The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has revised the range of global heating outcomes at both ends. The best outcome may be worse than we had been told but the worst outcome should be not as bad. There, don't you feel better?
The old range, introduced before anyone can remember, went from 1.5 degrees Celsius to 4.5 C. Now the best outcome is 2.6 C and the worst has been lowered to 3.9 C.
The really bad part of this is that almost no one knows what those numbers mean. The truth is that those numbers, high or low, will mean different things to different people in different places. Remember, those are global averages. Let's take the 2.6 C prediction. Some places will experience much less than 2.6 degrees Celsius of heating. Latitude has a big role in the variation. So too does proximity to oceans. Even rainfall patterns bear on the outcome. But if some places will be cooler than average, others will be much hotter than average.
Then there's the question of resilience. How much climate change can you take? How much can you afford? If that sounds facetious then consider the heatwaves endured in Paris since 2003. Thousands died. Those lovely old, postage-stamp apartments with their narrow staircases and lousy ventilation were ovens for their elderly tenants with next to zero options. If you had a villa out of town with central air and a lovely swimming pool your mortality rate was probably a bit lower.
Some societies are more resilient than others. Some neighbourhoods are more resilient than others. Just ask the population of east L.A.
Over the past decade climate scientists have developed a theory of a climate phenomenon not considered by the IPCC - "climate departure." Think of it as going from "bake" to "broil." Once departure arrives there'll be no cool years as we understand the term. Every year, post-departure will be warmer than the warmest year pre-departure. Climate departure is predicted to debut in the equatorial/tropical latitudes in the next three to four years. It will gradually spread poleward into the temperate regions by mid-century. It's a relative thing. The north won't get as hot as Central America. It'll be hot by northern standards not tropical standards.
The other caution about the IPCC numbers is that the panel has a record of "getting it wrong." From its inception the UN panel has underestimated the pace and severity of global heating. Change they predicted might occur by the end of the century are already happening. It's the way the panel is constituted that it only produces consensus reports meaning that holdouts can and do put their thumb on the scales. And it focuses on man-made or anthropogenic global warming. The idea at the outset was to curb man-made greenhouse gas emissions to stay well clear of triggering natural feedback loops, natural global warming a.k.a. runaway global warming. Only we've already awakened the beast. We have triggered those natural feedback loops, not all but most, and natural processes have joined humanity in releasing powerful greenhouse gases once safely sequestered in the tundra, the underlying permafrost and seabed and lakebed ice formations called clathrates. That stuff is going and we have no way of arresting it.
We must slash our man-made emissions as rapidly as possible. That is a non-starter in petro-states such as Canada or Saudi-Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and such. They're exploring for and discovering new fields of oil and gas every day. You gotta give them credit - they're not quitters.
Anyway, my point is the new IPCC numbers are nice but they're really not helpful because they're woefully out of context and, as such, more apt to mislead than inform.
And this is one. In Portland, one of Trump's goon squad confronts a member of the Wall of Moms. Well, small mercies, at least he didn't shoot her. These women, most dressed in yellow t-shirts, have been turning out to form a wall between BLM protesters and Trump provocateurs. Would they dare turn on the moms?
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic entered our lives, liberal democracy was reeling across the world.
Countries such as Poland, Hungary, Brazil and others succumbed to authoritarianism and transformed into illiberal democracies. The Big Daddy of them all, the United States of America, inspired despots like Orban, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdogan, Duterte and Netanyahu.
Many of us prayed that it was a temporary affliction, that liberal democracy and democratic norms would soon stage a comeback. We misjudged how authoritarianism is deeply embedded in the conservative psyche.
A team of four Canadian psychologists studied patterns of “cognitive reflection” among Americans.
They found that a willingness to change one’s convictions in the face of new evidence was robustly associated with political liberalism, the rejection of traditional moral values, the acceptance of science, and skepticism about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial claims.
Those who ranked high on a scale designed to measure the level of a respondent’s “actively open-minded thinking about evidence” were linked with the acceptance of “anthropogenic global warming and support for free speech on college campuses.”
Conversely, the authors — Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina, and James Allan Cheyne, Derek J. Koehler and Jonathan A. Fugelsang of the University of Waterloo — found that an aversion to altering one’s belief on the basis of evidence was more common among conservatives and that this correlated “with beliefs about topics ranging from extrasensory perception, to respect for tradition, to abortion, to God.”
The soon to be released Canadian paper dovetails with earlier research in America.
Consider a 2019 paper, “False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the United States Equally Biased?” by Jonathan Baron and John Jost, professors of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and N.Y.U., who write, “Nowadays we read that liberals are every bit as authoritarian as conservatives; as rigid and simple-minded; as intolerant; as prejudiced.”
The authors found it ironic and more than a little bewildering that social psychologists are drifting into this relativistic view of morality and politics just as authoritarian conservatism (and illiberal hostility to democratic norms) seem to be reaching new heights of popularity and brazenness not only in Trump’s America but also in Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary, and Netanyahu’s Israel.
Baron and Jost also cite studies suggesting that those on the right are more susceptible to authoritarian appeals:
"Conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive or perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism."
Liberals, they write, “perform better than conservatives on objective tests of cognitive ability and intelligence” while conservatives “score higher than liberals on measures of self-deception” and “are more likely than liberals to spread ‘fake news,’ political misinformation, and conspiracy theories throughout their online social networks.”
Baron cites John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty,” specifically this famous passage:
The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious.
These findings have been well borne out in my experience with conservative-minded acquaintances, both small and large "C" conservatives, from the highly educated and accomplished to rebel-flag waving, backwater rednecks (yes, I know a few of those too). Across the social spectrum their shared attitudes and attributes are inescapable.
In a February 2019 paper, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” four political scientists, Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher and Bert N. Bakker, argue that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties” and that this variance in linguistic complexity is
rooted in personality differences among conservative and liberal politicians. The former prefer short, unambiguous statements, and the latter prefer longer compound sentences, expressing multiple points of view.
It is no accident that Trump speaks on a 5th-grade level. That's the frequency common to his base. That's where they communicate, how they parlay.
Separate studies of the language used by presidents — both “The Readability and Simplicity of Donald Trump’s Language,” and an analysis of the language used by the last 15 presidents on the blog Factbase — concluded that President Trump speaks at the lowest level of all those studied, as measured on the on the Flesch-Kincaid index. As Factbase put it:
By any metric to measure vocabulary, using more than a half dozen tests with different methodologies, Donald Trump has the most basic, most simplistically constructed, least diverse vocabulary of any president in the last 90 years.
Some scholars argue that a focus on ideological conflict masks the most salient divisions in the era of Donald Trump: authoritarians versus non-authoritarians. Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” emailed me on this point to say that
It’s really critical to help people understand the difference between conservatives and authoritarians. Conservatives are by nature opposed to change and novelty, whereas authoritarians are averse to diversity and complexity. It’s a subtle but absolutely critical distinction.
“What we’re facing,” she continued,
authoritarian revolution — not a conservative revolution, the term is inherently contradictory — which in the U.S. has been creeping up since the 1960s.
Donald Trump, in the shadow of the November elections, seems to be transforming Washington into Festung Trump from which he dispatches raiding parties onto the streets of Democratic-leaning cities, starting with Portland, Oregon.
Trump is determined to use authoritarian means to restore race to the core of his campaign.
Last week, Trump sent dozens of armed federal forces in camouflage to quell Black Lives Matter protests in Portland.
On July 19, Trump responded to a direct question from Chris Wallace of Fox News about whether he would “accept the election” win or lose. Trump answered: “I have to see. Look, you — I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”
And on July 20, Trump threatened to send more armed troops to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland to quell dissent, noting that these cities’ mayors were all “liberal Democrats.”
Put another way, Trump plans to echo George Wallace and take his stand in the schoolhouse door or, even more ominously, to use urban America as his Alamo.
No one outside the Oval Office can be sure what Trump has planned for the next three months to counter his popularity deficit. If he can't win at the ballot box and knows it, we can probably watch for him to do something to sweep the democracy handicap out of his path.
After George W. Bush we thought we had seen the last of the worst US president ever. After Donald Trump came along and was so much worse, George W. didn't seem like such a bad guy after all.
Maybe it's the lead in the water down there but we now have a raving, bi-polar loon trying to get on November's presidential ballot, Kanye West.
My brother was furious with me when he found I had chucked them out. "They" were a cheap, ceramic Nativity set, the bottom of each piece stamped with "Made in Occupied Japan." It was the era of general McArthur when Japan was struggling to rebuild, in constant danger of famine. Japan didn't regain its sovereignty until 1952.
Today there's another sort of occupation underway. This time America, or rather the Trump administration, is occupying American states, sending unidentified agents in combat gear onto the streets of Portland, Oregon in defiance of the wishes of the mayor and governor. But I said states, plural. That's because it seems Oregon is just a prelude.
Trump is now dispatching another brigade, this time to quell protests on the streets of Chicago. Trump says he might do the same to other unruly states controlled by Democratic mayors and governors.
“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”
The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
Just because Trump "aced" a dementia test, even if he took it himself, doesn't mean he's very bright. But he is bright enough to know that, trailing Biden in the polls and the Covid spread worsening, he can still manufacture a crisis to try to lure back rightwingers who have lost heart in his administration. He's going to give them what they want, a war on Democrats.
These "little green men" aren't being dispatched to secure federal government buildings and installations. They're taking to the streets to provoke a reaction, to incite violence, to give Trump an excuse to turn this into an electoral civil war.
This is not about enforcing law and order. These guys aren't cops. They're not even trained in population control. They're foot soldiers, far more akin to Brown Shirts of an earlier era. Trump is declaring war on America.
We need rules, new rules for how humankind is to share this planet with other species. Emphasis on "share." We need to figure out what share other species require and, from that, what share we can take and still live in harmony with our planet. We need to do this before the whole thing comes crashing down on us and that is the course we are on right now.
The world is in the grip of a pandemic that is said to have been transmitted from bats to humans via a Chinese "wet market." We're used to this idea that living in immediate proximity to other creatures can create a gateway for the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. Think avian flu. Think swine flu. As I recall it, HIV was transmitted from primates or monkeys that bit a human.
For 13 years now, scientist Michelle Power has been grabbing samples of human waste and animal poop from Antarctica to Australia to try and answer a vital question.
Has the bacteria in humans that has grown resistant to antibiotics – an issue considered to be one of the world’s greatest health challenges – made its way into wildlife?
The answer, it seems, is a resounding yes.
“I don’t think there’s been an animal where we haven’t found it,” says Power, an associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney.
The sorts of animals Power has chosen to look at most live close to humans or are urbanised – like possums – or animals that spend time with humans either in wildlife care facilities or in conservation breeding programs.
Power traveled to Antarctica and, sure enough, human pathogens were found in the poop of penguins and seals.
According to the World Health Organisation, the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics is one of the world’s greatest health challenges facing humans, making treatment of dangerous diseases ever more challenging.
So far, Power says she has found evidence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in about a dozen animals, including bats, penguins, sea lions and wallabies.
This is not the greatest problem of the day, not even close. It is, however, more proof that humanity has gone too far. We've grown too large, too numerous, and, with every extra billion people we're forced to look further afield for land and resources to support our burgeoning numbers. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are metastasizing.
Most of us get up every morning and go about our normal routine whether that's heading to work or getting kids off to school. Day in, day out. The same old, same old. A source of great boredom. Except between yesterday morning and this morning a great deal has changed even if you don't notice it. This is called the Great Acceleration. If you open the link you'll find chart after chart tracing the path of human activity since the 1950s. There's an eerie similarity to them. Sort of like a rocket launching from Cape Canaveral. The Great Acceleration is also a theme of the 2018 Living Planet Report. If you're not interested in reports and data, here's a nice video.
That video is six years out of date and much has occurred since it was produced.
"Swelling population, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring carbon dioxide emissions mean humanity is putting a greater squeeze on the planet's resources then ever before. Particularly hard hit is the diversity of animals and plants, upon which many natural resources such as clean water are based.
"The latest Living Planet report, published on Tuesday, estimates that global demand for natural resources has doubled since 1996 and that it now takes 1.5 years to regenerate the renewable resources used in one year by humans. By 2030, the report predicts it will take the equivalent of two planets to meet the current demand for resources.
"Most alarming, says the report, is that many of these changes have accelerated in the past decade, despite the plethora of international conventions signed since the initial Rio Summit in 1992. Climate-warming carbon emissions have increased 40% in the past 20 years, but two-thirds of that rise occurred in the past decade."
The 2012 report indicated that, were the world to live at the consumption rate of Canadians, we would already need three Planet Earths to survive. That's strictly human consumption. No accommodation is factored in for other species. Let that sink in.
The 2014 Living Planet Report addressed the choke hold humanity was applying to other terrestrial species.
The central theme is that, not only are humans consuming renewable resources at more than 1.5 times the Earth's ability to replenish them but animal and plant species are falling extinct because of it. We're not only eating our seed corn, we're eating their share too. To put this in context, over the past 40-years, the Earth has lost 50% of its wildlife.
"It is no coincidence that our Ecological Footprint has climbed while biodiversity has plummeted. Overshoot is a core pressure on biodiversity, and WWF is the leading conservation organization recognizing and addressing this link," said Mathis Wackernagel, President and Co-founder of Global Footprint Network. "Humanity must learn to live within the budget of nature, not just for our own welfare and resilience but also for the well-being of countless other species on our planet."
Global Footprint Network provides the Living Planet Report’s measure of humanity's Ecological Footprint, which calculates the amount of biologically productive land and sea required to produce all the resources a population consumes and to absorb its waste, with prevailing technology.
According to the report, it would take 1.5 Earths to produce the resources necessary to support humanity’s current Ecological Footprint. This global overshoot means, for example, that we are cutting timber more quickly than trees regrow, pumping freshwater faster than groundwater restocks, and releasing CO2 faster than nature can sequester it.
"Nearly three-quarters of the world's population lives in countries struggling with both ecological deficits and low incomes," noted Dr. Wackernagel. "Growing ecological constraints demand that we focus on how to improve human welfare by a means other than sheer expansion."
And thus the argument is made for the urgent need to transition from neoclassical, GDP growth based economics into a Steady State economy in which the economy is maintained within the capacity of the environment. That sounds so obvious and yet the very idea is heretical in the boardrooms and legislatures of the Western world.
Did you get that 50 per cent reference? In the remarkably brief interval of four decades prior to the 2014 report the populations of terrestrial species (other than our own) had declined by half. There were half as many of these mammals and birds and reptiles as there had been 40 years earlier. We had suppressed them out of existence.
I won't go into it at any length except to note that the next Living Planet Report, 2016, inventoried the populations of marine life - fish, mammals and sea birds - and found their raw numbers had also been halved over the previous half century.
The 2018 Living Planet Report primarily addresses unsustainable,yet still growing, levels of human consumption. It also speaks to soils degradation, loss of wilderness and species extinction as human needs overwhelm nature. It's important to bear in mind these conditions are accelerating, worsening and, unless we develop some new rules to ensure that mankind can once again live in harmony with nature, this can only end abruptly and not well.
The most notable aspects of these reports, at least to me, is how rapidly they're flushed down the Memory Hole, one by one. They've got a shelf life of about three days and then they're gone, like some dirty family secret, never to be spoken of again.
Here's something to mull over. The LPR 2014 announced that mankind had reduced other forms of terrestrial life by half since 1970. Fifty per cent. By 2018 that 50 per cent had grown to 60 per cent. And the band played on.
Yes, I'm pushing the idea of the need for new rules whereby mankind lives in harmony with nature, Planet Earth, our one and only biosphere. Rules that will demark humanity's share of space and resources and what we must leave to allow other species to live sustainably.
We know what's happening. We know what needs to change. We know what will befall us, every species, if we don't change course. And we don't have the slightest inclination to do a damn thing about it. We can't even tackle the climate crisis. If we can't do that, there's about zero chance that we'll collectively agree to rein in our population and our footprint on the planet.
Nature is showing us a series of signs that the way humanity chooses to live cannot continue. Nature can't carry us much longer. And it's not even up for discussion.
Trump's totalitarian instincts have never lurked very far from the surface. Now there's word he's looking for ways to circumvent the House and Senate so that he can rule America by decree. And who is advising this would-be despot but John Yoo, the Bush/Cheney-era counsel who wrote an opinion that waterboarding was not torture.
John Yoo told Axios he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders that flout federal law.
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month.
Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.
“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.”
Yoo became notorious for a legal memo he drafted in August 2002, when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
It stated: “Necessity or self-defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate’ the criminal prohibition against torture.”
Memos drafted by Yoo were used for justifying waterboarding and other forms of torture on terrorism suspects in CIA “black sites” around the world.
Trump is unrepentant about dispatching "little green men" to the streets of Portland, Oregon, over the opposition of the mayor and governor. He said he's planning to do the same to other cities soon.
Tribe called Yoo’s interpretation of the Daca ruling “indefensible”.
He added: “I fear that this lawless administration will take full advantage of the fact that judicial wheels grind slowly and that it will be difficult to keep up with the many ways Trump, aided and abetted by Bill Barr as attorney general and Chad Wolf as acting head of homeland security, can usurp congressional powers and abridge fundamental rights in the immigration space in particular but also in matters of public health and safety.”
Alka Pradhan, a defence counsel in the 9/11 terrorism cases against inmates in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s so-called reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the president get away with?’ rather than ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’
“That is not legal reasoning, it’s inherently tyrannical and anti-democratic.”
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That doesn't mean others have to accept it. Just because they're expressing an opinion doesn't mean others have to be meek about what they're saying, what they're promoting. Sometimes they deserve a really loud STFU.
You want to champion man-boy love, pedophilia, STFU. You want to speak out in favour of white supremacy, STFU.
Calgary
Now there are a couple of additional groups for the STFU category - anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. They need to be told to Shut the F--k Up and crawl back beneath the rocks they came from.
These anti-maskers don't care that what they want would put others, without their consent, at risk. They don't care that they would put others at risk not merely to their health, in some cases to their life. Their right to not wear a mask trumps others' right to health and life.
I don't give a damn if these people wear masks. I just don't want them anywhere near me. Not now after we've seen what their twisted mentality has wrought across the United States. There are responsibilities that need to be accepted to belong to a society. We all obey rules for the greater good of the community. These jackasses want to ignore social norms. Fine, but they need to find a place for themselves where they can't harm the rest of us.
Hamilton
As for the ludicrous complaints that wearing a mask impedes respiration, this Dutch doctor puts paid to that nonsense by donning six surgical masks without any drop in his blood oxygen levels.
Full disclosure. This is an item attributed to Dr. Anthony Fauci that has appeared on social media, notably FaceBook. Did he actually write it or deliver this commentary? I don't know. There are some parts, the "how dare you" passages, that do not sound like something Fauci would say in public. I've tried a bit to source it but without success.
That said, Dr. Fauci or not, I've chosen to post it here because it's an important message and it is consistent with medical opinion. Make of it what you like.
“Chickenpox is a virus. Lots of people have had it, and probably don't think about it much once the initial illness has passed. But it stays in your body and lives there forever, and maybe when you're older, you have debilitatingly painful outbreaks of shingles. You don't just get over this virus in a few weeks, never to have another health effect. We know this because it's been around for years, and has been studied medically for years.
Herpes is also a virus. And once someone has it, it stays in your body and lives there forever, and anytime they get a little run down or stressed-out they're going to have an outbreak. Maybe every time you have a big event coming up (school pictures, job interview, big date) you're going to get a cold sore. For the rest of your life. You don't just get over it in a few weeks. We know this because it's been around for years, and been studied medically for years.
HIV is a virus. It attacks the immune system and makes the carrier far more vulnerable to other illnesses. It has a list of symptoms and negative health impacts that goes on and on. It was decades before viable treatments were developed that allowed people to live with a reasonable quality of life. Once you have it, it lives in your body forever and there is no cure. Over time, that takes a toll on the body, putting people living with HIV at greater risk for health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, diabetes, bone disease, liver disease, cognitive disorders, and some types of cancer. We know this because it has been around for years, and had been studied medically for years.
Now with COVID-19, we have a novel virus that spreads rapidly and easily. The full spectrum of symptoms and health effects is only just beginning to be cataloged, much less understood.
So far the symptoms may include:
Fever Fatigue Coughing Pneumonia Chills/Trembling Acute respiratory distress Lung damage (potentially permanent) Loss of taste (a neurological symptom) Sore throat Headaches Difficulty breathing Mental confusion Diarrhea Nausea or vomiting Loss of appetite Strokes have also been reported in some people who have COVID-19 (even in the relatively young) Swollen eyes Blood clots Seizures Liver damage Kidney damage Rash COVID toes (weird, right?)
People testing positive for COVID-19 have been documented to be sick even after 60 days. Many people are sick for weeks, get better, and then experience a rapid and sudden flare up and get sick all over again. A man in Seattle was hospitalized for 62 days, and while well enough to be released, still has a long road of recovery ahead of him. Not to mention a $1.1 million medical bill.
Then there is MIS-C. Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. Children with MIS-C may have a fever and various symptoms, including abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, neck pain, rash, bloodshot eyes, or feeling extra tired. While rare, it has caused deaths.
This disease has not been around for years. It has basically been 6 months. No one knows yet the long-term health effects, or how it may present itself years down the road for people who have been exposed. We literally *do not know* what we do not know. For those in our society who suggest that people being cautious are cowards, for people who refuse to take even the simplest of precautions to protect themselves and those around them, I want to ask, without hyperbole and in all sincerity:
How dare you?
How dare you risk the lives of others so cavalierly. How dare you decide for others that they should welcome exposure as "getting it over with", when literally no one knows who will be the lucky "mild symptoms" case, and who may fall ill and die. Because while we know that some people are more susceptible to suffering a more serious case, we also know that 20 and 30-year-olds have died, marathon runners and fitness nuts have died, children and infants have died.
How dare you behave as though you know more than medical experts, when those same experts acknowledge that there is so much we don't yet know, but with what we DO know, are smart enough to be scared of how easily this is spread, and recommend baseline precautions such as:
Frequent hand-washing Physical distancing Reduced social/public contact or interaction Mask wearing Covering your cough or sneeze Avoiding touching your face Sanitizing frequently touched surfaces
The more things we can all do to mitigate our risk of exposure, the better off we all are, in my opinion. Not only does it flatten the curve and allow health care providers to maintain levels of service that aren't immediately and catastrophically overwhelmed; it also reduces unnecessary suffering and deaths, and buys time for the scientific community to study the virus in order to come to a more full understanding of the breadth of its impacts in both the short and long term.
I reject the notion that it's "just a virus" and we'll all get it eventually. What a careless, lazy, heartless stance.”
Trump sent his own contingent of "little green men" to crack down on protesters in Portland, Oregon. The term was coined when mysterious combat forces, their uniforms stripped of any insignia or badges that might identify their unit affiliation, turned up in Ukraine prior to Putin's annexation of Crimea.
Trump's little green men showed up in camo gear, helmets, etc., wielding a variety of "less lethal" ordinance. These "federal agents" turned up supposedly to protect federal property from the protesters but that pretence didn't last long as they wandered far afield. Some were caught on cellphone video snatching civilians off the street, flinging them into vehicles and then driving off - basically kidnapping.
“Keep your troops in your own buildings, or have them leave our city,” Ted Wheeler, the mayor, told the president, at a news conference on Friday.
The Democratic governor, Kate Brown, said Trump was looking for a confrontation in the hopes of winning political points elsewhere, and for a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing rising numbers of infections in Oregon and across the nation.
Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said arresting people without probable cause was “extraordinarily concerning and a violation of their civil liberties and constitutional rights”.
The Oregon attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Federal Protection Service, alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them.
This certainly sounds like a tactic that might be dreamed up in the troubled mind of Trump's handler and in-house white supremacists, Stephen Miller. Even if Trump loses in November it would still energize the very worst part of his base if the Culture War somehow goes hot. To that base this clearly casts the protesters as enemies of the state, a meme Miller loves.
Little Green Men use vans to drive off with abductees.
Several visitors to this blog have suggested that Trump could try to avert a loss in November by sparking unrest that he would use to justify imposing martial law. I used to think that was a fanciful nothing. Now I'm not sure that they were wrong. I might have got it wrong.
Every day the courts get plenty of business from people who can't hold their booze and people who can't drink responsibly. Fights, traffic accidents, DUIs, petty crimes - everything goes better with booze. So does Covid-19.
Across the country we're seeing Covid-infections flaring up where people gather to drink and party. After witnessing what happened in Florida following Spring Break this outcome should have come as no surprise.
Booze makes people, or at least some people, throw caution to the wind. Ask the locals at Spanish resort towns as hordes of besotted Brits descend on them. But let's get back to home, Canada.
Ilene Polansky, owner of Montreal restaurant Maestro SVP, said disrespectful clients littered; stumbled into her; did not distance; refused to wash their hands; and stormed off when she declined to group tables together.
The post-reopening spikes inevitably raise questions about whether Canada is simply a few weeks behind a neighbour that reopened sooner.
These instances, of course, are anecdotal. The telling metric is the positivity rate, the percentage of people tested who are positive for coronavirus infection. Here, despite the problems in our bars and outdoor social gatherings, Canada's numbers are mercifully low compared to most American states.
The statistic to watch, according to one U.S. epidemiologist: the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus, and which direction it goes.
That's a metric Jennifer Nuzzo follows closely as a leading indicator of where case totals are headed.
If it starts to move down, that's good news; if it moves up, that's a red flag that more cases are being missed, more people are unwittingly spreading the virus, and there's a growing chance it might spiral out of control.
The goal set by the World Health Organization is to keep positive test rates below five per cent.
By that standard, the U.S. is in brutal shape. A whopping 33 U.S. states had rates higher than the WHO benchmark on Thursday, with several just above or just under 20 per cent.
The Americans, of course, have been 'doing' summer for longer than what we get in Canada. That's why Americans sometimes refer to us as 'snowbirds.' We may have to wait for another month for an accurate picture of whether Canada has allowed Covid-19 to regain a meaningful toehold and what then may lie in store of we're hit by the dreaded "second wave."
Only it's not 1 percent. The mortality rate among the infected varies country by country with 4-5 per cent at the lower end of the scale. The Intercept explains how Trump, the rightwing and social media pundits spread false numbers to mislead the public. There are good reasons why experts such as Bonnie Henry and Anthony Fauci are at odds with this "don't worry, be happy" nonsense.
Scientific American reports on a hefty increase in LSD use in America. The article suggests it's becoming a popular form of "chemical escapism" in this era of existential perils.
Those results were published in the July issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The authors of the study suspect that many users may be self-medicating with the illegal substance to find relief from depression, anxiety and general stress over the state of the world.
“LSD is used primarily to escape. And given that the world’s on fire, people might be using it as a therapeutic mechanism,” says Andrew Yockey, a doctoral candidate in health education at the University of Cincinnati and lead author of the paper. “Now that COVID’s hit, I’d guess that use has probably tripled.”
...The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies LSD as a Schedule I drug, or one defined as having a serious risk of abuse and no accepted medical value. Significant research shows that the substance is not physically addictive, however, and that LSD overdoses are generally not considered life-threatening and subside within 72 hours. In some cases, people who accidentally overdose on the drug have even reported long-term improvements, according to a study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. In 2015, for example, a 49-year old woman reportedly took 550 times the normal recreational dose of LSD because she mistook it for a line of cocaine. According to CNN, after being incapacitated for about a day, the woman said that chronic pain she had suffered in her feet and ankles, caused by Lyme disease, had significantly improved. “It just shows that LSD is not that harmful drug that everyone makes it out to be,” Yockey says. Of course, there are well-publicized exceptions: for example, the drug can worsen symptoms of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
I thought by now we'd all be dosing on Soma. Oh well.
At some point even the most ardent, unquestioning Trudeau fans will have to accept that Canada's vaunted battle to slash CO2 emissions is a farce. The Libs talk a good game but it's mainly bullshit. After all what is it when a government proclaims we're in a climate crisis emergency one day and the very next day greenlights a massive bitumen pipeline expansion? Anyway you cut it, that's bullshit. What is it when that same government lavishes $16 billion dollars in pandemic relief to prop up oil and gas companies but a paltry $300 to support the clean energy sector? That's bullshit too. High grade Liberal bullshit.
The National Observer's Barry Saxifrage has just digested BP's latest, "Statistical Review of World Energy," and it's not a pretty picture for our government or for the Canadian people. As consumers of fossil fuels, Canadians use more per capita than 99 per cent of humanity. We are in the top one per cent. Our per capita consumption is five times that of the global median.
The myth of fossil energy's declining market share.
Saxifrage agrees that fossil energy has lost three per cent of market share over the past 30 years but, like so many claims in this petro-state, that too is first grade bullshit.
The climate doesn't care about “market share” or how much renewable energy we use. What our climate system reacts to is the total amount of fossil fuels burned. That's the solid black line on the chart. And it, clearly, hasn't fallen. It's rocketed up by 65 per cent. That's what is fuelling the climate crisis. That's what is threatening our future. And that's the line that must fall quickly if we hope to preserve and pass along the safe and sane climate that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into.
The House of Commons is knee deep in broken promises.
Here it's helpful to remember that Stephen Harper was our prime minister from 2006 until Justin Trudeau took the reins in 2015. The black line shows what has happened to Canada's fossil energy consumption under these two prime ministers and, hint, it's not what they told us would happen. This is Numero Uno bipartisan bullshit.
You can see that we haven't been cutting back as promised. We keep burning more.
One bright spot is that our coal burning has declined. But that relatively small bit of climate progress has been wiped out many times over by our increases in both fossil oil and fossil gas burning.
At this point, eliminating coal won't even get us to back to our starting line. As the chart shows, our rising fossil oil and gas burn is now higher than all our fossil burning (including coal) was in 2005. That's the baseline year we promised to make big cuts from in our Copenhagen and Paris Agreement climate targets.
We just can't quit ya.
The author's third chart shows the growth in carbon energy versus clean energy in Canada since 2005. Yes, clean energy has increased (until recently) but nowhere near the pace of fossil fuels.
And the winner is...
Canada burns the most per person. We now burn even more than the Americans; twice as much as the Europeans; and three times the global average.
Second, Canadians are still burning as much as we did back in 1990. In fact, we burn a bit more per person now.
In contrast, the Americans cut their fossil burn by 15 per cent per person. The Europeans now burn 22 per cent less. And the U.K. burns 37 per cent less per person than they did in 1990. So, clearly it is possible for wealthy, technologically advanced countries to turn down the fossil burner — at least at the per-person level.
Saxifrage points out what others have noted. Nations that do cut national emissions always have a clear, binding plan. That means successive governments are obliged to meet that same plan. Canada, by contrast, has aspirational targets - the ultimate tribute to, well, bullshit.
I don't care if you are a Liberal. I don't care that the Conservatives are worse. When it comes to the climate crisis and the future of Canada, our planet, our grandchildren, the distinctions between Liberals and Tories are all but irrelevant. A Tory will like shamelessly straight into your face. A Liberal lies just as shamelessly straight into your face. One's climate promises are as worthless as the other's.
I was still in my teens when I first got to fly aboard the Boeing 747. I suppose that over the decades there have been countless teens who did the same only I was aboard Air Canada's first and brand new 'jumbo jet.'
I was supposed to be on a DC-8 red eye flight Toronto to Heath Row. It was lightly booked, something that happened in those days. It was also delayed and delayed and delayed. Gremlins apparently.
Airlines cared more about their paying customers back then which was probably why we were informed they were fetching another aircraft for the flight. Fine, great, whatever - let's just go. And then it showed up. It wasn't this 747's very first flight but it was close.
So the passengers on what was to have been a lightly booked DC-8 instead boarded this cavernous beauty. The cabin crew invited us to seat ourselves and stretch out. Many of us got a row of seats to ourselves. For a red eye, we were going to be comfortable.
And now that era ends. The Queen of the Sky will soon be no more, at least for the passenger trade. Covid-19 and the collapse of air travel is pushing her to a premature demise. British Airways just announced it is retiring its entire 747 fleet.
BTW, the 747 may have been the Queen of the Sky but, when it comes to jumbo jets, Lockheed's L-1011 was always the King. The Tri-Star damned near ruined Rolls Royce but there was nothing like it.
I am tired of writing about the perils and pitfalls of perpetual exponential growth so obsessively pursued by our political leadership. It seems so obvious that it's tempting to think of our leaders, from all parties, as deeply malevolent. So, here's the Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk. And Nikiforuk explores exponential growth in the context of Covid-19.
After China reported its first case in December of what was later identified as COVID-19, it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 global cases.
No big deal, we thought.
It then took 11 days to make the next 100,000 cases.
And just four more days for the third 100,000 cases.
Now the world reports 250,000 cases every day and this pandemic has just gotten started. When the numbers are small, we ignore them and underestimate the threat.
...Why this blindness? Humans have trouble imagining a small number becoming a tsunami. Our imaginations stop at the threshold of chaos and go blank.
Years ago, Albert Bartlett, a gentle Colorado physicist with wild hair, tried to convince people that the greatest shortcoming of the human race was its “inability to understand the exponential function.”
...In 1999 Ray Kurzweil, a technology guru and computer scientist, invented a new expression: “The second half of the chessboard.”
By the second half, he meant the point where exponential growth takes on a life of its own, and “its impacts become massive, things get crazy, and the acceleration starts to elude most humans’ imagination and grasp,” explained Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED, in a 2017 Edge article.
He’s right about the exponential growth of technologies. It took the telephone 75 years to conquer 50 million people, and computers just 14 years to command the same number. But it only took Pokemon Go just 14 days to dominate the imaginations of 50 million consumers.
...About 300 years ago the human population went on an exponential ride thanks to the proliferation of fossil fuels, which allowed an increasing number of people to eat, drink and spend like kings.
It took roughly 300 years for human population to double from 500 million to roughly one billion in 1804. It took 110 years to double to 1.8 billion. Then things went wild, taking only 60 years to hit 3.6 billion. And then just 45 years to hit 7.3 billion in 2017.
The consumption patterns driven by nearly eight billion people have created an exponential assault on the Earth’s finite resources.
In 1900, the globe dug up seven billion tonnes of coal, iron, fish, wood fertilizer and aluminum to keep the economy humming. By 2000, the economy consumed 49 billion tonnes of materials from the Earth. Now we carelessly extract 90-billion tonnes and plan to double that every 30 to 40 years. The global chessboard is groaning.
Exponential growth gives people two basic choices: act early or be overwhelmed. It then follows its own logic: things will initially get worse even when good actions are taken before they improve.
...In his wonderful novel on friends and marriage, Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner offers a more literate illustration of the power of the exponential function in our everyday lives.
“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
Heat could be the big environmental issue of this decade. The Earth is getting hotter. I think we all realize that. The land is getting hotter. The air is heating up. The oceans are absorbing ever more heat (remember, Newton's 2nd law of thermodynamics). This is easy stuff. We've been using thermometers for a couple of centuries. We've been keeping accurate temperature records for about 140 years.
Heat, however, is taking on some new dimensions. Hotter air, for example, retains more water vapour. That extra humidity, the science types peg it at 14 per cent more, results in severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. We're also getting more "atmospheric rivers." These are bands of moisture laden air that snake across our oceans and create heavy flooding when they reach land. Here on the west coast we're familiar with them. We call them the "pineapple express." Now they're showing up in other places such as the UK where the flooding can be even more devastating.
What we're getting today is abnormal. It's taking us by surprise, catching us with our pants down. The UK is a perfect example. There you'll find beautiful, quaint villages built along rivers that are now becoming seasonally inundated.
When these villages were built, flash flooding wasn't an issue. It is now.
The new heat and humidity is also taking a toll on humans. Excess heat and humidity can kill. Extreme humidity can negate evaporative cooling. You still sweat only the air is too humid to wick that moisture away. The body begins to overheat, damaging internal organs.
The US is broken into three heat bands. The hottest begins along the southeastern seaboard to Florida and then west to the California interior. I'm not sure why the San Diego/Los Angeles coastal corridor isn't included. Within this band the heat and humidity index is being taken seriously as this University of Georgia heat chart for athletics demonstrates.
In other parts of the world, wet heat is a more sinister threat. The areas most affected are countries in the equatorial and tropical latitudes. These tend to be the poorest countries where much of the population works outdoors, usually in agriculture. Working too long in the fields can be a death sentence. Seeking shelter, however, restricts the amount of farm work that can be performed. For people eeking out a subsistence living this can be a nightmare.
Global warming will increase the chances of summer conditions that may be "too hot for humans" to work in.
When we caught up with Dr Jimmy Lee, his goggles were steamed up and there was sweat trickling off his neck.
An emergency medic, he's labouring in the stifling heat of tropical Singapore to care for patients with Covid-19.
There's no air conditioning - a deliberate choice, to prevent the virus being blown around - and he notices that he and his colleagues become "more irritable, more short with each other".
And his personal protective equipment, essential for avoiding infection, makes things worse by creating a sweltering 'micro-climate' under the multiple layers of plastic.
"It really hits you when you first go in there," Dr Lee says, "and it's really uncomfortable over a whole shift of eight hours - it affects morale."
And as Dr Lee and other medics have found, the impermeable layers of personal protection equipment (PPE) - designed to keep the virus out - have the effect of preventing the sweat from evaporating.
For some healthcare providers help may be on the way where it's feasible and, more critically, where it's affordable.
In impoverished regions, personal cooling systems would be prohibitively expensive for agrarian workers. There, options will narrow.
If you think this "WE" business rises to the level of a scandal, you're wrong. Trudeau has apologized and let's move on.
There is another scandal involving the Trudeau government, one that's awfully horrific. It's about how Trudeau & Company have chosen to allocate their aid to the energy sector almost entirely to fossil fuel companies, giving the clean energy sector the cold shoulder.
Federal energy and environment officials were warned in late April that Canada's clean-tech sector was in danger as COVID-19 knocked the bottom out of the industry.
Three months later, a new policy tracker on energy investments made by G20 countries finds Ottawa and the provinces have put very little on the table to help clean-tech companies directly, while targeting fossil-fuel producers with more than $16 billion in aid.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said the federal government has been "completely captured by the oil industry."
But wait. Didn't the Trudeau government proclaim we're in a climate state of emergency? Of course they did, right there on the floor of the House of Commons. Of course, less than 24 hours later they greenlighted the massive expansion of the bitumen pipeline to the west coast. And now they're snubbing Canada's fledgling clean energy industry in favour of the fossil fuelers.
The Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development contributed to a new international energy-policy tracker, released Wednesday, which counted all the investments made by G20 countries in energy — both fossil fuels and clean energy — since Jan. 1. Across the G20, about $201 billion has been earmarked for fossil-fuel industries, and $119 billion for clean energy.
In Canada, the difference between the two is much more stark, with $16 billion put down to support the oil and gas industries, compared with $300 million for clean energy. That includes Alberta's $1.5 billion equity investment and the $6-billion loan guarantee for the Keystone XL pipeline, and Ottawa's $750 million to help fossil-fuel companies cut methane emissions.
If you're looking for a real scandal, a betrayal of Canada and our people, look no further.
After days of sniping from Trump's White House sock puppets trying to undermine him, Dr. Anthony Fauci apparently has had enough.
“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with The Atlantic on Wednesday. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”
He spoke as Trump administration officials have sought to undermine his credibility — first anonymously, over the weekend, and then out in the open. A short op-ed by Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, published in USA Today on Tuesday evening was headlined “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, posted a cartoon Sunday evening mocking Dr. Fauci.
In the interview Wednesday, Dr. Fauci called the partisan environment around the virus disturbing.
“It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control, rather than this back-and-forth distraction, which just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Asked to review the government’s response to the pandemic, he said: “We’ve got to almost reset this and say, OK, let’s stop this nonsense and figure out how can we get our control over this now, and looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, because those are the hot zones now, and I’m looking at the map, saying we got to make sure it doesn’t happen in other states.”
Navarro has been Trump's crazy-loyal backstabber. It was Navarro who, according to Trump officials, was sent out in June, 2018 to attack Justin Trudeau after Trump felt slighted following a G7 meeting in Canada. Navarro said "there is a special place in Hell" for Trudeau. His attack on Fauci is just another example of Trump White House "juvenilia."
When the inevitable backlash arrived Trump moved quickly to distance himself from Navarro's smear job - again.
Overpopulation is going to ebb faster than some had imagined. A new report by the University of Washington published in the Lancet predicts mankind will peak at some 9.7 billion in 2064 before declining to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
The major factors in shrinking the population are widening access to contraception and improvements in educating women and girls. If those trends are curtailed, higher growth will ensue. For instance, although sub-Saharan Africa’s population is projected to soar, its fertility rates are forecast to decline from 4.6 births per woman in 2017 to 1.7 by 2100. If that decline in fertility should fail to materialise, the overall growth will be much greater.
Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the lead author of the research, said this opened up the potential for negative consequences if governments chose coercive policies over embracing immigration.
“The best solutions for sustaining current population levels, economic growth and geopolitical security are open immigration policies and social policies supportive of families having their desired number of children,” he said. “However, a very real danger exists that, in the face of declining populations, some countries might consider policies that restrict access to reproductive health services, with potentially devastating consequences. It is imperative that women’s freedom and rights are at the top of every government’s development agenda.”
The report (you can find it here) models three factors: fertility (including contraception), mortality and migration. It does not account for the impacts of climate change, the loss of biodiversity, species extinction, degradation of the biosphere (soils fertility, etc.), resource shortages and problems such as wars. If, as it seems, we are on a path to a 5 C hotter world, these projections could be almost meaningless.
