With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.
Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.
The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.
The surge in power at midday forces the rest of the reliable generators to spin their wheels, running inefficiently, while they wait to be allowed back to do what they could have done all along without all the stopping and starting. It’s a miles per gallon kind of thing. Solar power makes the whole grid less efficient.
Here’s South Australia on October 16th setting a record in vanity-electricity:
The achievement is that the grid is so overdeveloped that it had twice as many generators as it needed at midday. Briefly, rooftop solar was making 92% of all the electricity the state could use.
Solar panels are the roadworks on the grid freeway that slows down the trucks and cars that are doing something useful. They provide poor quality electricity, which needs back up, frequency stabilizers, storage, long transmission lines, huge subsidies and large holes in the ground to store all the waste. Not to mention slave labor too. What’s not to like?
This AEMO graph below shows the exotic but mindless concept of “Instantaneous renewable penetration”. It creates the illusion that this concept is a long term meaningful attribute, when really this is just the peak half hour in a three month period, or 1 part in 4,000 of what we really need. This represents just the leading creeping edge of the fantasy. 99.99% of the time, the world doesn’t look like this.
AEMO Q3 report. 2022.
The fine print:
28Instantaneous renewable penetration is calculated using the NEM renewable generation share of total generation The measure is calculated on a half-hourly basis, because this is the granularity of estimated output data for distributed PV.
If they could have estimated the five minute peak of solar, they would have.
China emits more CO2 than first world combined, but tells the West to “do more” as it quietly sprints into the Space Race
…
China signed the Paris Agreement, which meant nothing at all. It is now building 60% of all the new coal plants in the world while the West does a kind of Tantric Energy Yoga — trying to run smelters with solar panels.
This is the luminous elephant floating in the kitchen at COP27:
If CO2 mattered, they would care. But the point of COP27 was never about the climate.
…
China absurdly mocks the moral carbon-beauty-contest of the west, while applauding us, and playing by its own rules
From the sidelines, the CCP berates and eggs on the West saying that “empty slogans are not ambition” and calling for the “UN climate summit to address the concerns of developing nations.”
Li Gao, director of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s climate change department… urged developed nations to meet their commitments on the US$100 billion per year and called for rich countries to develop a more ambitious road map for climate finance for 2021-25 and onwards. — South China Morning Post
Meanwhile today China-the-developing-nation is celebrating the docking of their third space module. Nothing says “advanced” quite like building your own space station. Nothing says “dangerous” quite like working on the far side of the moon, where no one can see you, which is another project for the China National Space Administration.
China Launches Final Module To Complete Space Station
There’s a shadow war in Space “every day”. China is actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis, harassing them with lasers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms.
Meanwhile it’s almost like there is a shadow economic and industrial war too, and one of the weapons is “carbon”.
Things are far far worse at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology than even we realized.
“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says.
While Australia is flooding and lives depend on forecasts, the management of our weather bureau is cutting back on meteorologists and on weather balloons, but they’re making sure they do frivolous exercises in rebranding with a new kindergarten logo and calls to be “The Bureau”, and not the BoM.
It’s hard to believe, but instead of releasing two weather balloons from each site every day like the rest of the modern world, the BoM has decided to cuts costs and reduce many regional sites to just one or even none each day. This is in breach of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) standards. Weather balloons are the prize “unrivaled” meteorological instrument. In roughly 900 places all over the world, weather balloons are launched twice a day, every day of the year. These radio back temperature, humidity and wind and pressure data as they rise up as high as 30 kilometers (20 miles) into the atmosphere.
The degradation of the BoM as a science agency is so far gone, that there was even an astonishing plan to reduce launches in capital cities. The idea was to do just one balloon a day, with a second one “on request”. After a fierce internal battle, it appears the aviation division of the bureau, perhaps concerned that planes might crash, said they will find some money to cover the second balloon. Though that’s only for this financial year. The intent is still there. Who needs data, eh?
Insiders are so outraged, they are speaking anonymously to reporters of The Saturday Paper.
One meteorologist at the bureau, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was now “an open secret that we are not meeting our WMO obligations” on upper atmosphere observation. “We have been told by several senior people that we are now not meeting our WMO requirements, but I also get the sense that it is not considered to be a big deal,” they said. “It’s kind of horrific, the effect that it would have on our model quality as well as just our ability to add our own expertise on top of the computer models. It is crazy to me.”
“Everywhere around the world balloons are launched twice daily at more or less synchronised times,” a meteorologist employed by the BoM said on the condition his identity not be revealed. “Not only is this data the only way to get a real idea of what is actually going on in the vertical profile of the atmosphere, it provides crucial observations for the NWP [numerical weather prediction] models.
“The NWP models are going to become significantly worse across Australia, which in turn affect forecast quality, especially with public weather relying on pure model data so much lately.”
It’s not clear exactly how many sites have shifted from 14 weather balloons a week “to five”, but if the capital cities were next on the list, how many other sites are left still maintaining the normal WMO standards?
Does the climate matter to the BoM? Looks like “not”.
The loss of weather balloon data is an absolute scandal — our entire hundred billion dollar forced transition depends on climate models that use weather balloon data as the main tool to identify the major cause of the warming. Hey, but it’s only “attribution”, who cares what drives the climate, apart from 26 million people paying for green electrons and eating crickets to save the world?
Besides, if the greenhouse “hot spot” fingerprint isn’t there, it’ll be so much easier to find it with sparser data and wider error bars. 28 million weather balloons looked for the hot spot from 1959 – 1999 and couldn’t find it, but maybe they could’ve if models had interpolated the “gaps” instead? Sometimes you can have too much data…
It’s not just the cost cutting, and the data loss, but also the management
Hard to believe I could ever feel sorry for the meteorologists at the BoM, but here we are. They didn’t speak up for science and data much in the last twenty years, instead they welcomed Big Government and it has come in to eat them. Karma, much?
Giles Met Station launching a weather balloon.
Instead of being a scientific agency it is now a Home-for-Bureaucrats which also does some forecasts. It’s run by administrators, not people who love meteorology, and as the bureaucrats grew, the meteorologists shrank. Increasingly the bureau is relying on models, but with less data, and less expert oversight. Staff are not being replaced to keep up with attrition.
“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says. “The public forecast gets produced twice a day, at 4am and 4pm. The national production team is shockingly small for the task at hand.
To cope with the vast task of individual town forecasts across a whole continent, the BoM is increasingly relying on “automation and bureaucracy through decision matrices.” All the advanced neural nets in the brains of meteorologists are ignored in favour of a silicon chip decision. So when a prediction from the weighted “global model of models” looks wrong, the experts can’t override it.
“Say, then, that in Melbourne the max temperature that was generated by models was going to be too high, or the models were saying showers all day when it really wasn’t going to happen,” a meteorologist says.
“Even if a forecaster in national production knew this was the case, and even if it would take them five minutes to fix, it would not satisfy the decision matrix for that day, and they would not be allowed to fix it. I stress, even if it would take them five minutes.”
The BoM defends its forecasts are better now than five years ago, and that the automated forecasts are more accurate. Though, of course, some of us wonder what accurate means, and who decided how to measure it.
The whole nation is spending billions of dollars to “fix” our weather based on warming measured in sites that often fail the BoM’s own standards, but the BoM is more concerned about the way people refer to it on Twitter instead of the thermometers placed near incinerators and bitumen car parks.
There’s a lot more BoM incompetence on display in The Saturday Paper article, which is well written, but is paywalled. In other scandals the BoM’s giant new supercomputer has sat there for years unable to be used until it can be moved to a new “resilient data centre” perhaps another year or two away. And an 18 month long program to upgrade the national forecast grid from 6km to 3km ended with them dropping the more accurate 3km grid which existed in Victoria and Tasmania and putting the whole nation on the lower resolution 6km grid. So not only did the process reduce the resolution in two states, but now there are many work-arounds to compensate for the lack of the 3km grid everyone was expecting to use, and had been planning for.
Thanks to David E, El Gordo, and The Great UnVaxxed.
This may explain why some unlucky people got such bad reactions.
Dr Ryan Cole points out that it normally takes years to perfect the mass production of a new class of drug products, but many people, he claims were lucky because they got a shot “of mush” — from harried car park pop-up clinics — if the vaccines weren’t kept cold enough they had probably already degraded.
Quality control was so poor, he claims, that batches weren’t mixed well, and some people got a dilute vial from the start of a batch. The fats in the vat float to the top, apparently, and the first vials are missing “the goods”. But by the end of the batch the last vials are high dose, and with debris from manufacturing, from gaskets, aluminum seals, and crushed glass.
“The more we look at it, the more we see bad manufacturing.”
By Jo Nova Just as Joe Biden cancelled Keystone on his first day, the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canned Fracking on Day one. He was appointed on Tuesday and the fracking ban was reinstated Wednesday. It tells us exactly what his top priorities are, and perhaps also tells us what the real unforgivable sin was that Liz Truss committed. There are a lot of vested interests that would hate to see fracking start in the UK. The horror, after all, would be if that cheap gas started to flow and people in the UK got used to it, and realized micro earthquakes were, well, nothing. How would anyone cork up those wells after the war? If a few old coal plants restart it’s no big deal, they can be shut down again. But if shale gas “was trialled” there’d be no going back.
Fracking shale gas turned the US back into an energy giant. For the last month or so, there was the stark danger that the UK might get energy independence too, but then Rishi Sunak arrived to save the day, or rather to save a few houses from theoretical seismic events so small that people would need a Richter scale in the kitchen to detect most of them. The UK fracking limit is set at a tiny 0.5 magnitude.
For perspective, there were 45,000 shale gas wells operating in the US in 2014, but the UK has two which are not operating, and they want to shut them down in the middle of an energy crisis. Things are so bad in the UK, that 1 in 10 hotels, pubs and restaurants may go out of business this winter.
The situation is so bizarre, so over-the-top, that there are calls for a general election from every angle. Even the greener end of the Tory Party are mad, because killing off shale is not enough — Sunak is committing blasphemy by not singing hymns at COP27 in Egypt too. Speaking of which, Boris is heading off to COP27 because grandstanding is what it is designed for, and the rumors are running that he will make a comeback.
The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.
It’s a case of selective enforcement. No other industry has to keep seismic events to nothing; not truckers, or miners, or pop singers. Even primary school children are allowed to generate seismic shocks ten times bigger than Cuadrilla is. In 2001, one million of children jumped off chairs to create a shake of about a 3.0.
The Russians have been feeding fracking fear for years:
Russia makes about $300 billion in gas and oil exports each year. For a tiny tenth of a billion dollars it fed western activists in NGOs* and successfully stopped fracking development in the UK (and some parts of Australia apparently). It’s what you call a stupendous investment.
But China also benefits from UK energy poverty; The EU doesn’t want a strong independent UK, and the WEF, the UN, the renewables industries, and the religious greens are all happy about it too.
No wonder British people want an election:
Liar!
Rishi Sunak 10 weeks ago showing his support for fracking and once he got the position of Prime Minister, banned it.pic.twitter.com/hLWt0gutw0
Whatever the question, the excuse is always “climate change” and the answer is always Wind and Solar.
Are you an Energy Minister? Did you stop drilling for gas, let teenage girls design your national grid, and rely on a hostile power to supply your fuel? Stupid you, but that’s OK, because if your reliable grid is failing, it’s not your fault, it’s “climate change”. See how this works? It’s not that you vandalized a highly engineered system with frivolous vanity projects but that you didn’t do enough of them.
Heatwaves are apparently wrecking coal plants now. That extra one degree outdoors makes all the difference to a turbine that runs 24 hours a day at 540 degrees C. If only we’d known? Or maybe we did. In 1962 we could build coal plants in Arizona that are still running, and gas plants (in 1959) in Yuma County where the average maximum is 45C (115F) for three months of the year.
Seems the engineers had hot weather sorted out 60 years ago.
Extreme weather events – high winds, heatwaves, freezing rain, and loss of glaciers and snow pack mean once reliable sources of power can fail.
It’s not that socialist policies to drive out reliable power have succeeded and 50 year old equipment is being neglected and not replaced. No…
Clearly children are not doing enough tours of nuclear plants and coal turbines. They grow up to be journalists for The Guardian that think rainy, windy days can slow these industrial giants down.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says 87% of global electricity comes from nuclear, hydro and thermal fossil fuel plants that rely on water for cooling, and up to a third of these are in high water stress areas. Predicting droughts, stream flows and water availability is therefore vital for maintaining supply.
If only climate models were not 100% skillless in predicting regional rain, droughts or extremes, 1,2,3,4 they might be able to tell us where to build our power plants. Not to mention those windmills…
For solar and wind, where water is less of an issue, predicting wind strength and sunshine hours is key. In countries with highly variable weather, such as the UK, this is still a work in progress, although improving all the time. Partly, these problems can be mitigated by giant batteries and well-tried technologies, such as pump storage, where water is pumped back uphill at night for hydro-power production at peak times.
““A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”“
Restoring free speech on Twitter is not necessarily a given. There are plenty of political players that are afraid of uncontrollable citizen journalists and they will fight back.
But Musk at least, is clear on what he hopes to achieve:
The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.
There were only 16 people involved in the lawsuit in New York, but they won this round categorically and it may set a precedent that affects thousands. The 16 sanitation workers who were sacked because they chose not to be vaccinated must be reinstated, and the Judge wants lost wages to be paid too:
The Epoch Times: Judge Strikes Down NYC Vaccine Mandate
A New York Supreme Court judge on Monday struck down New York City’s vaccine mandate, finding the rule to be unconstitutional, arbitrary, and capricious.
Attorney Chad LaVeglia, who announced the verdict outside the Richmond County courthouse, said the mandate was now “null and void.”
This is not over yet. The decision, applies just to these 16 workers and will be appealed:
The ruling strikes down the mandate that saw over 2,000 city workers fired for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine. LaVeglia said the ruling extends to all public workers, including the New York fire department, the police department, and the Department of Corrections. However, the city disagreed and filed an appeal, saying it is keeping the mandate in place.
Justice Ralph Porzio’s decision is here. Apparently the legal case partly hinged on the lack of scientific evidence for the mandate, but mostly on the arbitrary and capricious nature of the ruling. While police, firefighters and cleaners had to obey, some athletes and celebrities did not. The mandate applied to public sector workers from one date but not to private sector workers until several months later. And the NY ruling class gave exceptions out “arbitrarily” (presumably to anyone famous enough to protest and make the City of New York look bad).
“This is clearly an arbitrary and capricious action because we are dealing with identical unvaccinated people being treated differently by the same administrative agency.”
Porzio said in his ruling that a new condition of employment cannot be imposed on employees when the condition did not exist when they accepted the contract. This seems cut and dried, but expect future employment contracts to add in this cause. Free citizens must be prepared to protest as soon as the employment contracts change and before anyone signs them.
Nearly half of Britons are already finding it hard to pay their energy bills. Over two million UK households are behind in their payments, and some have started unplugging fridges, hand washing their clothes and skipping meals, and it’s not even winter. The National Grid manager is so desperate they’re setting up a scheme to pay people to switch off their own electricity at peak hour, and the going rate for these precious Negawatts is £3,000 per megawatt hour.
There’s the hint of a war footing building. Thousands of shared refuges from the cold are being planned across the country, and the WarmSpaces website is setting up a directory.
Last week someone leaked that the BBC was secretly planning what to do if the UK gets a full two-day national blackout in the dead of winter. Apparently the BBC will advise people to use their car radios, or haha “battery powered receivers” (do the millennials know what they are?) to tune in the BBC. If they manage that, the BBC could then helpfully tell them, the minute after it was too late to do anything, that the blackouts may affects their gas supply, their mobile phone, the cash machines and all the traffic lights too. And don’t call an ambulance unless you really need it. But that’s OK, because if their phone battery goes flat, they won’t be able to anyway.
Maybe the BBC could stop covering up for Big Government and advise people to buy batteries, food, fuel, and a small radio now instead. Was the leak was their way of doing that?
Britons will allegedly be advised to stick to car radios or battery-powered receivers to get the necessary information amid a power cut. One draft of these scripts states that a blackout could last up to two days, with hospitals and police placed under “extreme pressure”.
Another warns: “The government has said it is hoped power will be restored in the next 36 to 48 hours.”
People will be comforted to know that there will be no shortage of bureaucrats:
It also states that an emergency coordination centre has been launched in Wales, while in Scotland the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is chair of a devolved government emergency planning meeting in light of the ordeal.
This is how to tell people their food supply might be at risk without saying it.
The script also states: “Officials are saying there is no current risk to food supply and distribution. But they’re asking people to look out for vulnerable neighbours and relatives.”
There really are a lot of warm spaces being planned. Wolverhampton has 0.4% of the UK population:
The phenomenon is widespread — the 262,000-resident city of Wolverhampton alone expects 38 such centers to open within its limits this year. But issues such as disability access, amenities and even ideal indoor temperatures may vary widely. Lewis’s how-to guide is aimed at ensuring that these often bottom-up, locally organized facilities are inclusive, financially sustainable and welcoming.
The UK National Grid wants to pay people for having their own little blackout at peak times:
Fintan Slye — the director of National Grid’s electricity system operator
We can now confirm our proposals for how much people and businesses can be paid for shifting their electricity use outside peak times. We anticipate paying a rate of £3,000 per megawatt hour. Businesses and homes can become virtual power plants and, crucially, get paid like one too.
For a consumer that could mean a typical household could save approximately £100, and industrial and commercial businesses with larger energy usage could save multiples of this. We are working with Ofgem to get this scheme launched in November…
If they have to pay people as much as £3,000 per megawatt hour to turn off their own power, it shows how highly people value the service. And, presumably, only the poor will take the deal, upend their daily schedule, screw with their body clocks, or cook with candles indoors.
Give this man a medal. Prof Norman Fenton explains this so well. If this technique is widely used, then it is a scandal. It is so utterly dishonest, so obviously wrong. If groups really are using this to report “efficacy” where were all the Professors and medical agencies we pay to protect us? Perhaps there were other efficacy studies which didn’t do this? Shouldn’t our universities, the FDA, the CDC, the TGA, and the Chief Medical Officers be the ones to point out this problem, and in real time, not 18 months later…
As a piece of science communication this short video is excellent. The only thing lacking is the list of where exactly this technique is used.
In the first two weeks after vaccination researchers call people “unvaccinated” which leaves room for all kinds of naughty statistical games. By switching infected people from the vaccinated group to the unvaccinated group, or reclassifying them, they introduce a selective bias which will “show” that the vaccinated are less likely to catch Covid, even if they are exactly as likely to catch it.
UPDATE: How many studies misclassify the vaccinated in the first two weeks? On his site Fenton explains that “In assessing the efficacy of Covid vaccines in observational studies (such as in the large Israel study which claimed 95% efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine) it is now standard to assume that the vaccine takes 14 days to ‘work’ and hence to classify a person as ‘unvaccinated’ within 14 days of vaccination.“
Yossi Shaul replied: this is exactly what happened in Israel. And that’s also why whenever we requested “raw data” without any classification, we were turned down.
Hiding raw data is never a good sign.
This is the same Prof Norman Fenton who wrote the paper about mis-categorisation of vaccinated people. That paper is still the most scientifically robust example of excess deaths rising in the weeks after vaccination programs were carried out in each age group in the UK.
I’ll just keep repeating this graph from December last year — the one with the spooky quantum entanglement effect where more unvaccinated people die in the weeks after other people in their age cohort get vaccinated.
Ponder how many people we have vaccinated since this damning study was published?
Strangely, the unvaccinated are more likely to die in the week after the first dose peaks in their age group.
A year ago a large Swedish study of efficacy showed how the vaccines held up well from 2 weeks to 4 months, but declined to zero protection by nine months. The graphs don’t include any data from the first two weeks which is a shame. It would have been better to see it, whatever it was, just to know that those who were vaccinated (but didn’t yet have a mature antibody response) were kept in the same data set.
*Edited after a few hours to reflect that we are not certain which studies this applies too.
UPDATED to a corrected video.
Now for something very unusual: Tuesday night in Perth, Australia, there will be a climate debate. Bravo to the Philosophy and Reason group for organising it.
Click to enlarge to use the code.
The legendary David Archibald and I take on ProfessorPeter Newman from Curtin University – Advisor to IPCC, 2018 Premier’s (WA) Scientist of the Year, and Councillor Ian Johnson – Current City of Swan elected councillor responsible for CoS Climate Sustainability Policies.
Belmont RSL 6:30PM
To attend see Meetup Use the QR code in the image on the right. It’s a small group and a shoestring budget, but they look like pulling off something that almost never happens. Kudos to Prof Newman and Councillor Johnson for being willing to take part.
Finally we have a preprint paper assessing SARS2 as if it might have been an engineered product from a laboratory. We now know it was very likely a lab product and we can probably even name the tools that were used to tweak it.
The virus appears to be too clean, lacking in the noise that all its wild type cousins have. Random evolution in bats and pangolins just doesn’t work like this. SARS2 has the unmistakable fingerprint pattern of a virus that not-so-coincidentally is perfectly suited to being manipulated with two of the most common laboratory enzymes available available at a biolab near you for $150. (Shop here, here, or here).
The authors stress that even though their results strongly suggest this virus was a “synthetic” virus, that doesn’t tell us whether it was intended to harm, or was released deliberately. But their results do cast a very different light on the rush to declare the wet markets were to blame, and the too-fast calls, based on no evidence, that anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist. This kind of analysis could have been done in Feb-March 2020 and it wasn’t. How fast would nations have slammed the borders shut if they thought this was a lab accident?
“This has been an incredible project. Yet, for obvious reasons, this is the saddest paper I’ve ever written.” — Alex Washburne
*UPDATE added at the bottom as the debate over this paper progresses.*
So Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen looked for evidence that the virus was manipulated to suit two of the most common gene-slicing tools for sale — called BsaIand BsmBI . As Alex says, when you walk into the store to buy enzymes, these are the top recommendations. What they found were that the target cutting sites for these were placed quite neatly separated, to produce workable size fragments of a similar size. They also found that important genes were not split — things like the key RBD code were neatly contained in one piece, rather than cut in the middle. (RBD means the Receptor Binding Domain — the key bit that sticks to ACE2). When they compare SARS2 to 37 other types of coronaviruses the mutations that produced these new target codes were conveniently “silent” mutations. They were neutral spelling changes in the code that don’t alter the final meaning. For example both CTC and CTA code for the same amino acid. So we can flip between the two and the end product made from this will be the same*. But change an ATG to a GTG and the shape of the protein made will be different. Obviously if a human brain was managing the code for some desired effect they would select the “silent” kind of mutations to either create new target sites or remove unwanted target code in the wrong spot.
This is a long post, but the era of bioweapons and genetic-engineering accidents is upon us whether we like it or not. These researchers conclude the SARS2 virus was likely synthetic but even if it wasn’t and someone comes up with a realistic criticism of the paper — the SARS2 virus could clearly have been made easily in many labs. Clearly we need to talk about this!
From the abstract:
Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses. Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2.
To understand how genetic engineering works we need to know the basic tools
Once we know the basic gene editing techniques we can see how well adapted the virus is for lab work. So here is a ten-second instruction kit for genetic engineering. DNA is made a four letter code A, C, G, and T. It has two strands: the active code and the mirrored “back up” copy (something the computer coders will appreciate). Thanks to chemistry the A’s always pair with T’s, and the C’s pair with G’s. So, for example, the sequence of GGAA will “glue” itself to CCTT on the opposite paired strand. Our DNA is the ultimate chemical velcro. The chain of paired bases makes up the famous double helix.
We have a lot of off-the-shelf tools to slice up that double helix code, and each of these tools cuts only a certain sequence, say CGTCTC, which leaves handy “sticky ends” that can be glued back together. This short sequence will stay embedded in the code after the edit, which is a clue, but not much of one on its own, since these sort of short sequences can occur randomly too.
This is code ready to be cut into 3 parts with “sticky ends” that will reassemble back onto themselves (to loop) and then later reassembled back in a line. There are unique “sticky ends” so the loops only pair back to the right partner in the right order.
But the lack of these target sites is also a clue. In wild viruses these “target sites” will occur randomly in the wrong spots. So the first task of serious genetic engineers is to remove the badly placed target sites — if they don’t do that, the enzymes will chop up the DNA into odd sized fragments, too big and too small to work with. The code needs to be “clean”.
Hmm? Those fragment sizes in SARS2 are oddly “perfect”…
[EDITED] Here’s a graph of the number of fragments made from 70 different wild viruses which were chopped at all the wild target sites.The number of fragments is graphed against the size of the longest piece. The wild viruses produce the grey curve with a kind of random distribution of cutting sites. But synthetic viruses fall in the red box where 5 – 8 fragments of similar size is easier to work with.
All the fragment sizes are conveniently similar. Not too big and not too small.
Washburne explains this graph on his blog. To get the neat log curve they took 70 wild viruses and cut them up with 200 enzymes in 1,000 enzyme pairs. Engineered viruses end up in the red box. Wild viruses fall on the grey curve.
Genetic engineers need to play with nice medium length fragments
The basic technique for genetic engineering is below in the diagram. The virus is chopped up into separate bits. Each bit has a matching end that pairs up on itself to form a loop, which is easy for people to work with. Then after we have played games with the separate loops we can cut them open at the same target marks, put all the loops back together, and they will reassemble into the right order in the long chain. To make this work the fragments need be a workable length, and each “split” is unique so the chain will only form in the right order.
So we chop up DNA, roll it into little circles we can work with. Make the changes we want and the open the circles and reassemble them into one long chain of code.
It’s worth knowing that while SARS is a single strand RNA virus, to play games with it we convert it into DNA and use our DNA engineering tools. This is because in the world of chemistry — RNA is like a cheap photocopy of DNA. The molecules are nearly the same, but it has only one strand, and it’s so unstable and sticky that it’s very hard to work with. To engineer RNA, the lab techs convert it to DNA, then play games, then convert the end product back to RNA (click to expand the diagram of the process above). This is especially important with a large virus like the SARS-Cov-2 virus which has nearly 30,000 bases. (That’s one long strong of letters like… ACGTCCTGC… up to 30,000 “letters” in a row.)
So let’s imagine the target sites were placed randomly by mutation inside bats in a cave…
This below is an evolutionary branched tree of corona viruses with two kinds of SARS2 in the top two rows and compared to 37 other corona viruses below. As you can see, for some reason the bats that SARS2 came from have cleaned up the target sequences. Clever bats. The red and green dots are the target sites for our favorite genetic engineering tools. The spacings in the SARS 2 rows are oddly ideal. This is part of the fingerprint of a laboratory made virus.
Like wow: This table blew me away…
Note the striking even spacing of the cutting target sites in the top two SARS rows compared to the random pattern in all the other Coronaviruses.
There’s more to this to be a full fingerprint pattern of a lab virus:
On his blog Alex Washburne‘s describes a pattern that marks a virus as “lab made”. An “infectious clone” means a synthetic clone of a wild virus. It not only needs nicely spaced markers for enzymes available by mail order, but also the “sticky ends” must be unique so it can be reassembled in the right order, and the mutations must be silent, and the genes need to be contained neatly on single piece.
The Z-scores for 5 – 7 fragments suggest this was “more likely engineered”.
Your eyeballs knew it anyway…
Caption: A ranked plot of z-scores for all digestions creating 5-7 fragments, the idealized range for a CoV reverse genetic system. z-scores measure the standard deviations below the wild type expectation, correcting for the number of fragments. SARS-CoV-2 appears more likely to have been engineered for IVGA than several known CoV reverse genetic systems.
So this then is the final SARS2 compilation of fragments assembled
Here’s the assembly plan for the virus that held up the world. The lowest layer in the diagram below is the old SARS1. We can see the placement of target sites for the two common laboratory enzymes (marked in red). As we go up each layer (to a new different virus) things are cleaner than the layer before. The topmost layer is SARS2 itself. The RBD and FCS (Furin Cleavage site) are marked. Click to make this bigger.
This is the covid virus, at the top, in segments. Start with wild coronaviruses at the bottom, they have random spaced target sites. But the sites in Covid are neatly spaced just where an genetic engineer would want them to be.
All the clues point to a lab created virus:
What are the odds a million bats typing on typewriters could create this?
Washburne tries to calculate the odds of this pattern occurring naturally.
It turns out, the sticky ends produced by BsaI/BsmBI digestion of SARS-CoV-2 are all unique, non-palindromic, and all contain at least one A or T – all criteria either required or recommended for in vitro genome assembly.
It also turns out, the mutations separating SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI sites from those of its close relatives are all silent. About 84% of mutations between SARS-CoV-2 and its two closest relatives (BANAL-20-52 and RaTG13) are silent. There are 14 distinct mutations separating SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI sites, and all of them are silent. There’s a ~9% chance that 14 randomly drawn mutations are all silent.
Compared to the rest of the genomes, we found a significantly higher rate of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBI sites. Between BANAL52 and SARS-CoV-2, there is a 5x higher rate of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBi recognition sites than the rest of the genome (P=0.004). Between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2, there’s a whopping 8x higher rate of silent mutations with 1/100 million odds of seeing as high or higher concentration of silent mutations within the BsaI/BsmBI restriction sites.
The odds of meeting any one of these criteria vary, from 1%-0.07% of having such a small maximum fragment length to 1/250 to 1/100 million odds of having such high concentration of silent mutations within BsaI/BsmBI recognition sites. The odds of meeting every single one of these criteria are even smaller. Much smaller.
As a result of this analysis, we theorize that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in a lab via common methods used to assemble infectious clones pre-COVID.
It looks just like a common research product from a lab:
SARS could be an experiment that escaped, or it could be a bioweapon. This research does not differentiate, but obviously, if it’s a lab leak, that changes everything, and it also would have changed everything if this had been known in February 2020:
A synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mean there was malicious intent. In fact, the location of BsaI/BsmBI site appear almost chimeric: some are shared with close relatives and others are shared with distant relatives, making us hypothesize that perhaps researchers just wanted to make chimeric viruses within this clade of relatively unstudied CoVs. Again, this is a common research project, much like that conducted at Boston University recently, and it is often done with noble intentions of learning about genotype-to-phenotype relationships and even preemptively designing vaccines against viruses that are most-likely to cause a pandemic. That would be tragically ironic if proven true.
Many labs could have done this kind of work says Washburne on his blog. The world needs to wake up to the ease with which this kind of dangerous work can be done:
We don’t identify who constructed the virus. Many people in the world could do this, although the origin of this outbreak in Wuhan does narrow the range of suspects considerably. The technology used to make infectious clones is relatively cheap, especially compared to making an atom bomb. Even if our theory is rejected by later tests, the ease of these experiments should scare the shit out of all of us enough to start talking about global biosafety.
We need to urgently discuss of how to prevent accidents
Perhaps all labs should have signature markers inserted in their work?
In addition to, I don’t know, regulating which sequences you can purchase online, we may also want to require some identifiability of chimeric experiments. As silencers for guns are illegal, we may be wise to require all chimeric viral research have clearly identifiable sequences that help us identify right away who did it and what was done, as such information may be relevant for preventing a lab accident from turning into a full-blown pandemic.
Washburne writes in beautifully dispassionate tones — always trying to figure out why he might be wrong:
As a scientist conducting this research, I did my best to ensure our methods were reproducible, our statistics conservative, and our presentation honest. We discovered SARS-CoV-2 was unusual, knew the massive stakes of our finding, and set out to disprove our hypothesis by looking closer at sticky ends, silent mutations, and analyses of the evolution of CoVs. Any one of these tests could’ve rejected our hypothesis and the world would never have seen this paper. We sought peer-reviews from world experts at every leading institution we could connect with, and we asked them to shake down our results. The pre-print is not exactly “not peer-reviewed”, as it is the product of rolling feedback from world experts and we did our best to incorporate all of their feedback, test all of their proposed tests, and include all of the limitations they identified in our manuscript.
The authors stress that “synthetic” means synthesized, and not necessarily a bioweapon, or “Gain of Function”. But even if SARS2 wasn’t a bioweapon we need to discuss these tools and techniques. There are other aspects outside this work that are relevant to the bioweapon question, and we’ll discuss those another day. For the moment, the citizens of the free world need to learn enough about genetic engineering to discuss what kind of world we want to live in.
___________
UPDATE: It’s great to see commentary on this paper starting. Alex Crits-Christoph has attacked the paper on a twitter thread, which Washburne has already responded to. The former points out that the the pattern in other enzyme targets in SARS2 are not unusual and claims this is cherry picking, but if a team did engineer the virus to suit one or two enzymes I don’t see why we wouldn’t see what Crit-Christoph finds? Washburne replies they didn’t cherry pick they just started looking at two of the most popular enzyme tools. They also used a long list of criteria.
Other critics are pointing out the the Golden Gate Assembly model would remove the “scars” (or traces) of the Golden Gate sequences. But are these scar or coding elements removed later, only at the end? Tony vanDongen (author) says it’s correct the process can be scarless with target sites removed, but then they can’t be used again. He implies SARS2 is a work in progress — “The BsaI/BsmBI fingerprint in SARS2 is indicative of a design where you could test many different iterations of the virus. Disassemble and reassemble the genome at your heart’s content.” That suggests SARS2 may have been a workhorse used to test many things in a lab?
EDITED: Washburne notes that “The most important tweak is that the exact method used to assemble CoVs isn’t best termed “Golden Gate“ but “Type IIS directional assembly”. So “Golden Gate was removed from the introduction paragraphs.
____________
REFERENCES
Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, Antonius VanDongen (2022) Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756
The new glue trend in protests may suddenly be over. Just like that.
As Twitchy and RedState report: Nine new protestors called “Scientist-Rebellion” turned up to the Volkswagon factory and glued themselves to the floor saying they were “on hunger strike until our demands to decarbonize the German transport sector are met.”. The normal response is to call the police and get the glue protestors arrested which gives them the attention they so desire. Instead, Volkswagon immediately decarbonized the factory — turned everything off including the heating and left the protestors there to figure out the scientific logistics of eating, drinking, and going to the toilet while glued to a cold floor.
You’ve nailed it mate. No heating, no lights. You’ve successfully decarbonised the hall that you are in. Let us know how it’s working out for you, and see if you can join the dots. https://t.co/0pcg3nqTSV
These people want to run the world but couldn’t plan their own lives 24 hours in advance:
Getting ready for first night of sleep inside the Porsche Pavillion @Autostadt to demand @VW to eventually act to decarbonise the transport sector.
These are our demands to the Volkswagen CEO, adapted from our general demands. (1) support introduction of speed limits on German motorways; (2) condone bonds held by @VW from Global South; (3) declare infeasibility of 1.5 goal.
@VW told us that they supported our right to protest, but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating. People in support can’t get out of the building.
Just a clarification: people in support can get out of the building but then they couldn’t get back in. We can’t order our food, we must use the one provided by Wolkswagen. Lights off. Random unannounced checks by security guards with bright torches. Police just came in.
His hand got swollen in 24 hours, and he’s now continuing his hunger strike “from hospital”.
“after 24 hours of remaining glued to the floor and a nearly sleepless night my hand got swollen. The Wolkswagen manager had initially refused to let a doctor in but eventually accepted. “
Doctors ascertained the possibility of life-threatening blood clots in my hand and recommended an immediate transfer to a hospital. My health is of course paramount. I accepted to leave this wonderful group and was taken to hospital, continuing my hunger strike.
BertyBollocks says: “I’m a serious scientist protesting against fossil fuels. Now turn the gas heating on and bring me my potty”
Private Domains: Loosing a hand for clima change is nothing, keep going
It’s a 2 Party system and We’re not Invited says: If you really want to send a message, glue your testicles to a car. Glueing hands to the floor is a half measure. Make this count!
SoloWingKiba: Bro this is why people don’t “trust the science” these days. You’re all scientists and not a single one of you know the effects of glue on skin, or how you planned to use the bathroom? If you’re making a sacrifice to protest, whining about it makes the sacrifice meaningless.
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