, but no one can predict a turning point in advance.
When will the newspapers retract all the false headlines?
A wandering polar jet stream can drag cold air south, and warm air north. | NASA/TRENT L SCHINDLER
“Global Warming is responsible for Freezing”
This paper heavily criticizes a central media theme in the man made global warming theory. At the core of this was the principle that the poles would warm the fastest, this would reduce the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator, and that would mean the winds would slow too, and the jet streams would be “wavier” (meaning wandering north and south). They would bring hot air away from the equator, and dump cold arctic blasts in the most odd distant places. This Francis and Vavrus hypothesis was only devised in 2012 (discussed more here). This theory though, has been used by the science-media industrial complex to tell us that cold snaps, snow storms and warm weekends were caused by polar vortexes, which were thus driven by our evil coal plants and our horrible light globes. If only we drove more Teslas we’d get less blizzards, right?
It appears that ever since this theory was published there were plenty of scientists who weren’t sold on it (and these are the same climate modelers that the newspapers usually love to quote — read the introduction of this 2014 paper by Hassanzadh et al.). Indeed it appears many climate scientists really didn’t think that Arctic Warming would create more “blocking” events. Where were they when the journalists were blaming coal stations for storms and blizzards?
The post hoc stop-gap theory:
It has been proposed that the faster warming of the Arctic compared to the rest of world—so-called Arctic amplification—is altering the atmospheric circulation and contributing to an increase in extreme weather in the midlatitudes (6). One hypothesis proposed by Francis and Vavrus suggests that the reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradient weakens the predominant westerly wind, which, in turn, causes larger-amplitude waves in the midlatitude circulation (7, 8), hereafter referred to as a “wavier” circulation. A wavier circulation has been linked to increased occurrence of extreme midlatitude weather, with the types of extremes favored by amplified waves varying by location (9)
The new paper looks at the way that the Arctic kept warming in autumn and winter but the jet stream waviness didn’t. The increase in waviness suddenly, and for no reason the models could say, reversed in the last few years. Blackport and Screen do the most surprising thing and draw the obvious conclusion: the models are wrong.
DISCUSSION
As usual, the paper solves model failures and discrepancies that the public didn’t know existed. Where was that press release?
Our results help to resolve the apparent discrepancy between the observed increased in waviness and the small decrease projected by modeling studies.
So the models predicted waviness would go down, but it went up. Then someone came up with a way to explain that, but now the waviness stopped going up. So we’re resolving nothing much by dropping that dud theory except that climate modelers do not understand what drives jet stream trends.
The increase was only detected in 2012. (Ref 7):
In the years since the observed increase was first detected (7), Arctic amplification has continued; however, the increase in waviness has not. Over the past 40 years, seasonal trends in waviness across all regions and using multiple metrics are close to zero, in agreement with multidecadal trends simulated by models. This strongly suggests that the previously reported increases in waviness were a manifestation of internal variability.
Note “internal variability” is code for “some factor we don’t know” which in this case could be The Sun. None of the models include little old factors like solar magnetic changes, solar particle flows, or massive solar spectral changes. The Sun swings through high UV years to low ones but the models won’t find out if that matters because they are not even looking.
The coldest ever day recorded in Greenland stands at -63.3 C (minus 81 F). But on January 2nd in 2020, after Greenland suffered a century of global warming, the thermometer at Summit Camp sunk to at least -64.9C. I say, at least, because it may have been even colder. Sharp eyes of Cap Allon at Electroverse saw it hit minus 66C. Ryan Maue also saw it and predicted there would be cold as the Arctic Oscillation broke down.
4:13 AM · Jan 4, 2020
I sought confirmation at the time (among the Bushfire days in Australia). I looked for any official tweet even, but couldn’t find any. How’s that work — a new all time record for a whole continent for any month of the year, and no one who was paid to care about these things even writes a paragraph?
John Cappelen: I have now had the opportunity to go through the American observations from NOAA GeoSummit from January 2, 2020 . I have at NOAA’s wab-site found January 2020 ftp data up to January 15, 2020.
January 2, 2020 was a cold day at SUMMIT and 23:13 utc the temperature had a minimum -64,9C…the same temperature was registered 23:15 and also 23:16 utc….data looks all right…
…
That’s nearly three degrees cooler than the record for January at Summit Camp:
…
Paul Homewood writes that it’s a record one way or the other:
Although the DMI equipment has now been closed, it was at the same location as the Geo Summit, so readings should be comparable.
Quite clearly then, a new record low has been set for both Summit and Greenland. Whether it is –64.9C, as stated by John Cappelen, or the graphic reading from Electroverse remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, we await the new record to be officially declared by NOAA, and reported in the world’s press!
Compare this to the rush to declare the highest ever June temperature in Greenland last year which was announced in the newspapers but turned out to be wrong and was quietly corrected a week later. From Anthony Watts at WUWT August 2019 “Shoot out the headlines first, ask questions later.”
Danish climate body wrongly reported Greenland heat record
The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.
But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.
“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”
Coldest Day in Greenland ever recorded, Jet streams, Arctic Oscillation.
It’s those dang meridonal jet streams — as predicted here by Stephen Wilde five years ago and postulated via solar driven UV changes or charged particle shifts.
Can’t blame the coal plants, so it’s like it never happened. Don’t call the media “sensationalist”, call them “activists”.
The good news — babies and children appear to be not at risk. The not-so-great news, people over 80 in China have up to a 15% fatality rate (usual caveats, based on unreliable communist statistics and will hopefully be lower for many reasons, see below.) Note that even with the “one child” policy effects in China, that most western nations have a higher proportion of older folk — especially France, Germany and Greece.
The news on “rates of severe cases” is mixed. Singapore, Japan and HK are looking at 15% early rates. But many other nations are looking at 0%. Hmm?
A/ Fatality rate per age group. b/ Demographic age groups in different nations. C/ Relative mortality compared to China (apparently due only to the age demographic). | Click to enlarge. Age and Sex of COVID-19 Deaths REF China CCDC
*Fatality rates calculated by the China CCDC won’t include many unrecorded asymptomatic infections, nor the deaths outside hospitals and don’t appear to include the lag either. But they show which groups are at most risk.
Worldometer now gives us rates according to sex and preexisting conditions. (Reproduced below). Basically there are 30% higher death rates in men, and death rates are 6 – 10 times higher in people with heart, lung or diabetic type conditions. That is partly due to the conditions themselves, but may also just be due to the ACE2 gene — which the virus binds too. Since variants of the the ACE 2 gene increase the risk of both heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, it may be that those with a genetic predisposition to those conditions are also predisposed to either the infection or to the more damaging effects from the virus. Given that young people with those same genes are able to cope and recover though, it’s not all “genes”. Managing those conditions may help reduce the risk. For some reason, younger people don’t seem to progress to the cytokine cascade — the inflammatory response that gets out of hand.
The all important rates of progression to severe cases is spread from zero to 15%
Adjusted for the eight day delay in progression to severe symptoms, the number that keeps coming back is strangely split at close to zero, or an unappealing 14% — Singapore has 4 severe cases out of the 28 it had on Feb 11th. (14%) Hong Kong had 49 cases on Feb 11th, and 7 have progressed to severe or critical. 14%. In Japan there were about 28 cases a week ago, and 4 of those are severe. (14%). The Diamond Princess cases: 15% severe (see below).
But in many places the news is good. South Korea is interesting, with 46 cases and still none classed as “severe”. Fifteen of those cases are only one day old, so don’t count, but 28 of those cases are eight days or more after diagnosis. This is encouraging. As is the lack of any “severe” progression in Australia (only five active cases left) and in the US, Germany, and France (apart from one death of a Chinese man, ten of the other cases are now at least ten days old and haven’t progressed.) Taiwan, likewise, had 18 cases a week ago, and apart from one death, none of the others have progressed to severe.
Why the disparity? Statistical fluke perhaps (South Korea only needs 4 severe cases to put it in the same category as Singapore et al)? Otherwise, genes, culture, diet, weather, hospitals and medical systems? Or possibly some strains of the virus may be evolved to be nicer already.
The Diamond Princess: — it ain’t over yet:
On Feb 11th there were 135 cases. Today there are 542, with 20 being severe. So about 15% of cases progress to serious (20/135). We don’t know the ethnic or genetic breakdown, though we can guess the rates are higher because of the demographic spread. Cruise ships probably have few people from 0 – 40 years old.
Since there were another 88 new cases today that tested positive, clearly Cruise-ship-quarantine is a bad plan. There are fears that the Diamond Princess may yet spark a global spread:
With people aboard hailing from more than 50 countries, the end of the quarantine raises worries the vessel could become the source of a fresh wave of global infections.
Undoubtedly these 88 new cases will not be the last new cases, and though the US, Australia, Canada, South Korea and other nations are wisely insisting on a further two weeks of proper quarantine, but Japan is not, and the Netherlands didn’t either. With 76 cases already inside Japan (presumably not former passengers of the cruise) they have apparently given up containment.
One expert in Hong Kong, who ought to know what’s going on, advised that even people who test negative today could test positive in a few days. Keiji Fukuda, the director of the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University thinks more quarantine is needed. Meanwhile another expert in Japan, who ought to know too, says the opposite:
An expert on infectious diseases said Japan has focused on preventing the virus from causing more fatalities. “My view is that Japan’s effort will be evaluated later not on the level of expansion of the spread, but on the rate of mortality,” said Shigeru Omi, a former WHO official who now sits on the Japanese government’s expert panel on the coronavirus. “That’s why our focus is now on community prevention control so that we can reduce mortality rate and lower the speed of expansion,” he said. “It’s impossible to stop transmission.”
So Japan is going to hope those who test negative and have no symptoms can wander around the nation and not infect too many others. Hope that works out for them. It doesn’t seem like a good strategy when their early rates show that 15% in Japan may suffer the severe form.
The world may become split between the no-virus states and the infected ones — call me an optimist — all clean countries need a two week mandatory quarantine as a barrier. Or we may (cheery thought) be in the early stages of a pandemic.
What to do if you are an 80 year old — especially with a high risk condition?
Time to think about improving preexisting conditions (make those doc appointments, fill those scripts, do that exercise, consider eating better). Think about the options if the virus starts to spread locally. Hopefully it wont. But there may come a point where having a stash of things at home and cutting back on shopping trips, parties and nightclubs will improve the odds. Buying up things that will be used anyway in the next few months seems like a low cost form of insurance, as long as they are stored well.
———————————————————–
Best case: West contains the spread
The Optimistic Mantra (repeated): Covid 19 will likely be less severe outside China due to cleaner air, healthier lungs, better diets, lower population density, possibly genes (ACE2 receptor), cultural habits, more sun, better nutrition, lower rates of smoking, and better medical systems. We also got a head-start and, if we are not totally stupid, we might use that to our advantage. We hope we can stay above all this and help the poor sods stuck in China, and probably Africa, and possibly Indonesia, India, etc. We won’t be much use to them if we lose control ourselves. We really really don’t want to get on the wrong side of that exponential growth curve.
If countries manage to avoid the hospital meltdown the big impact from Covid 19 might be the economic fallout. Think about what you might need that is made in China, or rather, used to be made in China. Shelves may get quite empty of a few things in the next two months.
There are hints that the draconian Chinese lock downs might be slowing the spread. But even if that is the case there are many weeks yet of this to play out.
Since SA was islanded the costs just to keep the frequency stable are as much as the energy itself
Two weeks ago the Australian grid had a major near miss, and South Australia has been isolated from the rest of the nation ever since. It was supposed to be connected again in two weeks, but repairs to the 6 high voltage towers that fell over, evidently will be longer. Strangely, apparently no news outlet has mentioned this in the last two weeks.
While SA has been the renewables star of the world for two weeks, there’s been mayhem in the market. Instead of cheap electricity with 50% renewables it’s chaos. Allan O’Neill explains that the cost of stabilizing the grid has gone through the roof. It’s so bad, and generators have to contribute to balance their output, that solar and wind power are holding back from supply because they can’t afford to pay the costs to cover their share of frequency stability.
But when South Australia became islanded by the transmission line collapse, FCAS requirements for that region could only be supplied from local providers – and there is only a small subset of participants in South Australia who have chosen to offer in the FCAS markets. With a suddenly reduced group of providers, the price of all FCAS products in South Australia leapt from a pre-event range between few cents and roughly $30/MWh (some higher levels on 30 Jan, driven by the very high energy price averaging over $770/MWh on that day), rising to daily average levels mostly over $100/MWh and in a few cases approaching $3,000/MWh after the separation event – remember, these numbers are daily averages!
Johnathon Dyson estimates it’s added up to $90m. He calculates that some solar panel providers are paying as much as 15% of their revenue (in a normal week) on FCAS, far higher than the 1% they would have estimated when they built their projects.
The ever rising costs of frequency stability on the Australian grid for the next quarter are about to go “off the scale” in this graph by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER):
The $90m FCAS cost in SA is higher than any single quarter on the whole national grid. | AER
Years ago frequency stability was just a happy byproduct of the large coal fired turbines. The giant 200 plus ton turbines would spin at 3,000 rpm — exactly in synchrony with the 50 Hz grid. They would absorb the ups and downs and keep the frequency tight within safe bounds.
It’s another hidden cost. Imagine the fun if the whole nation was trying to run on “50% renewable”?
If only SA had kept the coal plants running, says Ian Waters:
The Heywood interconnector can normally carry 650Mw of reliable brown coal fired power from Victoria and regularly stops blackouts in S.A. when the renewables are found wanting. The AEMO has been forced to take extraordinary steps to keep the lights on in S.A. and are ready to force shutdowns of solar, wind and gas units if the demand drops. They have taken control of the 3 batteries in S.A. in desperation. It is an !unprecedented! disasterand the whole state is on the edge. Please look at AEMO market notices 73830, 73832, 73838, 73857 and 73858 and you will recognise how desperate they are and how they are running around in blind panic.
Now here is the first point: If Weatherill, Turnbull and the AEMO had kept the Northern coal fired power-station running, most of these problems would not occur, the price would be much lower, the State would have sufficient system strength and S.A. would not be minutes or hours away from the next blackout!
It’s all just another reminder of how fragile our “renewable” grids are now. Despite having nearly twice as much infrastructure to make the same amount of electricity, SA can’t keep itself going without help and a lot of extra money. It’s more prone to price swings, spikes and squeezes that serve Big Corporate profiteers very well.
Someone is making a lot of money out of this. It’s a bit of a short squeeze with few frequency stabilizers able to help. And spikes can reach the same cap as energy charges — $14,700
Allan O”Neill:
Historically, FCAS capabilities have been provided mostly by generators as by-products of their main game, energy production, although batteries and certain loads with appropriate controls can also provide some or all forms of FCAS. In an analogous way to energy prices, market FCAS prices are set via bidding and clearing processes, which are fully enmeshed – coöptimised – with the NEM’s dispatch process for energy.
The quantities of FCAS services required are much smaller than the volumes of energy traded through the NEM (like energy, these volumes are measured in MW and MWh).
Usually other states keep SA stable:
The striking feature here is that the relationship between energy and FCAS prices was turned on its head by the separation event. That’s largely because under normal conditions, FCAS can often be supplied from anywhere in the NEM, so the cheapest offers from generators, batteries, or loads in any region can be used to meet AEMO’s requirements. Not all generators are able or choose to supply FCAS (until recently none of the NEM’s large scale renewable generators did so – however that is changing, and this post may show why that’s long overdue). But with a NEM-wide pool of potential suppliers, FCAS prices have tended to be lower – often much much lower – than energy prices.
But when South Australia became islanded by the transmission line collapse, FCAS requirements for that region could only be supplied from local providers – and there is only a small subset of participants in South Australia who have chosen to offer in the FCAS markets. With a suddenly reduced group of providers, the price of all FCAS products in South Australia leapt from a pre-event range between few cents and roughly $30/MWh (some higher levels on 30 Jan, driven by the very high energy price averaging over $770/MWh on that day), rising to daily average levels mostly over $100/MWh and in a few cases approaching $3,000/MWh after the separation event – remember, these numbers are daily averages!
This graph shows just how chaotic it has been in SA — but notice the prices — it’s a log scale!
Note also the prices hit a automated-cap on Feb 1st (hence the flat line keeping them at $300/MWh).
five minute FCAS prices over Friday 31 Jan and Saturday 1 Feb. WattClarity
This next graph is the exact same graph, but without the automatic cap added. So we can see what the prices would have been. Shocking!
This shows prices for many FCAS products jumping about wildly after separation, with extended periods at $14,700/MWh for a couple of products (the “Raise 6 second” and “Lower 60 second” services
FCAS charges Electricity SA, 2020, Graph. WattClarity
No doubt the whole drama will be used as a reason to build more giant interconnectors. Never waste a crisis!
Alan Kohler (ABC economics guru) thinks there is so much overwhelming evidence that a Royal Commission would persuade the skeptics. Skeptics say, yes please, lets do the due diligence that’s never been done. Go on convince us.
Over 50% of Australians are skeptical of the IPCC explanations (think that’s changed? See the last election results). Over 60% don’t want to pay even $10 a month. So lay it out. We want a Royal Commission, some kind of public debate, based on scientific evidence, not “scientific opinion”. It’s not enough to show the climate’s changed, we expect to see evidence about cause and effect. Let’s get all the uncertainties laid bare, not buried behind models and hidden by indignant namecalling. What are they afraid of?
If you worry, like I do — that any institutionalized forum can be another waste of money — captured by the swamp — then view this as a play in the only court that matters, the court of public opinion. Let Alan Kohler know there are lots of skeptics and we want a debate. Ask why the ABC won’t tell the world that there are tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, including NASA stars, meteorologists, Nobel Prize winners, and men who went to the moon, and they are willing to speak out even though the ABC likens them to pedophiles and tobacco profiteers and calls them denier scum.
If the science were settled the ABC wouldn’t be so afraid of phoning up Buzz Aldrin or Harrison Schmitt to ask politely “Why are you a skeptic?”
Don A reminds Australians who sign the petition that theyMUST confirm they’re not a robot, and tick the relevant boxes AND respond to a subsequent email. Make it count!
The PRESS RELEASE:
_________________________________
Cool Futures Funds Management
Climate and Energy Policies – Due Diligence Initiative
We support Alan Kohler’s call for an Australian Royal Commission and the related House of Representatives e-Petition EN1231 to review the evidence on our Climate and Energy Policies.
If the Government is genuinely interested in dispassionately resolving the polarized climate and energy debate, it should welcome this Royal Commission.
No one among the public, the policy-making ministers, the bureaucrats, the corporate and management class, the public intellectuals, or indeed our journalists, has ever seen or understood the empirical evidence in support of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). Why do the climate scientists believe in CAGW? Is there any empirical evidence? Can we see this evidence? What due diligence has been done so far?
This Royal Commission, as Alan Kohler suggests, will fill a critical need.
“… a review of the evidence on (climate change and energy) in which everyone is required (under oath) to tell the truth.”
The Australian Sept 21, 2019
Alan is alluding to those who are sceptical of CAGW. He wants to convince everyone the evidence on ‘climate change’ demands a ‘carbon’ emissions drop. Policies are supposed to be “science based” and “evidence based,” so we all need to know precisely what the relevant terms mean and what the evidence is. The public only ever hear or see people, including scientists, giving their opinions on climate change. But opinions are not evidence.
Climate & energy policy due diligence – not only has to be done – but has to be seen to be done.
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