It’s just another day in the death of investigative journalism
Notice the way the words shift. The ABC told us tonight that a new “Atlas” will “chart” the temperature for wine growing regions in Australia, as if charting is what we do when we are taking a blind guess with a broken model at the future. Once upon a time, atlases mapped things that already existed. The ABC and Uni Tas are just staring right into the future. Neat advertising eh?
Makes you wonder why we bother with thermometers.
The ABC News is like reading Harry Potter. The Hunter Valley is not predicted to get warmer, it’s “destined” to. Gone are the qualifiers: where once people might have to adapt, now they’ll be forced to. In gushing form, the ABC quotes shocked farmers saying “It’s pivotal”, “a line-in-the-sand body of work” a “wow moment” and a “world first”, as if Tasmanian scientists discovered the magical Marauders Map itself. It’s also like no group on Earth has ever tried to predict the climate of wine regions before. If the ABC interviewed a skeptical farmer it would have broken the camera.
If Uni of Tas hired an agency to run an advertising campaign, they couldn’t have done better than the prime-time, supposedly “investigative” segment on what we used to call news.
Pity the poor viticulturist who changes grape varieties, irrigates, or buys up a cold farm.
There is no mention of “uncertainty”, “projection”, “estimate” or any hint that there might be one living scientist in the world is not flat-out-drooling with excitement.
The ABC could have interviewed one of the greatest viticulturalists in Australia, but they wouldn’t like what he has to say. If you know someone growing wine, tell them to read John Gladstones, Wine, Terrior and Climate Change. Gladstones wrote The definitive text for the industry 30 years ago. He’s very much the industry guru, and not surprisingly — also a skeptic.
Watch this story on ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm or on iview if you can bear.
Save the children, and our Australian wine industry. Sell The ABC.
A world-first research document about to be released has detailed how Australia’s famous winegrowing regions will be forced to adapt due to climate change.
It charts an 80-year course for climate change, including temperature, rainfall, aridity and frost for each of the country’s 71 wine regions.
Lordy! They’ve discovered data from the future!
“It’s pivotal; I think this will be a line-in-the-sand body of work,” said Hunter Valley viticulturist Liz Riley, one of the first industry insiders to analyse the data.
With the Hunter destined to become three degrees warmer by 2100, with more intense and frequent heatwaves and more rainfall, Ms Riley is concerned for the health and safety of workers who will need to endure hotter, more humid conditions during the harvest season.
Shh. Nobody mention how reliable models are with rainfall OK? As in, “skillless”.
All eight wine regions in Tasmania will become hotter, some will become drier and others slightly wetter, but the water availability will be reduced, measured by an aridity index.
“It’s going to get hotter and drier in most Australian regions,” said lead author Tom Remenyi, from the University of Tasmania’s Climate Futures Group.
“That warming, drying trend is because as the temperature increases, there is more evaporative demand, so there is this drying pressure on the landscape which would require it to increase in rainfall to maintain the same balance we have at the moment.”
May the Lord have mercy on farmers who rely on UTas:
They do not have any irrigation, but concede they may need to in the future if, as the data suggests, the region becomes more arid.
“To have really detailed numbers and projections for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it’s hugely beneficial,” Ms Lipscombe said.
“We can make really concrete plans on what we need to do and how we need to approach the next few decades.”
The PDF is not even available yet. We must wait til Monday to read the legal fineprint declaring that they will take no responsibility for losses or damage caused, or lives ruined, or investments wrecked.
Remenyi, TA , Rollins, DA, Love, PT , Earl, NO , Bindoff, NL and Harris, RMB 2020 , Australia’s Wine Future – A Climate Atlas , University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/32250/
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
The BBC news mentioned that there were a lot of imported cases, that the biggest variety of genetic variants came from Spain, France and Italy and not China. But one tantalizing finding was that the UK transmission lines now appear to be “very rare or extinct”. Which surely implies that the lockdown is working, the UK lines are dying out, and that … by golly, the new infections must be regular incoming virus?
Three Key Conclusions:
The UK epidemic comprises a very large number of importations due to inbound international travel2. We detect 1356 independently-introduced transmission lineages, however, we expect this number to be an under-estimate.
Many UK transmission lineages now appear to be very rare or extinct, as they have not been detected by genome sequencing for >4 weeks.
We estimate that ≈34% of detected UK transmission lineages arrived via inbound travel from Spain, ≈29% from France, ≈14% from Italy, and ≈23% from other countries. The relative contributions of these locations were highly dynamic.
Instead, according to the BBC the big surprise in this study was that there was “no patient zero” who went on to give 300,000 people in the UK Covid, though it’s hard to believe anyone older than six thought that was even possible.
In February a quarter of million people flew into the UK — that’s not in February “the month”, — it’s every single day. In a world of exponential rising infections surely even preschoolers can figure out the odds that millions of travellers were flying in from a world of sick, and somehow were not sick themselves.
In March, 20,000 people a day were flying in from Spain, where the infection was running rife. Many of these would be British people returning home. The study shows the incredible folly of keeping borders open.
James Gallagher, BBC, Health and Science Correspondent
The study, by the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium (Cog-UK), completely quashes the idea that a single “patient zero” started the whole UK outbreak.
They found the UK’s coronavirus epidemic did not have one origin – but at least 1,356 origins. On each of those occasions somebody brought the infection into the UK from abroad and the virus began to spread as a result.
“The surprising and exciting conclusion is that we found the UK epidemic has resulted from a very large number of separate importations,” said Prof Nick Loman, from Cog-UK and the University of Birmingham.
“It wasn’t a patient zero,” he added.
The big surprise for me was that the number was so small. But the full study shows this is the tip of an iceberg. They analyzed data from 16,506 UK genomes, and another 12,000 genomes from other countries. So they looked at about 5% of the known coronavirus infections in the UK (which is still an impressive sample). So when they say 1,300 separate infections arrived, the researchers admit “We expect the number is an underestimate”. But it could be that 30,000 cases arrived across those open flowing borders. The researchers certainly don’t say that. They add that they do not attempt to measure the contributions of importation versus local transmission, nor to model the impact of the public health interventions. There are many caveats, and many assumptions. They have to estimate how fast the mutations are happening, how quickly they spread, how long it took to detect them, and how many of the subsequent transmissions they sampled.
The graph shows that the variants detected in early March have largely disappeared
…..
Most of the 1,356 lineages lasted for a month or so and died out. If those variants had successful spread and mutated they would look different to what they did on March 1 but there would still be a continuous chain of changes. The lineage wouldn’t have died out.
Figure 5: Estimated total number of inbound travellers to UK per day (black line) and the estimated number of infectious cases worldwide (dashed red line).
New cases in the UK are about 1,300 per day
How many of these new cases are from planes, trains and cars? How low would this tally be if instead the UK had put in border controls at the same time as it started major restrictions at the end of March? Mobility trackers show the UK was slowing down for most of March, and by the last week of March reached a full lockdown.
Even though, as of this week, the UK government is demanding all arrivals self-isolate for two weeks, they are only collecting names and addresses and promising to check on some of them. There’s a £1,000 fine for breaches, but only a £100 fine for people not filling in the form. (Seems like a cheap alternative to two weeks quarantine). The isolation is not only not enforced, it is not even a full 100% requirement — as those in self isolation are asked not to visit pharmacies and what not, unless they absolutely have to, and can’t find a friend to do it for them.
Individuals quarantining will be permitted to shop for food essentials and medicines but only if it is not possible to rely on others, and will be able to take public transport to their designated accommodation.
About a fifth of people are expected to receive a spot-check to ensure that they are staying at the address or addresses they have provided to the authorities, the Guardian understands.
As I’ve said before, and this study shows, the biggest mistake the UK Swamp made — apart from being unprepared was leaving the borders open. Which are still not closed. The UK aimed for Herd Immunity (that was the excuse for keeping the borders open, while the rest of the world closed them), a deadly mistake that killed tens of thousands of people who didn’t need to die, and also cost billions upon billions of dollars in pointless damage to the UK economy.
Have you got Coronavirus, do you live in the third world? Where’s the best place you could fly for safety and healthcare? — London.
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will shrink, so the price of those products will rise. It’s not possible that this change would increase the Australian GDP.
It’s all being rushed in to start in October 2021*, presumably because no one has the confidence that the Australian Grid will survive the next two summers without either price bonfires or a major blackout.
Big conglomerate generators and retailers don’t want this change, because it’s partly aimed at them. They like the price spikes and this threatens their profits:
The shift, which will begin in October 2021, has been adopted by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) despite opposition from big energy generators and retailers, who were using the COVID-19 crisis to pressure for delaying the rule changes.
Instead of making the market fairer and more transparent by removing all renewable subsidies, and asking renewable generators to pay fair prices for transmission costs, stability costs and back up of their unreliable product, this is a desperate workaround that leaves former agreements in place but adds a new layer of complexity to try to get rid of the spikes so the generators can’t game the system.
This is a change to enable the forced transition to renewables.
Head of energy policy at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre Craig Memery said it was “a critical reform that will bring much-needed benefits to consumers, and a key part of a secure, zero-carbon energy system”.
The propaganda makes out this is a win for all:
[AMEC] argues it will reduce electricity prices for consumers and improve reliability on the network, by allowing demand response to compete with “peaking” electricity generators that typically receive very high prices for supplying additional electricity during times of heavy demand.
“The benefits of wholesale demand response will flow through to all households and businesses through lower electricity bills and improved network reliability.
Obviously, the ABC repeats the propaganda and doesn’t ask any hard questions about how Australian citizens get richer by doing less.
Nobody mention the real costs:
Instead of “earning money” consumers will pay via their shareholding and superannuation losses, and via the increased prices of products. Some consumers will gain jobs, but more will lose their jobs as the net efficiency of a Greener economy means companies produce less, move overseas, generate less profit and thus employ fewer Australians. Less profitable companies will also pay less tax. Meaning that individual taxpayers will have to make up for lost tax income or the government will have to offer less services.
And so yet again, the cost of a green economy is buried so deep not even a PhD can unravel “who pays”.
They call it a win for environmental groups, which tells us it’s there to prop up the renewables industry, but of course, the only parts of the “environment” that will benefit from this are the unintended parts. Wind Turbines are the new top predator in the ecosystem. So lizards living under wind farms will be happy because predatory birds will be killed off.
Complexity breeds corruption:
Somehow we have to estimate what customers would have used to pay them for what they didn’t. This is a market of nullities again.
Under the change, large electricity users (such as big farms, factories and commercial enterprises) will be able to bid reductions in demand into the wholesale market and get paid for taking their demand out of the system.
Over time, demand response is expected to be extended to households and smaller businesses who sign up with companies that “sell” power reductions from thousands of customers into the market at times when wholesale prices are high.
Obviously all complexity comes at a price and provides more loopholes for dishonest players to profit just as China and others did when naive Western governments started paying companies to “save carbon” based on guesstimates of infrastructure changes they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Hands up who thinks companies will adjust their useage to game the system and imply they are taking out more demand than they actual did?
h/t David B
*Corrected, thanks John Hultquist. Not 2020 but 2021
Tucker Carlson asks whether the insane, unpopular idea to “defund the police” means getting rid of the current police and bringing in a new BLM-compliant “force”? Is this just The March through yet another Institution?
No one is allowed to say anything against this ideology. People are losing their jobs for the merest hint they they don’t wholeheartedly adopt an activist supporting role. But bullies thrive on grovelling obedience.
NEW ZEALAND EASES ALMOST ALL CORONAVIRUS RESTRICTIONS AMID NO ACTIVE COVID-19 CASES
— New Zealand has no active cases of the coronavirus, and no new positive cases reported in the past 17 days, according to CNN. For the past 12 days, there are no patients in the hospital receiving treatment for COVID-19 and for the past 40 days, there is no evidence of community transmission, according to CNN. Now, New Zealand is lifting almost all of its coronavirus restrictions, while still encouraging social distancing, keeping borders shut to non-residents and requiring that residents traveling into the country to quarantine for 14 days, according to CNN. New Zealand will be under “alert level 1” rules which means there will be no restrictions on domestic transport and no restrictions on workplaces or services, according to CNN and New Zealand’s government website.
— One third of all hospitalized cases also affected in NYC data
New data from two health systems in New York City — where hospitals struggled to keep up with dialysis demands as they were flooded with COVID-19 patients — detailed a high rate of acute kidney injury among infected patients.
In the first 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 33.9% developed acute kidney injury. Of the 236 who ended up in the ICU, 78% developed AKI, Ruijun Chen, MD, and colleagues reported in The BMJ.
In another study of 5,500 patients the rate was 36% of those hospitalized, and 89% of those in ICU on ventilators. Quite a few of these people went on to die, so, to put it bluntly, they wont be in need of dialysis or further care. But some part of the population in a post corona world will need ongoing care and won’t be able to work at their former level.
Docs are not sure if the kidney injury is from the virus or a side effect of the treatments. As we get better at treating this we may prevent this damage happening. Though, any disease involving mass clotting could cause damage in most organs, some of which can be repaired, but some of which will cause scarring that may be permanent. If Coronavirus is like a stroke-machine, the cognitive damage may be significant.
By Reed Abelson, Sheri Fink, Nicholas Kulish and Katie Thomas, New York Times.
April 18th, 2020
“Nothing like this has ever been seen in terms of the number of people needing kidney replacement therapy,” [said Dr. David S. Goldfarb, chief of nephrology at the New York campus of the New York Harbor VA Health Care System].
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a powerful display of their care for love and justice, protesters in Minneapolis burned the word “LOVE” into the city, arranging the inspiring message with homes and businesses set ablaze by their riots.
Be aware, the Bee’s point is very serious, but the reporting isn’t.
* * *
Commentators, due to Section 18C in Australia it’s illegal to discuss race or color since it may offend someone somewhere. Therefore the words black, white, yellow, red, skin, color, indigenous, indian, african, eskimo, asian, european, sub-saharan, BLM, WLM, ALM, will go straight to moderation, and can only be published after Section 18C is repealed in 2073AD or thereabouts. We can have a no color conversation. Which means, we here, have arrived in Martin Luther King’s world, ahead of the protestors and looters:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream that one day political parties will not seek to divide and segregate nations by skin color.
The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant
Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved.
It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile. Obviously Ecoworriers want to take that failure and do more of it.
…the data reveals that two months of significantly reduced human activity did not make a dent in the damage we’ve done to the planet. It ultimately confirms that nothing short of wholesale systemic change will do – with the rejection of fossil fuels at the heart of that transformation.
“Surprised” is not the word. When the punters realize that empty streets and skies makes no difference, there could be a monumental crisis of motivation coming. Games up?
“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak hasn’t done more to influence CO2 levels,” Ralph Keeling, a geochemist who runs the Scripps Oceanography CO2 program, said in a statement.
Daily emissions of CO2 were cut by an average of 17% worldwide in early April, but as COVID-19 lockdowns eased, the fall in emissions for the year as a whole is likely to be only between 4% and 7% compared to 2019.
Let’s just double this for five times as long, and never stop?
According to Scripps scientists, such small differences won’t reverse the devastating climate change course that the planet is currently on. However, if emissions reductions of 20% to 30% could be consistently achieved for six to 12 months, then the rate of CO2 increase on Mauna Loa would likely slow.
We discussed the inadequacies of the large Lancet study of hydroxychloroquine supposed used on 96,000 Covid patients from 671 hospitals. It was largely useless because it ignored zinc, wasn’t randomized and was mainly used on people who were already very ill, with a terrible 12% death rate. But it is far worse than that and has now been retracted. The number of deaths listed in Australia was higher than the official Australian tally on April 21. The number of Covid cases in Turkey was 80 times higher than official numbers.
The Guardian investigated the company that came out of nowhere with this enormous dataset which was used in both The Lancet paper and a New England Medical Journal paper. It turned out to be small, with a handful of employees and that include a science fiction writer, an adult content model, and few scientific qualifications. When The Guardian contacted the Australian hospitals that were supposedly included, they denied any role in the database. The firms CEO, Sepan Desai was listed as a co-author. When asked how the company accumulated so much data so quickly, Desai said it was with AI and machine learning.
But look how obviously dodgy this data was. After the Lancet study swept through the media like a breaking wave, will the media now work as hard to undo that news?
by Elizabeth Hlavinka, and Amanda D’Ambrosio, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Alarms were first sounded about a recent Lancet study on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and chloroquine for COVID-19 that appeared to have surprisingly high mortality rates overall. Researchers were also concerned that Surgisphere’s number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia exceeded the country’s published total.
Questions have been raised about Surgisphere, a data collection company founded by Sapan Desai, MD, PhD, that says it gathers and stores de-identified electronic health record data from 1,200 healthcare organizations in 45 countries.
Similar questions were raised about a New England Journal of Medicine study that found common blood pressure medications were not associated with in-hospital death among hospitalized patients with COVID-19, assuaging concerns about a possible harmful association. In that study, the number of COVID-19 cases Surgisphere counted in Turkey in mid-March was vastly greater than official numbers at the time — by a factor of about 80, according to a series of Twitter posts by Mike Johansen, MD, of Grant Family Medicine in Columbus, Ohio.
“At this point, there appear two viable options: the analysis and/or data were of such poor quality that it would render the studies unsuitable for publication, or the studies are derived from falsified data,” Johansen told MedPage Today in an email. “Two of the world’s most prestigious medical journals published studies by the same group of authors that are, at best, of no value with numerous obvious errors.”
Fake Warming in Queensland: The BOM says the sites didn’t move, but photos show they did.
The warming at these four sites alongside the Great Barrier Reef is due to site changes, incompetence, poor record keeping and “adjustments”. Map: Terrametrics, Map data Google 2020
All along the coast near the Great Barrier Reef, the BOM has claimed temperatures have warmed in the last 50 years, and they’ve calculated it to a tenth of a degree. To get that kind of accuracy the thermometers need to be carefully placed, and the BOM needs to know exactly where they were, but they don’t.
The BOM keeps long pages of site descriptions and exact dates of moves and equipment changes, but historic photos show the records are wrong. The BOM will solemnly swear a site was in the same place for decades but photographs and archives show the sites were often moved as developments sprang up around them. The BOM didn’t keep the records and didn’t bother to check. If the thermometer moved to a warmer location or it warmed because they replaced the standard 230-litre Stevenson screen with a 60-litre toy one, or no longer cleaned it of dust and grime that’s climate change at work (Ka-Ching). There’s probably a thermometer 500km away that can be used to “correct” the record. (Like say, Coen or Musgrave which are used to “adjust” Cairns and are 452 km and 746 km away!). Near enough’s rough enough! Homogenisation is fatally flawed and should be abandoned.
“The notion that the Great Barrier Reef is threatened by climate change and warming depends on incompetent records, unjustifiable ‘corrections’, super-sensitive thermometers in smaller boxes, and neglected sites” says Johnston.
Dr Bill Johnston has done the work documenting our sites that the million-dollar-a-day Bureau of Meteorology can’t find time to do. He uses aerial and satellite photos as well as ground based shots from the national archives. The BOM says the climate is the most important issue for life on Earth, but it isn’t important enough for the BOM to find the archived photos and documents that show the thermometers kept moving and the area around the thermometers kept changing.
If Blair Trewin and the Bureau director Dr Andrew Johnson had even the slightest interest in the Australian climate they would welcome the dedicated, historical work of Dr Johnston with a big thank you. Instead the BOM stopped answering questions, and Bill Johnston finds it difficult to get published anymore in meteorology journals. As the Bureau became an advertising agency for Big Government projects, the scientific evidence apparently became a pain in the neck.
The same team that holds the raw data and the metadata, is also the same team that analyses it and makes political statements it. They are the only ones who know what the instruments are really measuring, they won’t explain in full how they adjust it. The raw data is deleted. The methods are a secret, and the team have become unaudited political actors.
So Bill Johnston has started publishing his meticulous work on his own website. There are four stations there and so many more to come. A life’s expertise and several years of work, done unpaid. The BOM say they are independent, but they are totally dependent on Big Gov for their existence. Bill Johnston really is independent. It’s cost him to publish this and do this work, but he’s done it anyway.
“Despite all the catastrophism and free money, there is no evidence that the climate of the Great Barrier Reef has changed or is likely to change in the future”, says Bill Johnston.
Dr Johnston uses maps and plans from the National Archives and National Library of Australia and aerial photographs and satellite images to check if changes in temperature data align with site changes detailed by Bureau of Meteorology site-summary and ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature) metadata.
The site at Gladstone has changed dramatically from 1965 to 2016.
He has investigated and analyzed more than 300 of Australia’s most important long term sites, and 80 of supposedly top notch ACORN-SAT sites (which is about 75% of them).
Across Australia no sites have stayed the same. They’ve moved, the original 230-litre Stevenson screens have been replaced with more responsive 60-litre ones; automatic weather stations (AWS) have replaced thermometers; new sites have opened using PVC-screens in the hottest places they could find; observers have gone and they scrimp and save by not mowing the grass or cleaning equipment of dust and grime. “Australia’s warming is mostly due to poor maintenance and electronic thermometers operating in small Stevenson screens”, Dr. Johnston said.
“Evidence that the Bureau adjusts their datasets to support the warming narrative is unequivocal” Bill said; “sometimes they recognise a site change, sometimes they don’t; it’s a non-random pattern. Many forgotten site changes create a trend they can blame on the climate”.
“Furthermore, as AWS are hard-wired to Melbourne, Weather language has also changed. “They cook-up a record wherever you are and the weather is always extreme”, Bill said.
“Photographs, aerodrome plans and documents show metadata relied on to make adjustments are faulty and misleading”, said Bill. “For instance, at Gladstone, they replaced the radar; cleared the bush and installed a 60-litre screen 30-metres away; sacked the staff, demolished the office and its unsurprising that as instruments are no longer regularly serviced and cleaned, temperature has increased relative to the climate”.
It’s a debacle up at Cairns as well. They didn’t know what happened at the Post Office or that the original aerodrome site was located beside the old apron. They said that in December 1992 the site moved 1.5 km northwest (to the other side of the runway). However, they forgot that it moved to a mound near the centre of the airport in 1966 and that it moved again before September 1983. Also, as one was bulldozed to build the other and no data was missing, another site must have opened in the interim.
The 60L boxes are too small to allow all the equipment to operate at it’s best. The highly sensitive electronic thermometers at the back are barely 2cm away from the hotter north facing side of the screen. They will record one second spikes in temperature, and the Bureau of Meteorology accepts these spurious spikes as new “hottest day ever” records.
Inside the crowded little 60-litre screen at Townsville. Note the electronic thermometers at the back are about 2 cm closer to the north facing rear of the screen than maximum and minimum thermometers are; which is enough to make them warmer on warm days. Photo courtesy of BoM (http://www.bom.gov.au/qld/townsville/photos.shtml)
The Bureau claims the Townsville airport weather station has absolutely not moved: “There are no documented moves until one of 200 m northeast on 8 December 1994”. However, the site moved at least three, possibly four times while it was on the eastern side of the main runway and probably twice between January 1970 when it moved to a mound on the western side and the most recent move to the AWS. “By pretending the site didn’t move before 1994, they attributed trends and changes in the data to the climate”, Bill said.
Similarly at Rockhampton, where before it moved to a mound near the middle of the airport in about 1956, the original Stevenson screen was near the airport’s northern boundary beside the USAAF garrison and canteen. Warming caused by a satellite communications module installed close-by the second site in 1986 was ignored to imply it was due to the climate.
Saturday week ago in Queensland was cold enough to break records. Brisbane “only” made it up to 17.9C (64F). It hasn’t been that cold there in May for 40 years. At the same time a band of cloud covered the populated slice of the state.
The cloud cover meant all the large solar “farms” in Queensland — with a total rated capacity of 1.7GW — produced only 79MW as an aggregate average daily output.
Averaged across the 24 hours in the day yesterday, average aggregate outputacross all of the Large Solar plant in QLD was a very meagre 79MW only:
1a) Dividing this by an aggregate 1,664MW installed capacity* across the Large Solar plant in QLD this represents a capacity factor the day of just 4.7%
Not surprisingly the same clouds that ruined the large solar farms also wrecked the rooftop solar.
One in three homes in Queensland have solar panels. With 1.8GW of theoretical capacity, rooftop solar is Queenslands largest generator (except it hardly ever produces that much). At its peak in January the Qld solar farms worked at 31% of capacity. That’s a big slice of generation that may or may not be there.
There goes another Gigawatt — there one day and gone the next:
As Rafe Champion would say, “this was a chokepoint for solar”. We have to have the backups there to cover the worst days — even if the bad days are only a few days a year.
McArdle estimates that Queenslanders used 17% more electricity that day than the Saturday a week earlier. It was cold (for Queenslanders) so power use went up at the same time as clouds cut the states main generator. When clouds rolled into Alice Springs, they ended up with a nine hour blackout. That didn’t happen in Queensland, but there are five million people who depend on electricity there. There are similar warnings about clouds and solar power causing blackouts in Western Australia.
If you think this is crazy, worse is coming. Wikipedia has a list of QLD solar farms. Ominously, another 1.7GW are under construction and another 8GW have been approved. All of which would have been useless together on May 23rd.
Hey, but it’s only one day. They could just close some factories.
The Swedish soft lockdown will cost a lot more in the long run
Despite the relaxed approach, Sweden still had major changes in behaviour and movement patterns. The “half lockdown” may have stopped the exponential growth, but it wasn’t enough to reduce the spread. So Sweden is now trapped into maintaining some kind of isolation measures for months while other countries open up around them, and possibly, fly right over.
Norway’s sharp hard action and closed borders cost more in the short run, but they are now tracking towards zero cases and recovery beckons. Sweden has twice as many cases per capita as Norway, and ten times as many deaths, and there’s little sign the new infections are declining, nor that herd immunity is close. Antibody tests show that by late April only 7% of Stockholm may have been exposed to the virus, much less than the 20+ percent that the Swedish Chief Epidemiologist was expecting.
In the graph below the number of cases are on the same scale, though Sweden has twice the population. Given that viruses grow and decline on exponential scales, the Swedish curve could have still shrunk almost as fast as it rose — like Norway’s did.
Sweden (grey) population 10 million, compared to Norway (red) population 5 million. Click to enlarge.
Norway: 12 days after major quarantine measures the curve gets crushed
The way the Swedish response has been structured has made the country more resistant to changing tack during the epidemic. Sweden’s expert agencies are kept quite separate from the government, which is generally a good thing, because it means that scientific issues don’t become politicised. “But if the expert agency is making bad decisions there is nothing to counter it,” [Lena Einhorn, a virologist and author] points out.
Swedes are generally more trusting of authority and science than those in other countries, he adds. Despite recent murmurings of disquiet, the agency remains broadly popular among the public – and Tegnell has become something of a cult figure in Sweden, with toasts on his birthday and people getting tattoos of his face. But that’s been part of the problem. “The biggest problem in Sweden is there is really only one voice – that voice is the public health agency, and in particular Anders Tegnell,” Einhorn says.
h/t Travis T Jones.
Mobility in Sweden was reduced by about half compared to reductions in Norway and London
Apple iPhone data suggests that requests for directions on public transport may have been reduced by nearly half in Stockholm. This compares to a 70% reduction in Oslo, Norway and the 85% fall in London, UK. See the graphs below. These are requests for directions. They aren’t passenger records, and people doing regular trips probably don’t use them. But we can see that whatever the change in behaviour was in London, it was less severe in Norway, and about half in Stockholm.
Oslo Apple traffic data
Pandemics cause economic pain regardless of what governments do
Even if the government doesn’t mandate restrictions, apparently many people choose to stay home anyway. This is what we see in Sweden.
Even the UK, which was caught unprepared and with a high density population, is managing to reduce the spread. The late start meant the UK ended up with a dreadful tally, and had to do some of the most severe restrictions of the three. But even so, and even with the sabotage of open borders bringing in 10,000 people a day, the UK has gradually cut their 5,000 new cases a day down to one third of that.
Beware — there are two different scales on the graph below. (!) The UK population is six times larger than Sweden, it had ten times as many cases at the peak,but putting them on the same scale makes it hard to compare the shape of the curves.
The effects of the harder lockdown in the UK show in May. Daily new cases in the UK are now a third of what they were at the peak.
Sweden (grey) compared to the UK (blue). Note the diffent scales, the UK daily cases are 10 times higher than Sweden. | Worldometer: UK peak daily infections
The UK decline in cases would have been faster if the borders in the UK were not open. Plane traffic into the UK was hugely reduced, but there were still 10,000 arrivals a day, bringing in something like 300 new infections a day which would go on to infect another 600 people before that line of infection died out. (This is assuming an Ro of 0.7 for the UK as estimated by Imperial College). So the UK tally was effectively inflated by 900 new cases a day, which made the severe lockdown much less effective, and not surprisingly draining enthusiasm.
I remain baffled that any government would demand 60 million people stay strictly at home while allowing foreigners to fly in without mandatory quarantine.The UK Swamp-Expert advisor were clearly thinking of ‘herd immunity” when they modeled some excuses not to close the borders. It is almost a form of sabotage. The economic advantage of letting sick people fly in without putting them in mandatory hotel isolation must be a tiny fraction of the lockdown cost. It makes no sense and would burn through the patience and social capital of the UK people.
Sweden also kept borders open which presumably must work against the 50% lockdown. It would be good to have flight data in Sweden.
Citimapper Ap Data
Many media outlets have used the Citymapper Ap data, so I’ve included that here.
Remember the Japanese wonder drug Ivermectin that killed Coronavirus in the lab? Some trials on patients in Bangladesh and the US are showing some promise. This is the drug I called “sheep dip” (but which is really more of a cow or horse drench now). It’s famous for stopping River Blindness and saving the eyesight of thousands. It’s also used against roundworms, lungworms, mites, lice, scabies and hornflies, as well as cattle-ticks. So it’s another drug, like hydroxycholoroquine that has been road tested for safety’s sake up the kazoo.
As I said — there may come a day when you can cure coronavirus and treat the kids headlice at the same time. Handy.
So it’s good to know some trials are occurring, and even better to know that some doctors are very enthusiastic about the results. In terms of medical clinical trials, these are small. I’m not sure the enthusiasm is matched by the data. I’d only say “it’s not dead yet”. But in terms of drug testing, that’s an achievement. Here’s hoping it can live up to these plans.
[UPDATE: Some readers missed the meaning in the paragraph above, so I bolded it. If anyone thinks I’m raving about these small anecdotal reports, read the line above . – Jo]
But if Coronavirus can be treated with a common mass produced, safety tested chemical, some Big Vaccine makers might not be as enthusiastic.
Reports Friday from multiple trials in the United States and abroad indicate a drug already approved by the FDA to treat parasitic infections is showing “astounding” results, and could represent a breakthrough in efforts to vanquishing the SARS-CoV-2 virus at the heart of the global pandemic.
Emergency medical physician Dr. Peter H. Hibberd, M.D., of Palm Beach County, Florida, told Newsmax Friday evening in an exclusive interview that he’s optimistic the drug will prove to be an important therapeutic advance, although he expects more trials will be needed before it wins FDA approval for use as a COVID-19 medication.
“There’s a common denominator here,” said Hibberd. “This drug is salvaging people from their death bed.”
In some cases, doctors reported just one dose of ivermectin markedly improved a patient’s condition. U. S. patients received a single oral dose, and some of them received a booster dose seven days later. The FDA-approved dose for parasitic infections was used.
“We have got astounding results. Out of 60 COVID-19 patients, all recovered as the combination of the two drugs were applied”, said Professor Dr Md Tarek Alam, the head of medicine department at private Bangladesh Medical College Hospital (BMCH).
My team was prescribing the two medicines only for coronavirus patients, most of them initially reporting with respiratory problems with related complaints, later to be tested COVID-19 positive, he said.
Bangladesh has so far reported 20,995 coronavirus cases. A total of 314 people have lost their lives in the country due to the disease.
The death rate in Bangladesh then is around 1.4% of known cases. No clues there either.
ICMR to review ‘wonder’ drug combo used to treat Covid patients in Bangladesh
According to doctors in Bangladesh, the combination of ivermectin and doxycycline is an effective treatment against Covid-19, with patients recovering within four days.
h/t Keith Harrison, Bill in Oz, Chad, Dave in the states, NezySquared, Another Ian.
UPDATE: The early lab tests implied we would need to use Ivermectin at an impossibly high dose to get the effect we want. After the Monash paper suggested the drug was reducing viral titres by 5,000 fold, another paper quickly replied that the approved dose of Ivermectin [would] not [be] useful in treating Covid-19. That headline desperately needed a verb of some sort. I added the “would be” which tells the audience that this response came from modeling and estimates, not from any patient data. It’s a theoretical response, not an observed one. It’s a lesson that in humans, we just have to do the testing in vivo. h/t Peter F
Clare Armstrong, David Aidone, James MacSmith, News Corp Australia Network
Plans have been launched for a quarantine-free gateway to Europe through Israel by December, and a long-haul flight to Costa Rica, as countries that have managed COVID-19 effectively race to join Australia and New Zealand’s tourism bubble proposal.
Israel wants to schedule a permanent flight to its economic hub of Tel Aviv from either Sydney or Melbourne to open itself up as a stepping stone to ‘safe’ European countries including Norway, Denmark, Greece and the Czech Republic.
While the timeline includes the Pacific Islands, it has been labelled “aspirational” and the NZ and Australian government will make the final call.
Meanwhile, discounted plane tickets and free accommodation are among perks that will be offered to travellers as countries ease border restrictions.
Countries with plenty of virus could always travel freely to other countries with plenty of virus. But the country with the most infections, or the worst hospitals, gets the better deal.
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, Rollins, DA, Love, PT 
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
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