Science Matters

Why “Sustainability” Isn’t

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Peter Wood explains what’s wrong with the cult of “Sustainability” and its continuing threat to scientific knowledge. His Spectator article is E.O. Wilson and the climate cult My run-in with the late sociobiologist. Excerpts with my bolds and added images.

E.O. Wilson, as it happens was one of the founding members of the organization over which I now preside, the National Association of Scholars. He served on its board of advisors starting in 1987 and gave a keynote speech in 1994 at one of NAS’s early national conferences. But I crossed paths with him only once, and it was not a happy occasion. I’ll tell it my own way.

In spring 2008, a faculty member at the University of Delaware alerted me that the university office of residence life has imposed a peculiar dorm-based form of ideological indoctrination on students. It involved all sorts of arm-twisting to get students to vocally support various racial claims, gay marriage and socialist goals. At first the university denied it was doing any such thing, but we had documents as well as witnesses, and the administration eventually climbed down. Those documents, however, looked even more peculiar when we started reading them more carefully. What jumped out was that the whole indoctrination program was presented as a “sustainability” initiative.

Thus began what became a seven-year project by NAS to track down exactly what this meant, culminating in 2015 study we titled Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. What did and what does “sustainability” mean? The answers aren’t so simple, though one place to begin is with a 1987 United Nations report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland Commission report. It defined sustainability as “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That sounds nice, but if you stop to think about it, how are we supposed to know what future generations will need? Could generations past have predicted the need for coal, oil, uranium or rare earths? Plainly we can predict some future needs. People will need breathable air and drinkable water, and we best not use these all up.

But the concept of sustainability, launched in that UN report, still has something fishy about it. Part of what is fishy is that its proponents were in a hurry to take a concept about “development” and the “environment” and move it quickly into seemingly unrelated areas. “Sustainability,” according to the mandarins at the University of Delaware in 2008, was only one-third about the environment. Another third was about “economic fairness” and the last third was about “social justice.”

In short, sustainability was a master concept that wrapped together a whole new Marxist utopian view of society.

By 2008, that included the idea that planet Earth was in the midst of manmade catastrophic global warming. But don’t lose track of the chronology. The sustainability movement was launched in 1987, a year before NASA scientist James Hansen lit the fire that became global warming hysteria. The two movements, however, quickly found one another and became the great quasi-religious pantheist dogma of our age.

I did my best for a decade to steer clear of “global warming” theory as a topic that would do the NAS no good. Clearly a lot of academics, including NAS members were enthusiastic votaries at that shrine. Apocalyptic thinking had secured a profoundly emotional hold on the modern mind. But the more I read, the more “climate deniers” I encountered and found to be level-headed folks, and the more preposterous became the pronouncements of the Carbon Doom Cult, the more difficult I found it to dodge the topic. A strange pseudo-science whose devotees insisted that they were upholding “true science” against a rabble of fossil fools were in ascendency.

And so I began to steer NAS into the dangerous waters of skepticism, not just towards “sustainability” but towards the whole idea that carbon dioxide, the gas that make up four one-hundredths of one percent of Earth’s atmosphere, was melting the glaciers, thawing the Arctic, whipping up hurricanes, drowning coastlines and turning croplands into deserts. Now we learn that the Arctic was being warmed by the Atlantic long before Exxon and Mobil started business; Greenland’s glaciers are growing; and increases in CO2 are so marginal as to mean nothing.

Not that I expect mere facts to arrest anyone’s enthusiasm for an exciting theory. We have too much invested in dismantling a modern energy-intensive economy to stop now. No matter that wind and solar are technological busts.

One of the early gurus of the ecology movement was Barry Commoner who way back in 1971 laid out his Four Laws of Ecology, including the first law, “Everything is connected to everything else.” It would be hard to find another platitude that has caused so much trouble. For sure, with an infinity of degrees, my shoelaces are somehow connected to the Great Wall of China, but it is not a connection that need detain us. Everything-is-connected is really a postulate of New Age religion and it is an invitation to descend into irrationality. Thus it follows that if we can’t prove a connection between the internal combustion engine and a tornado in Kentucky, we can just assume one. That’s what global warmists call “the precautionary principle.”

Sometime in the summer of 2015 I picked up the phone and called my NAS advisory board member E.O. Wilson to tell him where I was headed on this topic. He was appalled. In his view global warming was real, catastrophic and putting the whole web of life on our fragile planet at risk. After twenty-eight years on the NAS board, he abruptly resigned and so ended my call.

Of course, I knew he had often expressed his deep concern for the extinction of species and the loss of diversity in the plant and animal kingdoms, but I also knew him as someone who had a steely commitment to rigorous scientific inquiry and contempt for science that embroiled itself with political and ideological causes. It was arresting to see how he had settled down into an Al Gore conception of our blue speck in the vast universe.

Whether sociobiology is a signal contribution to human understanding of the living world and will prove sustainable to meet the intellectual needs of “future generations,” I have no clear idea. It is a model that works well with ants, and that’s something. To what degree are we like ants? I’d say not very much, but we do have an enormous capacity to fall in line, which is good myrmicine behavior.

If conformity is our central characteristic, then yes, we are ants. But I think we can do better.

Footnote from Vaclav Smil

I absolutely hate the word sustainability because there is no such thing. Sustainability cannot be defined. Sustainable for what? Over next year? Over 10 years? Over a millennium? On a local basis, on a planetary basis? I mean, there are so many time and space dimensions to it you cannot define what is sustainable. If somebody is boasting what they are doing is sustainable, it’s a total laugh. There is no sustainable thing.

Beware Moving Climate Goalposts

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Benjamin Zycher sounds the warning in his Real Clear Energy article Will the Climate Industry Move the Goalposts Again? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Global temperature was on course to meet the 2-degree target without any emissions cuts.

The international climate alarmist industry comprises a number of special interests. There are the activists, fundamentally anti-human and deeply disingenuous, demanding that billions of the global poor suffer and die in order that the planet be “saved.” There are the “experts” in pursuit of bigger budgets and “research” grants. There are the editors of the peer-reviewed journals, transforming “science” into a propaganda exercise. There are the bureaucrats massively expanding their budgets and powers, the politicians seeking to transfer ever more wealth, and the journalists desperate to produce clickbait even as they remain invincible in their ignorance.

There are the official “environmental” groups whose business model is the use of political, regulatory, and judicial processes to steal other people’s property. There are the foundation officials writing checks in hot pursuit of invitations to the right cocktail parties. There are the Hollywood airheads addicted to thunderous applause on the red carpets. Don’t forget the corporate gasbags myopic, ignorant, incapable of ideological battle, and so naïve as actually to believe that they can placate the environmental Left. There are the international organizations striving toward utopia through ever-greater coercion. And – of course – there are the innumerable useful idiots engaged in virtue-signaling.

Yes, it is a diverse group indeed, but its members share two habits. The first is a common (but not universal) reluctance to confront the evidence on the nonexistent climate problem emergency crisis catastrophe apocalypse. Many scientists and policy scholars have discussed the fundamental inconsistency between the mainstream climate “existential threat” narrative and the actual evidence on climate phenomena. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its 5th (page 12-78) and 6th (page 12-115) assessment reports, is deeply dubious about the various severe effects – the horror stories – often asserted to be looming as impacts of anthropogenic (man-made) warming, particularly over the course of this century, the maximum time horizon that plausibly can be described as foreseeable.

The second is the purported limit on warming asserted to be necessary for global “safety,” a parameter that has been driven almost wholly by the political needs of the climate industry, and virtually not at all by “science.” Put aside the fact that the official “safety” limit shunts aside the distinction between natural and anthropogenic temperature trends; the climate industry simply asserts that all warming is anthropogenic. That is why it has not attempted to explain – for example – the sharp warming that occurred from 1910 to 1945, which could not have been caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG), principally carbon dioxide, which changed only from about 300 ppm to 310 ppm over that period. It is clear that some of the recent warming is anthropogenic, some is natural, and no one knows the respective magnitudes.

Recall from 2009 the official safe limit on warming: 2°C above pre-industrial levels, as decreed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the 15th Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. That limit was repeated endlessly by all of the usual suspects; and the “pre-industrial” base period has been defined, reasonably, as the 1850–1900 time frame, that is, the decades immediately following the end of the little ice age. Can it surprise anyone that some warming would follow that period?

Unfortunately for the climate alarmists, the satellite temperature data are not cooperating with the “science.”

On average the climate models underlying the most recent (6th) IPCC assessment report predict 0.4°C of warming per decade for the period 1979–2019, and 0.5°C of warming per decade for 2019–2050, or, crudely, about 4–5°C of warming over the course of a century. The actual warming record as measured by the satellites for 1979–2019: 0.16°C per decade, or about 1.6°C per century. (The weather balloon measurements are virtually identical.)

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models. Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa. John Christy (2019)

Accordingly, the actual data have created a massive problem for the climate industry: They suggest strongly that the 2°C “safety” limit will be achieved without any climate change/GHG policies at all. Unless the satellite data can be shown to be wrong – a task essentially impossible – the only option available to rescue the climate industry and its massive funding, perquisites, and powers is a change to the asserted “safety” limit.

Which is precisely what the climate industry has done. As of 2015, the safety limit now is 1.5°C, as the UNFCCC made clear:

“The universal agreement’s main aim is to keep a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5 degree Celsius limit is a significantly safer defense line against the worst impacts of a changing climate.”

Yes, the IPCC, in a deeply dubious study, has moved the goalposts. The supreme silliness of that report is illustrated by its assertion (page 18) that as of 2018, “pathways that limit global warming to 1.5°C … show clear emission reductions by 2030.” In other words, we – the developed and the less-developed economies – had better get moving on serious reductions in GHG emissions over the next eight years, and this time we mean it. Note that for 1990–2019, annual global GHG emissions (Table B.1) grew by over 58 percent, and almost 13 percent for 2010–2019.

Let us consider now the latest satellite temperature data through December 2021: Since 1979, the average increase (“anomaly”) in the land/ocean temperature trend has been 0.14°C per decade, or about 1.4°C over the course of a century. Accordingly, the latest data remain inconsistent with the average of the climate models, and in particular continue to suggest that over the course of this century even the new, lower “safety” limit on global temperature increases might be achieved if there occurs a substantial cooling period, a phenomenon that is very far from implausible.

And so the climate alarmists cannot rest: They cannot risk an outcome in which even the new “safety” limit might be achieved without (forced) reductions in international GHG emissions. Because they obviously cannot wait until there is a cooling period, it is wholly reasonable to hypothesize that the “safety” limit will be reduced yet again. How this will be justified politically is far from clear – first the 2°C and then the 1.5°C safety limits received enormous publicity – and deep public skepticism about yet another movement of the goalposts would be a certainty. And so the justifications – the horror stories, the imminent arrival of the apocalypse, the mass die-offs purportedly already in process, the need for immediate capitulation to the demands of the climate industry, the denunciations of dissenters, etc. – will increase exponentially in decibel level, shrillness, and utter irrationality.

The admonitions and hysteria already are becoming ever louder. This reality is illustrated by the recent decision by Google to demonetize the most important science website reporting the monthly satellite temperature data – no, I am not kidding – because of “unreliable and harmful claims.” That is the Google characterization of two scientists – John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer – and a website that has simply reported the satellite temperature record since 1979! In short, Google now is censoring the actual science in an effort to prop up the climate industry.

In its own way this process will be supremely amusing. But what else can the climate industry do to save the planet, and its own interests, and not necessarily in that order?

Footnote on Carbon Budgeting

People who take to the streets with signs forecasting doom in 11 or 12 years have fallen victim to IPCC 450 and 430 scenarios. For years activists asserted that warming from pre industrial can be contained to 2C if CO2 concentrations peak at 450 ppm. Last year, the SR1.5 lowered the threshold to 430 ppm, thus the shortened timetable for the end of life as we know it. Fuller explanation at posts I Want You Not to Panic. and Greta’s Spurious “Carbon Budget”

Jordan Peterson: Canada’s Crushing Covid Obsession

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Jordan Peterson writes at National Post Open the damn country back up, before Canadians wreck something we can’t fix. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The country is growing more authoritarian in response to fear

I am not accustomed to feeling particularly sympathetic for the travails of large, successful enterprises: banks, airlines, utilities and the like. I expect a certain standard of service, so that I can conduct my own affairs effectively, and am impatient when delays unnecessary in the normal course of things emerge. The letter from the bank stopped me and made me think, however. It wasn’t just the bank. It was also the airline. It was the empty shelves in the grocery store in northern Alberta. It was the daughter of the man I once worked for as a cook, back when I was a teenager. It was the shopkeepers and small business-people I have spoken with on this trip.

We are pushing to their breaking point the complex systems upon which we depend and which are miraculously effective and efficient in their often thankless operation.

Can you think of anything more unlikely than the fact that we can get instant trouble-free access to our money online, using systems that are virtually graft- and corruption-free? Just imagine how much work, trust and efficiency was and is necessary to make that a reality. Can you think of anything more unlikely than fast, reliable and inexpensive jet air travel, nationally and internationally, in absolute safety? Or the constant provision of almost every consumer good imaginable, in the midst of plentiful, varied and inexpensive food?

These systems are now shaking. We’re compromising them seriously with this unending and unpredictable stream of restrictions, lockdowns, regulations and curfews.

We’re also undermining our entire monetary system, with the provision of unending largesse from government coffers, to ease the stress of the COVID response. We’re playing with fire. We’ve demolished two Christmas seasons in a row. Life is short. These are rare occasions. We’re stopping kids from attending school. We’re sowing mistrust in our institutions in a seriously dangerous manner. We’re frightening people to make them comply. We’re producing bureaucratic institutions that hypothetically hold public health in the highest regard, but subordinating all our properly political institutions to that end, because we lack leadership, and rely on ultimately unreliable opinion polls to govern broadscale political policy. I’ve never seen breakdown in institutional trust on this scale before in my lifetime.

I was recently in Nashville, Tennessee. No lockdowns. No masks. No COVID regulations to speak of. People are going about their lives. Why can that be the case in Tennessee (and in other U.S. states, such as Florida) when there are curfews (curfews!) in Quebec, two years after the pandemic started, with a vaccination rate of nearly 80 per cent? When BC is still limiting social gatherings? When we are putting tremendous and unsustainable strain on all the complex systems that have served us so well, and made us so comfortable, in the midst of the troubles of our lives?

The cure has become worse than the disease.

I have spoken with senior advisors to provincial governments in Canada. There is no end game in sight. The idea that Canadian policy is or should be governed “by the science” is not only not true, it’s also not possible, as there is no simple pathway from the facts of science to the complexities of policy. We are deciding, by opinion poll, to live in fear, and to become increasingly authoritarian in response to that fear. That’s a danger, too, and it’s increasingly real. How long are we going to flail about, hiding behind our masks, afraid to send our children (who are in no danger more serious than risk of the flu) to school, charging university students full tuition for tenth-rate online “education,” pitting family member against family member over vaccine policy and, most seriously, compromising the great economic engine upon which our health also depends?

Until we decide not to.

There are no risk-free paths forward. There is only one risk, or another. Pick your poison: that’s the choice life often offers. I am weary of living under the increasingly authoritarian dictates of a polity hyper-concerned with one risk, and oblivious to all others. And things are shaking around us.

Enough, Canadians. Enough, Canadian politicos. Enough masks. Enough social gathering limitations. Enough restaurant closures. Enough undermining of social trust. Make the bloody vaccines available to those who want them. Quit using force to ensure compliance on the part of those who don’t. Some of the latter might be crazy but, by and large, they are no crazier than the rest of us.

Set a date. Open the damn country back up, before we wreck something we can’t fix.
Time for some courage. Let’s live again.

All Roads Lead to Wuhan

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Matt Ridley connects the dots in his Spiked article Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought.

Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

These are the very suspicions raised in April 2020 in a careful essay by Russian-Canadian biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin, which was dismissed at the time by Garry and the others as nonsense.

Two years later, no such natural furin-cleavage-site insertion has yet turned up in the many wild SARS-like viruses found since then. But what has turned up is a grant proposal put to the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018 to fund experiments that would deliberately insert novel furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-like coronaviruses to help them grow in the lab. And who was party to that proposal? Why, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It’s an open secret in science that you sometimes put things into grant proposals that you have already started doing, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was funding most of the work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology anyway.

The emails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’. Francis Collins was pithier, worrying about ‘doing great potential harm to science and international harmony’.

Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting science’s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change one’s mind.

In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collins’s National Institutes of Health.

Voters, Beware Your State’s Secretary of State

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Ron Clutz

While waiting for something to actually happen to expose the corrupt US election apparatus, here’s more insight into what is broken. Jay Valentine explains at American Thinker When a State’s Secretary of State is in on Voter Fraud. Excerpts in italics with my bold.

We coined the term “sovereign fraud” right here on American Thinker. At the time, it was a concept, until we started doing voter anomaly analysis for one large, Midwestern swing state.

We have now finished state 15, on the way to 30 or more; we can say with certainty that the Secretaries of State are unlikely to lead voter roll clean up. In many states, they thwart it with flagrant data tricks.

Let’s take you through our excellent adventure working with voter integrity groups across the country. You need to understand their dedication, resilience, and the odds they face when the reddest states’ Secretary of State is in on “it.”

“It” means they know their voter rolls are replete with phantoms, but they deny it, evade it, some hide it. Let’s go there.

Most people have downloaded a file. It’s easy. Except if you live in a swing state on the southeast U.S. coast — and the file came from the Secretary of State’s office. When you process the file, it contains about every way of screwing up your search capability.

For instance: it is supposed to be comma delimited but it isn’t. It has non-ASCII characters embedded. That means search engines will flail with no result. It has half quote marks which means there is no end of quote so it will not process. There are nonsensical control characters throughout the data set.

This is deliberate data sabotage, intended to make it almost impossible for citizens using traditional tools to parse the data paid for with their taxes.

This example is a Republican Secretary of State in effect saying: “well, if I have to give you the voter roll, here it is, now just try to search it!”

Unfortunately for this guy, our team uses Fractal Programming and while it set us back half a day, that data is cleaned and in the hands of citizens who want to get some answers. They will.

Let’s visit another eastern seaboard state. These diligent citizens downloaded their Secretary of State data and innocently tried to process it. Within minutes of loading the data, all the lights went on. Control characters throughout the data deliberately inserted to thwart conventional search.

This is an example of active data sabotage from the sovereign entity – Secretary of State – making it hard or impossible for citizens to see the voter rolls.

It gets better. We presented data anomalies to some Republican secretaries of state; they got to see their “voter data,” live and in person. Be the fly on the wall. The Secretary of State for a bright red Southern state is assembled with his entire team. Lawyers all over the place, us presenting.

First, we showed the 4,300 people over 100 years old on their rolls. Some were 121. Those were the kids. The really old ones were almost 2,000 years old, and there were a bunch of them – and they voted.

To my surprise, one of their guys got right in my face (a camera really, I was remote) and denied we had their rolls. He claimed only 300 people over 100. His face was crimson with anger. He had this roll of paper in his hand – maybe their scammy voter roll, who knows?

Tough being him because our team bought their voter registration roll for $30,000 and I had their data live, in his face. Did make an impression.

We then showed them the “girl’s ranch.” Here is a place in the woods for young ladies to get attention and care. Focus on “young” and “ladies.”

They said, no big deal, there were 45 people registered there. They knew the owner, it’s OK.

We swept right and showed the names of the “young ladies.” 15 were men. Then we swept further right and sorted by age. Most were 61 to 35. Some “young.” Some “ladies!”

How about the 21 active voters in the county jail in their largest city? You would think that made an impression? It did, but not enough to look into it.

For the first time the sleepy sinecure — the stepstone to Congressman, Senator, or Governor – the Secretary of State office is getting checked out.

And they do not like it.

They liked it even less when they learned two weeks later, their data was turned over to the canvassing teams in their deep red state now doing the job the Secretary of State refuses to do – clean up voter rolls – with technology that makes voter rolls transparent to citizens.

A Secretary of State may be all in on voter fraud. In deep-blue states, we found leftist groups with real-time electronic access to voter rolls able to enter voters – real or fake.

In deep-red states, we found 18 registered voters living in a house the size of a panel truck. We did not find one or two, we found hundreds, meaning there are thousands. The canvassing groups are outing them.

We found 23,000 people claiming the same phone number on their voter registration form – for over 30 years. Some extended family!

We found people registering from a UPS Box calling it an apartment.

Canvassers found absentee ballots, hundreds of them with the same phone number, delivered on the same day. We checked the address: it was a cognitive care facility where many of those voters were unable to remember their children’s names, let alone vote.

Welcome to ballot harvesting at enterprise scale.

Voter rolls are a mess – all of them. That is why many Secretaries of State too often charge $30,000, $25,000, $5,000 for a single snapshot of the rolls – how many citizens can write that check?

One swing state deliberately uses multiple voter ID number sequences to thwart evaluation and insert voters without detection. In others, there are 40 years of built-up junk like people in UPS Boxes with their buds in the vacant lots, churches, and RV parks.

Anyone who thinks voter fraud is a Democrat party thing will be disappointed: voter roll fraud is a truly bipartisan enterprise.

Democrats are better at inserting phantom voters – particularly in large urban areas. The Republicans hold their own in deliberately salting voter rolls so citizens cannot easily find what their Democrat pals inserted.

The one constant is the Secretary of State’s office, whether Democrat or Republican, lies somewhere along the denial curve – from acquiescence to denial to outright instigation of sovereign voter fraud.

There is no way to guarantee free and fair elections until citizens receive 100% visibility to all voter rolls, without writing a $30,000 check, to keep these sovereign outlaws or lazies honest and active.

Jay Valentine led the team that built the eBay fraud detection engine and the TSA No-Fly List. Jay and his team are working with over 30 states cleaning up their voter rolls. Jay can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com

Sane vs. Stupid Energy Policies

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Gene Yaw writes at Real Clear Energy What Critics Get Wrong About Energy Choice. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Last month, seven environmental groups wrote a misguided letter to Philadelphia officials bashing legislation that I sponsored as counterintuitive to the city’s decarbonization goals.

In October, six Democrats, including two from the southeast corner of the state, joined all 28 Republicans and our chamber’s lone Independent to approve Senate Bill 275. That’s a veto proof majority, for those counting.

Why? Because the bill’s purpose is simple: it prevents Pennsylvania’s 2,500-plus municipalities from banning access to certain utilities, like natural gas or heating oil. This will preserve consumer access to affordable electricity, no matter where they live, and prevent a chaotic patchwork of regulations that ultimately undermine statewide environmental and energy policies.

It also reaffirms what many local and statewide officials, including the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, already understand to be true: municipalities do not have the authority to restrict energy sources.

What the bill does not do is prevent Philadelphia City Council from pursuing its goal to retrofit all publicly owned buildings to reduce emissions 50% over the next decade. It’s not just about ripping out gas lines and oil tanks and installing heat pumps instead. Reducing electricity usage – through upgraded windows, roofs and insulation – is also a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The aforementioned environmental groups said that SB 275 will eliminate any hope of Philadelphia reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. Which begs the question, if the only way to achieve decarbonization is by indiscriminatingly banning utilities deemed “dirty” and “bad,” is that even a good plan? Isn’t there an old adage forewarning the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket?

Banning specific fuel sources in pursuit of “clean energy” makes zero sense in Philadelphia and beyond. First, clean energy is a misnomer. There’s simply no such thing. Even if we shuttered every coal and gas plant across the world tomorrow and began a frantic campaign to install wind and solar farms in their place, we’d need to cover about 1.8 million square kilometers of land and coastline to replace the lost capacity.

And we would need fossil fuels to produce all of those solar panels and wind turbines. Just like we need oil and gas to create and distribute nearly every product we use every single day, from the medications we take to the clothes we wear to the packaging we use to preserve our food. To assume that banning fossil fuels will only impact emissions and electricity prices is to ignore the intricate web that is our economy.

Besides, the city doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s connected to a vast, 13-state power grid called PJM, that manages the safe and reliable flow of electricity for 65 million people from Chicago to Washington D.C. and many places in between.

PJM’s operators ensure that its network of transmission lines and generation facilities work in tandem every minute of the day, preventing system overloads that could trigger massive utility failures and inflict untold suffering on millions in its territory. So, if electricity demand spikes in Philadelphia, but environmental policies have forced fossil fuel plants into nonexistence, there are fewer reliable energy sources to shoulder the burden.

A similar story unfolded in Texas in February when an unprecedented winter storm froze generators and rendered solar and wind farms useless, leaving more than 4 million residents without power or water for days. More than 200 people died amid the chaos. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, promised to winterize its system to harden it against future storms, but the damage was done. The rest of the nation should take note: a diversified and robust grid is key to preventing systemwide catastrophes.

Which brings me back to the idea of banning access to fossil fuels. If we are willing to sacrifice our food, clothing, shelter and transportation, doing so might eliminate some carbon emissions in the United States. Globally, U.S. emissions equal about half of what China produces on an annual basis, according to 2018 figures. The annual combined emissions from the other three top polluting nations – India, Russia and Japan – would likewise take our place.

Then there’s the emissions from sources we can’t always control: volcanic eruptions, livestock, forest fires. Or the damage caused by human activity like deforestation and degenerative agriculture. Even if the United States found a solution to every single unsustainable practice that critics say contributes to climate change, the rest of the world’s leading nations aren’t following suit.

So what do these groups really want from the city? They want officials to take a sledgehammer to our carefully planned and managed power grid, collapse our economy and leave Pennsylvanians with higher electric bills, fewer jobs and unreliable utilities. All for the sake of reducing carbon emissions that will be offset by the rest of world, in perpetuity.

Protecting energy choices for consumers means that residents can pursue “cleaner” electricity sources if they want to or can afford to, while not punishing those who don’t have the option. SB 275 isn’t about protecting special interests – what does a senator from Williamsport owe to Philadelphia’s gas utility?

What I do care about is promoting sound energy policy that doesn’t leave others behind for the constant pursuit of ideological purity, no matter how impractical or impossible or harmful it is for the very people such policies purport to help.

Senator Gene Yaw was elected to represent the 23rd Senatorial District consisting of Bradford, Lycoming, Sullivan, Union Counties and a portion of Susquehanna County. He serves as Chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.

UAH Confirms Global Warming Gone End of 2021

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Ron Clutz

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The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling has now completely overcome the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April and then again in November, 2021 (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles.

Update August 3, 2021

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

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November Update Ocean and Land Air Temps Plunge

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you will hear a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast is the cooling setting in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino is now fully dissipated with chilly temperatures setting in all regions. Last month both land and ocean remained cool.

UAH has updated their tlt (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for December. Previously I have done posts on their reading of ocean air temps as a prelude to updated records from HadSST3 (still not updated from October). So I have separately posted on SSTs using HadSST4 2021 Ends with Cooler Ocean Temps This month also has a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years. Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes, and last month showed air over land dropping slightly while ocean air rose.

Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values change with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus the cooling oceans now portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates to HadSST4 now appear more promptly. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6 which are now posted for December. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the new and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean temps since January 2015.

Note 2020 was warmed mainly by a spike in February in all regions, and secondarily by an October spike in NH alone. In 2021, SH and the Tropics both pulled the Global anomaly down to a new low in April. Then SH and Tropics upward spikes, along with NH warming brought Global temps to a peak in October. That warmth was gone as November 2021 ocean temps plummeted everywhere. With an upward bump in December, global ocean air at 0.2C matches 1/2015 and is 0.5C cooler than its peak in 02/2016.

Land Air Temperatures Tracking Downward in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for December is below.

Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. Land temps are dominated by NH with a 2020 spike in February, followed by cooling down to July and a second spike in November. Note the mid-year spikes in SH winter months. In December 2020 all of that was wiped out. Then 2021 followed a similar pattern with NH spiking in January, then dropping before rising in the summer to peak in October 2021. As with the ocean air temps, all that was erased in November with a sharp cooling everywhere. Last month there was further global land air cooling below 0.2C, a drop of 0.7C from the peak of 0.9C 02/2016.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1995

The chart shows monthly anomalies starting 01/1995 to present. The average anomaly is 0.04, since this period is the same as the new baseline, lacking only the first 4 years. 1995 was chosen as an ENSO neutral year. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. A small upward bump in 2021 has been reversed with temps now returning again to the mean.

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST3, but are now showing the same pattern. It seems obvious that despite the three El Ninos, their warming has not persisted, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.

2021 Ends with Cooler Ocean Temps

Posted on January 11, 2022 by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 updates are slow to appear. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.

The Current Context

The 2020 year end report below showed rapid cooling in all regions. The anomalies then continued in 2021 to remain well below the mean since 2015. This Global Cooling was also evident in the UAH Land and Ocean air temperatures ( See Adios, Global Warming)

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through December 2021. After three straight Spring 2020 months of cooling led by the tropics and SH, NH spiked in the summer, along with smaller bumps elsewhere. Then temps everywhere dropped for six months, hitting bottom in February 2021. All regions were well below the Global Mean since 2015, matching the cold of 2018, and lower than January 2015. Then the spring and summer brought more temperate waters and a July return to the mean anomaly since 2015. After an upward bump in August, the 2021 yearend Global temp anomaly dropped below the mean, driven by sharp declines in the Tropics and NH.

A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.

Note that higher temps in 2015 and 2016 were first of all due to a sharp rise in Tropical SST, beginning in March 2015, peaking in January 2016, and steadily declining back below its beginning level. Secondly, the Northern Hemisphere added three bumps on the shoulders of Tropical warming, with peaks in August of each year. A fourth NH bump was lower and peaked in September 2018. As noted above, a fifth peak in August 2019 and a sixth August 2020 exceeded the four previous upward bumps in NH.

This has now been reversed in 2021 with all regions pulling the Global anomaly downward sharply, tempered by warming this year in spring and summer. Note in September the Global anomaly return to mean was driven by cooling in SH and Tropics, overcoming a final upward bump in NH. At yearend warming effects from the 2016 El Nino gone from all regions.

To enlarge image double-click or open in new tab.

A longer view of SSTs

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino. The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. For the next 2 years, the Tropics stayed down, and the world’s oceans held steady around 0.5C above 1961 to 1990 average.

Then comes a steady rise over two years to a lesser peak Jan. 2003, but again uniformly pulling all oceans up around 0.5C. Something changes at this point, with more hemispheric divergence than before. Over the 4 years until Jan 2007, the Tropics go through ups and downs, NH a series of ups and SH mostly downs. As a result the Global average fluctuates around that same 0.5C, which also turns out to be the average for the entire record since 1995.

2007 stands out with a sharp drop in temperatures so that Jan.08 matches the low in Jan. ’99, but starting from a lower high. The oceans all decline as well, until temps build peaking in 2010.

Now again a different pattern appears. The Tropics cool sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH are offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021, then all regions rose to bring the global anomaly above the mean since 1995 June 2021 backed down before warming again slightly in July and August 2021, then cooling slightly in September. The present level compares with 2014.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

But the peaks coming nearly every summer in HadSST require a different picture. Let’s look at August, the hottest month in the North Atlantic from the Kaplan dataset.

The AMO Index is from from Kaplan SST v2, the unaltered and not detrended dataset. By definition, the data are monthly average SSTs interpolated to a 5×5 grid over the North Atlantic basically 0 to 70N. The graph shows August warming began after 1992 up to 1998, with a series of matching years since, including 2020, dropping down in 2021. Because the N. Atlantic has partnered with the Pacific ENSO recently, let’s take a closer look at some AMO years in the last 2 decades.

This graph shows monthly AMO temps for some important years. The Peak years were 1998, 2010 and 2016, with the latter emphasized as the most recent. The other years show lesser warming, with 2007 emphasized as the coolest in the last 20 years. Note the red 2018 line is at the bottom of all these tracks. The heavy green line shows that 2021 has been tracking close to the cooler years, but in September 2021, an upward bump matched the highest year, 2016. That warming persists in Oct./Nov.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? If the pattern of recent years continues, NH SST anomalies may rise slightly in coming months, but once again, ENSO which has weakened will probably determine the outcome.

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

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USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

Dr. Malone’s Wisdom in His Words

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Recently Dr. Robert Malone was interviewed at length by Joe Rogan and the full transcript is Joe Rogan Experience #1757 – Dr. Robert Malone, MD Full Transcript

Below are excerpts in italics with my bolds, lightly edited and rearranged to serve as a synopsis. Read the full transcript for more details and technical points.

For about the last 20 years I’ve been focused on actually doing stuff: regulatory affairs, clinical development, getting necessary training, etc. I also completed a fellowship at Harvard University medical school as a global clinical scholar to round out my cv. And I’ve run over 100 clinical trials, mostly in the vaccine space, but also in drug repurposing. I’ve been involved in every major outbreak since AIDS. This is kind of what I do. I’ve won literally billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts. I’m often brought in by NIH to serve as a study section chair for awarding 80 to 120 million dollar contracts in vaccines and biodefense.

So, my position all the way through this comes off of the platform of bioethics and the importance of informed consent. People should have the freedom of choice particularly for their children; and in order to appropriately choose to participate in a medical experiment, they have to be fully informed of the risks as well as the benefits. And so I’ve tried really hard to make sure that people have access to the information about those risks and potential benefits, the true unfiltered academic papers and raw data etc. However, the policy that’s being implemented is one in which no discussion of the risks are allowed because by definition they will elicit vaccine hesitance. So it can’t be discussed, and yet that’s the backbone of informed consent. So not only is informed consent not happening, it’s being actively blocked, which makes no sense.

Michael Callahan is a CIA agent that I’ve co-published with in the past. He was in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019 and he called me from Wuhan on January 4th, 2020. was currently managing a team focusing on drug discovery for organophosphate poisoning, ergo nerve agents for DTRA, defense threat reduction agency. It involved high-end stuff like high-performing computing and biorobot screening. And he told me, Robert you need to get your team spun up because we got a problem with this new virus. I worked with him through prior outbreaks, and so it was then that I turned my attention to this. We started modeling a key protein, a protease inhibitor of this virus when the sequence was released on January 11th as the Wuhan seafood market virus. And I’ve been pretty much going non-stop ever since to address that outbreak with drug repurposing.

I’ve got some good news to announce. Today we should have the first patient enrolled in our clinical trials of the combination of monitoring and celecoxib for treating SARS-CoV-2. These trials are being run by the company Leidos, which is one of my clients. I’ve helped them design a plan based on my discoveries and funded by a defense threat reduction agency. I haven’t pushed this drug combination feeling it was inappropriate until we got the trials running. But they’re now open and we’ve passed through the FDA screening process. We had data showing that adding Ivermectin would further improve the combination, but the FDA created such enormous roadblocks to us doing an Ivermectin arm that we had to drop it. And by we I mean the DOD decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, and they just dropped that arm due to FDA creating so much grief.

There are good modeling studies that probably half a million excess deaths have happened in the United States through the intentional blockade of early treatment by the U.S. government. it’s the pushback against both Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin now. When you ask me why, you’re asking me to get into somebody’s head. What I can say as a scientist is what I observed: the behaviors, the actions, the correspondence, these bizarre things that have happened.

For example, it is well documented they conspired to cook up a strategy using emergency use authorization to make it so that Hydroxychloroquine could only be administered in the hospital, which is too late for when hydroxy should be used. The government had documents on hydroxy’s safety and effectiveness yet they asserted that there was no data on Hydroxychloroquine at the time this decision was made. Just patently false. So, what is the motivation when none of this makes sense? The only thing you know is this is a journalist problem, and you know the classic guidance is follow the money.

And it is bizarre that Merck would come out with these explicit statements about the safety of Ivermectin. Both Ivermectin and hydroxy are on the WHO list of essential medicines. They have been administered for millions and millions of doses; they’re among the safest known medicines when administered within this acceptable pharmaceutical window. Ivermectin is even safer than hydroxy, so Merck coming out of the blue and saying Ivermectin isn’t safe is really inexplicable.

In India, Uttar Pradesh has almost the same population as the United States; it’s huge, dense, urban and poor, all the characteristics of the Indian countryside. And the virus was just ripping through there, causing all kinds of death and disease. Out of desperation it was decided to deploy widely throughout the province early treatments as packages including a number of agents. The composition has not been formally disclosed but it was rumored to include Ivermectin. There was a specific visit of Biden to Modi, and thereafter a decision was made in the Indian government not to disclose the contents of those packages that were being deployed in Uttar Pradesh. The treatments are still in use there, and in Uttar Pradesh deaths have flatlined. The rest of the world is yelling about Omicron and about hospitalizations–well South Africa isn’t–and Uttar Pradesh is still flatlined in terms of deaths.

The observation that I can make if we follow the money is that hospitals are incentivized to to treat COVID patients. The thing that ties all this together, including the suppression through the government of early treatment, is hospitals are incentivized financially to treat COVID patients. For example, in the Imperial Valley of California, COVID patients are being treated outside of the hospital and prevented from going to the hospital. Brian Tyson and George Fareed have saved thousands and thousands of lives of indigenous Latinos that are coming across the border and working the fields. I mean they’re they’re breaking their backs to save the poor, an amazing story there with early treatments. I guess they’re left alone because they’re in the imperial valley nobody cares, they’re all poor, but in these urban environments there’s all these incentives for hospitals to treat COVID patients and if people are giving treatments that are keeping those people out of the hospitals then they’re not getting that revenue. Hospitals have financial incentives including death incentives to discourage early treatment. The other data point is those that are doing the attacking are almost universally hospital administrators and hospitalists, I.e. hospital-based physicians

I’m maybe the only one that has been involved deeply in the development of this tech that doesn’t have a financial stake in it, so for me the reason is that what’s happening is not right. It’s destroying my profession; it’s destroying the practice of medicine worldwide; it’s destroying public health in medicine. I’m a vaccinologist, I’ve spent 30 years developing vaccine, a stupid amount of education learning how to do it and what the rules are. And I’m personally offended by watching my discipline get destroyed for no good reason at all except apparently financial incentives, and perhaps political ass covering.

We have Covid mRNA genetic vaccines, and we have DNA virus administered genetic vaccines (that’s the J&J here in the United States). And they all have these symptoms of clotting, brain fog and other things. As you know this is basically: Does it walk like a duck and quack like a duck? What is the common variable between those three very different systems: natural viral infection, mRNA genetic vaccines, and DNA genetic vaccines? We don’t see these problems by the way with adenoviral vectored vaccines in development for my entire life. 30 years they’re licensed, adenoviral vector vaccines they don’t have these problems, so it’s something that’s not intrinsic to the platform. The common variable is spike protein just to cut to the chase.

Then then there is this fundamental logic flaw. In clinical development and non-clinical development and safety and pharmacology, I like to say the French judicial system applies. That is, you’re guilty until proven innocent. It’s the job of the pharmaceutical companies to prove that their engineered spike is safe. They never did that. And so all of this pressure that comes back you know from folks like me saying hey this isn’t right okay–and it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duc–it’s probably toxic. Because it’s the common variable. I get criticized by people saying you have to prove that it’s not safe. Sorry, that’s not the way it works. It’s pharma’s job to prove that it is safe, not my job to prove that it’s not safe. I’m observing the safety signal is there. It is associated with vectors that express spike whether it’s the vaccine the virus or the adenovirus, that is the MRNA, the virus itself or the adenoviral vectored spike. Those toxicities are there and the common variable is the spike protein. We can argue about the meaning of toxin just like so much of the rest of our language has been perverted during this. But the simple explanation, the simple definition is: Does it cause toxicity in people, and the answer is pretty clear now it does. The question that we’re all arguing about is how often and how bad.

Then we have the laboratory data that we’re seeing abnormalities in the key signaling molecules that b and t cells use to talk to each other–toll-like receptors that are associated particularly with the MRNA vaccines. So something is happening that is causing release of t cell suppression, reactivation of latent DNA viruses, maybe some signals relating to oncology, that is some changes in t cell signaling behavior. And then there’s this this increasing awareness that there’s some window of time, unsure how long after vaccination, when you’re actually more susceptible to infection. And this may be that not only is the vaccine efficacy waning, but the multiple jab strategy is actually creating more and more windows where people have this period of t-cell suppression. So there’s a whole lot in this box of immunology and what are the jabs doing to our immune system and how long does it last. Let’s gently say: That is a little worrisome to some of us that have a background in these things.

In this case there’s multiple reasons not to do the multiple jabs. The simplest one for everybody to understand is when your son develops seasonal allergies to ragweed pollen or whatever and it’s so bad that he can’t go to school his eyes are running he can’t play in sports whatever. So you say we have to do something about this: I’m going to take him to a rheumatologist an allergist and see what they can do. Well they do a bunch of tests and they say oh your son is allergic to ragweed pollen or whatever the thing is. Then what do is to give him shots- what are those shots? They’re high doses of antigen that are administered repeatedly to your child, and what it does is induce something we immunologists call high zone tolerance. High zone tolerance basically amounts to an ability by giving multiple injections at high levels of antigen to shut down t cells against a specific antigen. The other thing with the multiple jabs is that these are multiple jabs that are mismatched. Okay they don’t fit.

So there’s there’s those three things. The short term issue is we don’t know how long it lasts. There’s the high zone tolerance issue, and then there is the multiple jabs that are mismatched for the current circulating virus. That’s akin to repeatedly taking a flu vaccine from two seasons ago and hoping it’s going to protect against this flu.

So what we’re doing is with with administering a mismatched vaccine is we’re driving the effector and memory cells, b and t, towards a population that is focused on a virus that no longer exists. So what is my hypothesis for the poor durability of the vaccines? My answer is it looks to me like original antigenic sin. Let’s unpack what that terminology means–original antigenic sin. I think what could be happening with these data is that we’re driving the immune response towards responding to an antigen receptor binding domain a spike that no longer exists with Omicron. Now it it has become clear (after being initially denied) that all of us have a background immune response against Beta coronaviruses. These are naturally circulating cold coronaviruses that have significant immunologic crossreactivity with SARS-CoV-2. And the problem with that in original antigenic sin is that those existing memory cells will dominate the immune response when you get infected and when you get vaccinated. Let me unpack that in a way that kind of makes sense for the common person. We all know the adage that we’re always best prepared for the last war. That is, in your life the sum of your prior life experiences biases how you respond. In your martial arts you must know this deeply; what you’ve experienced in the past in prior fights is gonna bias how you respond to a new opponent. Same thing happens with your immune system.

Okay so we’ve got a new pathogen, but it’s got a series of of overlaps with the old ones that we’ve seen before, and our immune system is biased to respond as if it’s the old one. Now to make matters worse, we’re taking the spike protein only one of the proteins–the immunologically dominant protei–and we’re jabbing everybody multiple times. Thereby driving memory cells and effector cells to a virus that is not the one we’re encountering. So it could very well be that as you’re taking more jabs you’re further skewing your immune response in a way that’s dysfunctional for infection to Omicron. Whereas, somebody that is immunologically naive presumably either they haven’t had the virus before but they’ve had Beta coronaviruses and those that have had prior infection and are naturally immune.

When you get infected or I get infected it’s typically nasal or oral pharynx. It’s coming in through the mucosal membranes of your head. One of the good things about Omicron is that the prior strains infect mostly deep lung, and there’s really fascinating data from Hong Kong suggesting that Omicron is more infecting the upper airway. That is a characteristic of less pathogenic influenza viruses and hopefully even though Omicron is more infectious and replicates the higher levels it’s less pathogenic.

it is absolutely looking like Omicron is a mild variant. It is absolutely able to escape the control of prior vaccination typically with mismatched vaccine. It seems also able to infect a subset of people that are naturally immune probably less than the subset that get infected with vaccination. But this is a key message to your audience- the reproductive coefficient (more fancy language)–the reproductive coefficient known as the R naught. The R naught of the original Wuhan strain was about two to three, meaning that if I’m infected on average without any other interventions I’ll infect two to three other people. For Delta the R naught was more in the range of five to six. In the case of Omicron the R naught the base reproduction coefficient is the range of seven to ten, wickedly high. That is measles territory. Tto translate that into simple language: We are all going to get infected with Omicron. Whether you use masks or not, use social distancing or not, you’re going to get infected. So this gets to the key point: Find a doc that’ll administer early treatments.

So you know Joe Lapado surgeon general in the State of Florida has put out public statements also on twitter, among other things, decrying what the Federal government has done pulling back all of the regular monoclonals. Meanwhile I’m hearing from frontline docs is those older regeneron monoclonals etc. are still very effective in their hospitalized population presumably because it’s still predominantly Delta. And yet they’re no longer able to get it. So the government has literally stopped the distribution of medicine, effective medicine, for a disease that exists currently. When has that ever happened before? Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Those were off-label uses, while this is something that has emergency use authorization. This is wild.

When you see this kind of decoupling of public policy from logic, it causes thinking people to wonder what the hell’s going on here. And then we go down the rabbit hole: Is it this that or the other thing? One of the things in that spectrum of what’s going on is that the emergency use authorizations are predicated on policy determinations that were in a state of emergency. Those are now two years old. They’re expiring. I’m not saying this is what’s going on in their head but there is another perverse incentive here to amplify the fear porn. If you buy into the hypothesis that for some reason there are incentives for the government to maintain the state of emergency, one explanation could be that those declarations are expiring and will have to be re-implemented. Because if they’re not then all of this emergency use authorization vanishes like dust.

We have these reports from hospitalists and nurses–often it’s the nurses that are able to speak for some reason. The nurses are disclosing things that they’re seeing in their hospitals and the physicians are all shutting up. Is it because they have financial incentives or because they’re all owned because they have such debt burdens, I don’t know. But the nurses are speaking out and they’re saying hey we’re seeing strokes and heart attacks and these other types of problems that are known to be associated with the jabs. Well it’s hard to say because we got the virus in the vaccines overlapping; is it chicken or egg but we know that they’re happening. We know that the deaths are happening; that’s the excuses that are made about the sudden deaths in high-performing athletes that are being observed all over the world particularly in footballers. Where they’re just suddenly dropping is it because they’ve been infected or they because they’ve been jabbed? And I think it’s a mixture of both. But the thing about the vaccines is we have this principle to do no harm. And if a virus naturally infects you and you have a damage from it, I haven’t caused that damage as a physician. If I’m recommending that you take a drug or an intervention you didn’t need to have and it causes damage, well I have to own that as a physician as a representative of the medical industrial complex. And so for whatever reason there’s a under reporting bias clearly in the adult population and I think that people being be a little more sensitive to adverse events and deaths in their children.

I don’t want to get too off your topic, but our government is out of control on this and they are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the Federal common rule. They have broken all the rules that I know of that I’ve been trained on for years and years and years. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They’re explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report. They are flat out illegal and they don’t care. And the only thing standing between us and it’s too late for many of our colleagues including my you know the unfortunate colleagues in the DoD um hopefully we’re going to be able to stop them before they take our kids.

For example: the lab leak. And for me- the disclosure of emails that um Cliff Lane, Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins actively conspired to destroy any discussion of the appropriateness of lockdown strategies and the mainstream press hardly covers it and there are no consequences. The document trail having to do with the gain of function research and the implication of NIH and by the way DTRA in that, having absolutely no consequences for anybody. We’re in an environment in which truth and consequences are fungible. This is modern media management and warfare. The truth is what those that are managing the Trusted News Initiative say it is.

And they’re taking our licenses and license to practice medicine because we are speaking about these matters. You can label me however you want, I don’t care. I’ve done what I’ve done in my career. I’m at a stage at 62 years old; I’ve got a farm it’s almost paid off, I raise horses, I love my wife, been married a long time, my kids are both married, I have grandkids, you know I don’t need this. There’s this claim I’m doing all this because I seek attention- trust me this is not a fun thing to be doing at this stage. Physicians at FLCCC in senior positions highly, like Peter Mccullough, people at the at the culmination of exceptional careers. Paul Merrick an exceptional physician by any standards- run out of his hospital demeaned destroyed, actively attacked trying to take his license. This medicine is being destroyed globally. People are losing faith in the whole system. They’re losing faith in the scientific enterprise. They’re losing faith in our government. They’re losing faith in the vaccine enterprise. What is going to be the long-term consequences of public health when you have a large fraction of the population who previously wasn’t anti-vaxxer (that pejorative), but now they’re saying oh my god if this is how these people make decisions I don’t want anything to do with it. I certainly don’t want to jabbed into my kid.

Pfizer is one of the most criminal pharmaceutical organizations in the world based on their past legal history and fines. What do those fines include? Bribing physicians okay, it is a cost benefit analysis in the pharmaceutical industry about misbehavior. They are not grounded in the ethical principles that you and I as average people believe in. They don’t live in that world. As you appropriately point out they are about profit- return on investment. And furthermore the overlords that own them BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street etc. these large massive funds that are completely decoupled from nation states, have no moral core–they have no moral purpose. Their only purpose is return on investment. And that is the core problem here. That and the fact that we as a society have become grossly fragmented through social media, electronic appliances, the stress of what we’ve experienced, and this leads into this whole issue of mass formation psychosis that Matthias DeSmet at the university of Ghent has described, as a psychologist and statistician. That is how a third of the population basically is being hypnotized and totally wrapped up in whatever Tony Fauci in the mainstream media feeds them whatever CNN tells them is true.

Now there’s ways to get out of it. Matthias’s recommendation is you have to get people to realize we’ve got a situation of global totalitarianism. In his experience in Europe making people realize there’s a bigger threat than the virus can cause a separation psychologically in this fusion. This hypnosis that has happened the problem is then you’re just substituting a bigger boogeyman for the current one and somebody else can come in and manipulate that. The real problem and it gets back to your core point- we’re sick as a society and we have to heal ourselves and one of the things we have to do is come together we have to recreate our social bonds, we have to buy into integrity, the importance of human dignity, and the importance of community. That’s how we get out of this and I think that this insight of Matthias Desmond is really central to kind of making sense of all of this crazy. We got a world in which the press is incentivized to push a storyline because they’re all controlled by the same large funds that Pfizer is and so is tech. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of it but it’s got to start with us all of us finding common ground.

Resisting Covid Tyranny

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Several thousand protesters march against restrictive pandemic policies, in Montreal on Jan. 8, 2022. (Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times)

Noé Chartier reported in Epoch Times Thousands of Protesters March in Montreal to Denounce COVID ‘Tyranny’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

MONTREAL—Several thousand protesters took to the streets of downtown Montreal Saturday to voice their opposition to the province’s pandemic measures—whether the recently imposed curfew or the vaccine passport.

Not all were unvaccinated, with some taking a stand for freedom of choice or having received the first two doses and refusing a third due to constantly changing goalposts.

People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, who’s been vocal in criticizing the restrictions and mandates, was in attendance with a group of his supporters.

“I’m here like everyone else to tell the Trudeau and Legault governments that enough is enough. It’s not by trampling on our rights and freedoms that we’re going to solve the pandemic,” Bernier told The Epoch Times.

“They’re trying to turn the non-vaccinated into the scapegoats of this pandemic. It’s completely unjust, discriminatory. The real scapegoats are the politicians ruling us. They’ve had years to change the health-care system, which is a totalitarian, socialist, the state controls all—and that’s why the system is crumbling.”

Bernier says we should learn to live with the virus and protect the most vulnerable while letting others get on with their lives.

“I’m here to defend and protect freedom against the tyranny, against the darkness that ruins everything,” said Mohamad Reza Zeinali, a nurse who hasn’t been working since April 2021, refusing to be tested three times a week or to take the vaccine, which he calls “experimental.” “It takes at least five to ten years to know how safe it is,” he says.

“The [tyranny] has to stop, it’s gone too far. I’m here to stand up for my rights, my kids’ rights, everything,” said Marshall Golding, who works as a delivery truck driver.

Throughout the march from Old Montreal and through downtown streets, a 70-year-old woman was walking a bit ahead of the main body, leading the procession. Claire refused to give her last name and have her picture taken, but said she was attending her 15th or so protest against government measures. “We’re sick of this criminal government,” she said. “Everything we’re going through is ridiculous. The masks, the curfew—they’re lying to us all day long.”

A Montreal police spokesperson said the protest went smoothly with no tickets given or arrests made.

On Jan. 1, police handed out 57 fines to protesters who defied the curfew in Montreal and made one arrest for an assault on an officer, CBC reported. Fines for breaking the curfew can go as high as $6,000.

Quebec reimposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on Dec. 31 to try to stem the rise in cases, and the government announced this week it would further restrict unvaccinated people’s access to the public space.

From Jan. 18, those without a vaccine passport will be barred from entering the state-owned liquor and cannabis stores, and the government says it is consulting with the industry to reduce even more the access to other non-essential services. The province also seeks to eventually require three doses to qualify for the vaccine passport.

Federal Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos said on Jan. 7 that he’s in favour of the provinces making vaccination mandatory.

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