Surgeons wear masks to prevent the spread of bacteria, which are much larger than viruses. Viruses are too small to be effectively stopped by masks. (PDF) Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy
via Real Climate Science
July 23, 2020 at 11:02PM
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, writing in NYT, Bjørn Lomborg’s new book downplays the risk of allowing global warming to occur, and ignores a study prepared by himself and Lord Nicholas Stern which suggests climate action is affordable. But Stiglitz and Stern’s own study seems to gloss over the details of how society can afford to pay for their proposed low carbon transition.
Are We Overreacting on Climate Change?
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
FALSE ALARM
How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
By Bjorn LomborgThe thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s “False Alarm” is simple and simplistic: Activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of climate change. If we listen to them, Lomborg says, we will waste trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most. Science has provided a way to carefully balance costs and benefits, if we would only listen to its clarion call. And, of course, the villain in this “false alarm,” the boogeyman for all of society’s ills, is the hyperventilating media. Lomborg doesn’t use the term “fake news,” but it’s there if you read between the lines.
As with others in Lomborg’s camp, there’s the pretense in this book of balance and reference to careful studies. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we should do something about it. But, goes his message, let’s be real, there are other problems, too. Resources are scarce. The more money we spend on climate change, the less we have to grow the economy; and as we all know (or do we?) everybody benefits from growth, especially the poor. And besides, there’s not much we can do about climate change.
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Somehow, missing in his list of good policy measures are easy things like good regulations — preventing coal-burning electric generators, for example. Lomborg, a Danish statistician, exhibits a naïve belief that markets work well — ignoring a half-century of research into market failures that says otherwise — so well, in fact, that there is no reason for government to intervene other than by setting the right price of carbon.
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Assessing how best to address climate change requires integrating analyses of the economy and the environment. Lomborg draws heavily on the work of William Nordhaus of Yale University, who came up with an estimate of the economic cost to limiting climate change to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. While Nordhaus seems to think it’s enormous, an international panel chaired by Lord Nicholas Stern and me (called the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices), supported by the World Bank, concluded that those goals could be achieved at a moderate price, well within the range of what the global economic system absorbs with the variability of energy prices.
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This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. It’s nominally about air pollution. It’s really about mind pollution.
Joseph E. Stiglitz was chief economist of the World Bank from 1992 to 2000 and was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2001.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
The 2017 study authored by Stiglitz and Stern itself is an interesting document, it leans heavily on the idea of government imposed carbon taxes, backed by government investment in public transport and “laying the groundwork for renewable-based power generation”. The Stiglitz and Stern report recommends a carbon price of “at least US$40–80/tCO2 by 2020 and US$50–100/tCO2 by 2030, provided a supportive policy environment is in place“, and lists “co-benefits” such as reducing road congestion and air pollution, as ordinary people are priced out of private automobile ownership.
What appears to be missing from Stiglitz and Stern is any realistic estimate of the capital cost of going renewable. They briefly mention nuclear as an option, but their study mostly seems to assume if the carbon price pain knob is turned up high enough, it will encourage the innovation required to achieve the desired outcome.
Stiglitz and Stern criticise Lomborg’s suggestion that radical restructuring of the energy industry is too expensive, but they don’t seem to provide their own detailed transition plan to demonstrate renewables are affordable. I’m talking about an actual priced up transition plan; tonnes of concrete required, solar panels required, battery backup required, energy required to process and refine these materials, maintenance costs.
When you consider the magnitude of material and engineering required, the implausibility of the proposed transition to renewables is obvious.
Consider the problem of energy storage. Energy storage is critical to converting intermittent renewable energy to the reliable dispatchable energy we are used to. And I’m not talking about a few minutes of Energy storage; renewable energy droughts, prolonged periods of adverse weather conditions, can last for months or even years.
The following is from THE “NEW ENERGY ECONOMY”: AN EXERCISE IN MAGICAL THINKING by Mark P. Mills Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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Battery storage is quite another matter. Consider Tesla, the world’s best-known battery maker: $200,000 worth of Tesla batteries, which collectively weigh over 20,000 pounds, are needed to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil. A barrel of oil, meanwhile, weighs 300 pounds and can be stored in a $20 tank. Those are the realities of today’s lithium batteries. Even a 200% improvement in underlying battery economics and technology won’t close such a gap.
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The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.
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Read more: https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf
Unless green advocates like Stiglitz and Stern address in detail how this gap between capabilities and engineering requirements can be bridged, it will be difficult to take their criticism of Lomborg seriously.
Imagine if say a hurricane strength blizzard hit the East Coast, blacking out the sky with storm clouds for days, forcing wind turbines to furl their blades to survive the blast, covering large areas of the USA with a thick blanket of snow and ice, driving millions of people to turn up their home heating to maximum to avoid freezing to death.
How many thousands of years worth of battery backup production would be required in this scenario to keep the grid operating, until benign weather conditions returned?
Green advocate economists seem to want to leave the implementation details to the engineers, which given strong indications in various studies that renewables are impossibly expensive, seems a remarkable blind spot in their claims.
via Watts Up With That?
July 23, 2020 at 08:12PM
The media announcement is New study offers first glimpse into how widespread COVID-19 antibodies are in Canada’s adult population. Published July 23, 2020.
Initial results indicate fewer than 1 in 100 blood donations have antibodies to the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The header emphasizes how few blood samples showed antibodies, while the more important finding about reduced lethality of Covid19 requires searching in the fine print.
Context
Today, Canadian Blood Services and Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF) are releasing initial results of the first 10,000 blood donor samples assessed for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. This analysis reveals that over the period May 9 through June 8, 2020, fewer than 1 per cent of the 10,000 samples from blood donors tested positive for antibodies to the novel coronavirus. Antibodies indicate past infection with SARS-CoV-2, and population studies like this one tell us how many people have likely been exposed to the virus.
These results offer a first, high-level glimpse into an ongoing Canadian Blood Services study assessing SARS-CoV-2 antibodies across nine provinces. They will be updated once Canadian Blood Services completes their analysis of the full sample of 37,800 donations made during the months of May and June 2020. In addition, Héma-Québec will have results for Quebec in the near future, which will be important for a complete national picture, given the COVID-19 rates in that province.
“What is clear is that only a small percentage of adult Canadians has been infected by SARS-CoV-2,” Hankins says. “By far, the majority of us remain vulnerable to infection. We need to ramp up testing and tracing capacity across the country to interrupt any chains of transmission quickly to prevent unchecked spread.”
Acknowledging that many more adult Canadians are infected than currently documented, Professor Timothy Evans, CITF Executive Director cautioned against over-interpreting the apparent reduction in risk. “Among adults, the death rate from being infected with SARS-CoV-2 is likely closer to one per cent, as compared to the eight per cent reported to date among those diagnosed with COVID-19. But this is a highly infective virus that could take a huge toll if we allow it to spread, and we are only now learning that many survivors have persistent symptoms.”
This report expands on an earlier result from BC:
As is to be expected the headline buried the good news Serology study estimates less than 1 per cent of B.C. was infected by first coronavirus wave. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
B.C. Centre for Disease Control research also suggests province’s true infection rate is about eight times the rate based on reported cases
The study is the first in Canada to report infection rates based on seroprevalence, which is a measure of the presence in blood samples of antibodies produced to resist the virus. Determining exactly how many people in Canada have been exposed to COVID-19 is a key goal of the immunity task force the federal government set up in April.
Timothy Evans, a member of the task force and director of McGill University’s school of population and global health in Montreal, said the B.C. survey indicates the province’s deft management of the first wave of the pandemic resulted in very low exposure across its population.
“The low prevalence of population immunity suggests that continued vigilance and adherence to best practices to reduce risk of infection will be critical, especially in the context of the second wave of the pandemic,” Dr. Evans said.
He added that the eight-to-one ratio of actual to reported cases is consistent with international studies and that he expected a similar result across Canada. The survey was based on blood samples from more than 1,700 people in two periods, one in mid-March and a second in late May. The data were gathered anonymously from residual blood drawn from individuals at diagnostic clinics in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. The subjects were males and females of varying ages, including children.
Dr. Jha, who is leading a seroprevalence study that aims to sample as many as 10,000 Canadians, also said the individuals in the B.C. study may not be representative of the province’s population. For example, the study may be skewed toward healthy people who were having their blood tested as a precaution, or by those who were already ill.
It also captured the presence of antibodies in blood samples before and after the first wave but not during the peak in April. Another key piece of information the B.C. study does not provide – and was not designed to – is whether the individuals found to have antibodies for COVID-19 are now immune to the coronavirus and, if so, for how long.
My Comment:
Up to now, we have only been able to estimate the lethality of Covid19 by comparing death rates to confirmed cases. In Canada as of July 17, 2020, there were 8839 deaths of people with Covid19 compared to 109669 confirmed cases, or 8.1%. If the actual # of infections was 8 times higher, that ratio drops to 1% lethality. Furthermore, the ratio of deaths/cases ranged as high as 14% early June, and is now down to 3%. Factoring in the hidden infections reduces the current lethality to 0.4%.
Of course this is preliminary reporting while we await results from the nation-wide study. I do object to the “second wave” narrative parroted in the media to keep the fears alive. Also the public is never presented the big picture about national mortality.
| Canada Pop | Ann Deaths | Daily Deaths | Risk per Person |
|
| 2019 | 37589262 | 330786 | 906 | 0.8800% |
| Covid 2020 | 37589262 | 8839 | 60 | 0.0235% |
Over the epidemic months, the average Covid daily death rate amounted to 7% of the All Causes death rate. During this time a Canadian had an average risk of 1 in 5000 of dying with SARS CV2 versus a 1 in 114 chance of dying regardless of that infection. As shown later below the risk varied greatly with age, much lower for younger, healthier people. Presently daily Covid deaths are hovering around 10, or 1% of deaths from all causes.
See Canada Succeeds on Key Covid Metric
via Science Matters
July 23, 2020 at 07:08PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 