Ya lo avisaba gracias al mapa de migración de energía, se esperaba un terremoto igual o menor al que genero esta onda, después de menos de un día de espera ya tenemos las respuestas sísmicas en las islas Aleutinas y Alaska, 6.3 y 5.7 muy seguidos
The recent spike in the COVID-19 hospitalizations is caused by seasonality, and, probably, by hydroxychloroquine denial to the patients. The EU regulators attempted to link HCQ to psychiatric disorders, based on historical cases of chloroquine (usually overdosed), and fake science. The following Newsweek article has an appropriately ambiguous title:
Hydroxychloroquine for COVID Treatment Linked to Suicidal Behavior by European Regulators
The article is based on the Meeting Highlights from the latest PRAC meeting. This meeting was held by the Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) on November 23-26, 2020. The European Medicines Agency published Meeting Highlights., claiming that PRAC conducted “a review of all available data that confirmed a link between the use of these medicines and the risk of psychiatric disorders and suicidal behavior.” No link, nor any reference to the alleged review was provided. The same document also claimed that “chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have not shown any beneficial effects in treating COVID-19 in large randomized clinical trials.”
In addition to disparaging HCQ and providing no corresponding evidence, this same committee also ignored ample evidence of Remdesivir (Veklury), a competing COVID-19 treatment, causing serious kidney damage. PRAC published notes from its October meeting: Meeting Highlights from October, where they discussed “reports of acute kidney injury in some patients with COVID-19 taking Veklury (remdesivir)”. Kidney injury is a well-known side-effect of this drug, yet, PRAC still failed to provide any warnings and concluded:
“At this stage, it has not been determined whether there is a causal relationship between Veklury and the reports of acute kidney injury. … Kidney injury can be caused by other factors as well, e.g. diabetes; importantly, COVID-19 is itself known to be a cause. The PRAC will now carefully assess all available data to evaluate if the medicine may have been responsible for the kidney problems and if there is a need to update the existing information for Veklury. Recommendations for the use of this medicine have not changed.”
See a list of PRAC’s Meeting Highlights.
The alleged review was not provided by PRAC or anyone else and could not be found in any peer-reviewed literature. Since no links or evidence was provided, I used Google Scholar to find the most relevant review:
Brandon S. Hamm, Lisa J. Rosenthal, Psychiatric Aspects of Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine Treatment in the Wake of Coronavirus Disease-2019: Psychopharmacological Interactions and Neuropsychiatric Sequelae, Psychosomatics Journal, July 8, 2020
This review points to the completely opposite conclusion about HCQ – that it is safe. After decades of use, and more than a hundred million patients, there are only a few anecdotal cases of neuropsychiatric side effects. Severe COVID-19 causes psychiatric and/or neurological symptoms very frequently.
Below are some quotes form the HCQ review:
“neuropsychiatric side effects [of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine] are very uncommon but possible and include a potentially prolonged phenomenon of ‘psychosis after chloroquine’ [not hydroxychloroquine]”
“No studies were found regarding the incidence of hydroxychloroquine-induced psychotic symptoms. “
“psychiatric presentations are expected to be common in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 because of etiologies other than chloroquine- or hydroxychloroquine-induced neuropsychiatric side effects. Delirium has, anecdotally, been frequent in patients requiring intensive care … Prevalence of neurological symptoms was increased to 45.5% in severe COVID-19 cases. In addition, a study of 58 patients with COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome showed that 69% of patients had agitation… “
“Psychiatric symptom presentation during hospitalization for COVID-19 infection is much more likely to be due to delirium and adjustment disorder than neuropsychiatric side effects of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.”
After additional research, I stumbled upon one study that may have been used to substantiate the PRAC allegations.
Garcia, P., Revet, A., Yrondi, A. et al. Psychiatric Disorders and Hydroxychloroquine for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): A VigiBase Study. Drug Safety, October 19, 2020
This is a typical “database study.” It used VigiBase, a World Health Organization database containing reports of adverse drug side effects. The database currently has more than 20 million reports. Reporting is voluntary, and there appear to be no quality controls.
The authors of this study do not distinguish between cases in which HCQ was dosed correctly and cases of overdoses. Even so, from January to June 16, there were only 3 (three) reported cases with a suspected association between psychiatric symptoms and HCQ for COVID-19, in all Americas (Table 1 in the cited study). Additionally, the authors found only 751 reports of psychiatric side effects “associated” with HCQ, throughout the world, before 2020. Since more than one hundred million patients have been treated with HCQ, 751 cases is consistent with the definition of “anecdotal evidence” (Table 3 in the cited study).
The “suicidal behavior” mentioned by the Newsweek article likely arose form 48 reported suicides and 44 other self-injuries, out of the total 751 adverse reports. 48 cases of suicides, out of over one hundred million patients, is not a factor. But there are reasons to suspect that most of these reports are phony. The majority of these self-harm cases lack information about the time and the diagnosis for which HCQ was supposedly prescribed. Less then 5 out of the 92 reports include the time since beginning of taking HCQ to the self-harm incident. On the other hand, most of these patients (up to 68 out of 92) received psychotropic drugs.
This study makes an allegation of four suicides of COVID-19 patients, “linked” to HCQ, but the referenced documents do not confirm this claim.
The reporting odds ratios (RORs), used in the study, are unsuitable statistics for the claimed purpose. Many citations do not support or even contradict the study’s claims. Despite all the efforts, the authors concluded with a noon-statement:
“Our findings imply that during the COVID-19 pandemic, some patients may have experienced psychiatric symptoms associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine.”
Considering the complete lack of any evidence provided by PRAC and the subsequent lack of evidence throughout peer review literature to support their conclusions, the media is yet again engaging on unsubstantiated HCQ attacks.
via Science Defies Politics
December 1, 2020 at 09:10AM
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
An in-progress low key Chinese robotic sample and return mission is challenging the commonly held assumption that the USA is still the dominant player in deep space missions.
China’s Chang’e 5 poised for historic moon landing to collect lunar samples
China has reached a major milestone in its quest to bring home moon rocks, with its Chang’e 5 mission spacecraft separating into two pairs of vehicles in preparation for a lunar landing.
The Chang’e 5 spacecraft launched on Nov. 23 intent on becoming the first mission to bring lunar samples to Earth since 1976; the mission reached lunar orbit on Nov. 28. According to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, the mission’s orbiter/return vehicle and its lander/ascender vehicle separated in lunar orbit yesterday (Nov. 29) at 3:40 p.m. EST (2040 GMT; 4:40 a.m. Beijing time on Nov. 30). That move sets the stage for a landing near the peak of Mons Rümker, a mountain in the Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) region of the moon.
“The spacecraft is performing well and communication with ground control is normal,” officials with China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) said according to Xinhua.
..,
Read more: https://www.space.com/china-chang-e-5-moon-lander-separates-from-orbiter
Why do I think a low key unmanned robotic mission poses such a threat to US space supremacy?
The reason is if China decides on the basis of this mission to increase their Lunar activity, China’s friend Russia has spent over a decade developing nuclear launch technology which China could use to make a major expansion into space affordable.
In as little as 10 years, China could be building major industrial bases on the Moon, with the help of Russian nuclear powered reusable space launch vehicles.
By 2030, with Chinese and Russian flags flying on the moon, the USA could be staring into the face of at least two decades of desperate catchup, to get back into a game which America once dominated.
Note: The Russian nuclear launch technology is based on the 1960s US NERVA programme. Stationary ground based testing of NERVA at the time was perceived as an outstanding success, making NERVA a strong candidate for powering a manned mission to Mars, and resupplying a permanent moon base planned for 1981. Despite bipartisan support from Congress in 1972, the programme was cancelled by President Richard Nixon in 1973, part way through building a full scale NERVA launch vehicle, while Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal.
via Watts Up With That?
December 1, 2020 at 08:50AM
The futile ’emissions’ obsession will lead nowhere good as far as the economy is concerned. Here a group of supposed experts say the numbers tell them the UK economy will not be degraded fast enough for their liking.
– – –
The UK prime minister’s recent 10-point climate plan won’t do enough to achieve his goal of curbing the country’s greenhouse emissions, a report says.
A consultancy has calculated that the UK will need to go further and faster to achieve its commitment of net zero emissions by mid-century,
says BBC News.
UN scientists say massive emissions cuts are needed immediately to stop CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.
So, the year 2030 is a key date for avoiding dangerous climate change.
The analysis by Cambridge Econometrics suggests Mr Johnson’s plan will reduce emissions 59% per cent by 2030, based on 1990 levels. It says they should really fall by 70% by that date.
It’s rumoured that government advisers the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) will tell ministers that a percentage target reduction in the upper 60s will be needed.
The analysis released on Monday was commissioned by the Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group – a network of business heads concerned about climate change. Sixty of them have written to the PM to urge him to reduce emissions further still by 2030.
The intervention comes at an important time, because the UK is set next month to declare its 2030 climate target to other nations in the hope of persuading them all to do more.
Global meeting
The formal announcement will come at a special global meeting called by Mr Johnson for 12 December, but it’s believed that the UK’s 2030 target will be unveiled in coming days, in order to encourage other countries to raise their ambition.
Nations’ climate commitments will come in the form of what’s known as an NDC – a nationally determined contribution towards the world goal of keeping temperature rise as close as possible to 1.5C.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
December 1, 2020 at 08:48AM
The futile ’emissions’ obsession will lead nowhere good as far as the economy is concerned. Here a group of supposed experts say the numbers tell them the UK economy will not be degraded fast enough for their liking.
– – –
The UK prime minister’s recent 10-point climate plan won’t do enough to achieve his goal of curbing the country’s greenhouse emissions, a report says.
A consultancy has calculated that the UK will need to go further and faster to achieve its commitment of net zero emissions by mid-century,
says BBC News.
UN scientists say massive emissions cuts are needed immediately to stop CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.
So, the year 2030 is a key date for avoiding dangerous climate change.
The analysis by Cambridge Econometrics suggests Mr Johnson’s plan will reduce emissions 59% per cent by 2030, based on 1990 levels. It says they should really fall by 70% by that date.
It’s rumoured that government advisers the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) will tell ministers that a percentage target reduction in the upper 60s will be needed.
The analysis released on Monday was commissioned by the Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group – a network of business heads concerned about climate change. Sixty of them have written to the PM to urge him to reduce emissions further still by 2030.
The intervention comes at an important time, because the UK is set next month to declare its 2030 climate target to other nations in the hope of persuading them all to do more.
Global meeting
The formal announcement will come at a special global meeting called by Mr Johnson for 12 December, but it’s believed that the UK’s 2030 target will be unveiled in coming days, in order to encourage other countries to raise their ambition.
Nations’ climate commitments will come in the form of what’s known as an NDC – a nationally determined contribution towards the world goal of keeping temperature rise as close as possible to 1.5C.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
December 1, 2020 at 08:48AM
Here’s a preview of what to expect from the Green New Deal
Germany’s vision of a clean, environmentally friendly energy supply system, all to be discreetly nestled in an idyllic landscape, is in reality morphing into an environmental dystopia of catastrophic proportions.
Image: Vernunftkraft.de
German wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft.de posted a Youtube video showing how out of control wind energy has gotten in some regions of Germany.
The above video shows, for example the Uckermark region, around Prenzlau.
The Youtube text under the video:
“Around Prenzlau alone (up to 15 km) there are about 300 wind turbines. In the entire Uckermark region there are almost 800 wind turbines (2020), and the trend is rising.”
No avian wildlife can survive this.
Rural citizens get steamrolled by Big Wind
What’s left? An entire region whose landscape is totally blighted by noisy industrial towers and is inhospitable to most life. Gone are the tranquility and idyllic beauty the area once enjoyed. The problem is that this region is poor, rural and so stands no chance against big wind project developers and the crony pols behind them, who just steamroll over any reservations or resistance local that residents may try to muster.
Like the old communists, this is another example of what happens when planning and decision-making are left to incompetent and corrupt central-planning policymakers teamed up with greedy crony capitalists out to make a quick buck. A few win big, while the masses lose everything.
In 30 years much of it will remain in ruins, a monument to one of the greatest industrial scams of all time.
via NoTricksZone
December 1, 2020 at 08:33AM
Elected officials have become one-trick ponies. All they know is locking people down for the sake of social distancing. That was a reasonable strategy when the outbreak began, before the disease and its treatment was understood, and in order to protect the health care system from overload. But now a different prescription is required, if leaders have the courage and wisdom to adapt. Here are three recommendations that will stop the damage being done in the name of “fighting Covid19.”
Shutting schools and/or applying social distancing protocols to children are not only unnecessary. Stopping normal social interaction among children takes away the exposure they need to develop immunity for future outbreaks. Donna L. Farber and Thomas Connors and Columbia University. wrote Quarantine May Negatively Affect Kids’ Immune Systems. H/T Jeffrey Tucker at AIER (here). Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is unwittingly conducting what amounts to the largest immunological experiment in history on our own children. We have been keeping children inside, relentlessly sanitizing their living spaces and their hands and largely isolating them. In doing so, we have prevented large numbers of them from becoming infected or transmitting the virus. But in the course of social distancing to mitigate the spread, we may also be unintentionally inhibiting the proper development of children’s immune systems….Immunological memory and tolerance learned during childhood serves as the basis for immunity and health throughout adulthood.
[The article then continues and actually invokes the great taboo word of our age: exposure. It’s good. Exposure is good. It is necessary. It is needed. Not bad. Good.]
However, for memory T cells to become functionally mature, multiple exposures may be necessary, particularly for cells residing in tissues such as the lung and intestines, where we encounter numerous pathogens. These exposures typically and naturally occur during the everyday experiences of childhood — such as interactions with friends, teachers, trips to the playground, sports — all of which have been curtailed or shut down entirely during efforts to mitigate viral spread. As a result, we are altering the frequency, breadth and degree of exposures that are crucial for immune memory development.
[Okay, now it is time for the writer to invoke a bit of memorable scientific knowledge. It’s a beautiful paragraph with a stunning opening sentence.]
Failing to train our immune systems properly can have serious consequences. When laboratory mice raised in nearly sterile conditions were housed together in the same cage with pet mice raised in standard conditions, some of the laboratory mice succumbed to pathogens that the pet mice were able to fight off. Additional studies of the microbiome — the bacteria that normally inhabit our intestines and other sites — have shown that mice raised in germ-free conditions or in the presence of antibiotics had reduced and altered immune responses to many types of pathogens. These studies suggest that for establishing a healthy immune system, the more diverse and frequent the encounters with antigens, the better.
Summary: The kids are all right, let them get on with their lives for their own sakes.
Public health officials need to stop confusing and scaring the public with positive PCR tests. As noted in previous posts here, PCR tests amplify a viral trace up to 35 or 40 doublings, which is too small a viral load to make the person sick or to transmit to others. The rapid tests now available do not amplify and the protocol now should be to do antigen tests on people with symptoms to identify actual patients needing treatment and distancing.
Background posts: COVID Fearmongering With ‘Cases’ of Perfectly Healthy People
Summary: The BinaxNOW test detects antigens — proteins unique to the virus that are usually detectable whenever there is an active infection.
Kevin Pham, MD, explains in his essay If We’re Going to Control COVID, We Need to Make This Crucial Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
According to an Associated Press report, there has been a four-fold rise in nursing home-related cases of COVID-19 since June. And CDC data shows there has been an increase of nearly 1,000 COVID-related deaths in nursing homes from September to October.
There are three ways for COVID-19 to enter a nursing home: 1.) through staff and faculty working at the facility, 2.) through visitors who enter the premises, and 3.) through forcing nursing homes to admit patients with active infections.
The disastrous effects of the latter policy is one reason that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New York has contributed a disproportionate share of American COVID-related deaths. Thankfully, his order was finally reversed in May.
The more recent increase in nursing home cases are likely a function of the former two ways that COVID enters a nursing home. This is where we need to focus our efforts, with refined policies.
Test nursing home visitors.
Current guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services restrict the number of visitors in ways that are lacking. The focus is temperature checks and screening questionnaires, as well as observing for signs or symptoms of illness.
This may have been reasonable early on in the pandemic, when any sort of a screen was better than no screen, but it’s insufficient now. We have had point-of-care testing for months now, and more recently, rapid antigen tests that require no special lab equipment, no specialized storage, not even refrigeration.
No effort should be spared in procuring what is needed to test everyone going into a nursing home, whether visitor or staff. Key to making this work: the FDA should lift restrictions requiring all tests to reviewed at a lab, so rapid tests that don’t need lab equipment can truly live up to their promise.
Stronger mitigation measures for nursing home staff.
It is likely that infected staff are driving the rise in cases, as visitations are relatively restricted. The AP report shows a proportionate increase in the number of staff cases and resident cases. This is naturally difficult to control because the staff live in the community and work in the nursing homes. Their job is vital.
The latest CMS guidance on staff testing frequency are intended to test often enough to detect cases early enough to stop transmissions, from staff to residents.
Clearly that hasn’t been enough. We need more targeted testing to detect early cases, and that has to be done every time someone leaves and reenters the nursing home. This may be difficult for some facilities, especially rural ones, that lack either financial or human resources, but again, no effort should be spared to enable nursing homes to test everyone going to visit or who works with our elders.
Ensuring a steady and abundant supply of tests is one solution, but nursing home leadership should consider providing for housing for staff for several days at a time to obviate the need to go into the community where there may be high levels of COVID-19. Such an isolation “bubble” was good enough for the National Basketball Association, so it ought to be good enough for older Americans.
If a facility cannot manage these steps on their own, they should receive help, post haste. Every mayor and governor should immediately ask nursing home leaders for their plans, and to identify any barriers. If helped is needed, they need to arrange for its provision.
Summary: The primary focus of our COVID response should center on helping those known to be most at risk from the virus—nursing homes, the elderly and the vulnerable, and those who work with them. Anything else, especially now, would be unconscionable.
via Science Matters
December 1, 2020 at 08:30AM
George Orwell pointed out that one of the first casualties of socialism is language. The damage is not collateral, it is deliberate—designed to numb minds and render critical thought difficult or impossible. The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc). Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words. New words had a “political implication” and “were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.” The meaning of words was often reversed, as was most starkly emphasized in the key slogans of Ingsoc:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1949. Its nightmarish fictional world is now 36 years in the past, so one might reasonably conclude that Orwell was far too pessimistic, but his great book was less a prediction than a warning, and above all an analysis of the totalitarian mentality. Meanwhile, there is another significant date in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book’s Appendix on the principles of Newspeak stressed that the corruption of language was a multi-generational project whose fruition would not come until well into the present century. Ingsoc’s objective was to render independent thought impossible by “about 2050.”
Intriguingly, that is the same year that the world allegedly has to become “carbon neutral,” or “Net Zero,” to avoid climate Armaggedon.
Twenty Fifty has become a key date for the UN’s “Global Governance” agenda, which seeks nothing less than to oversee and regulate every aspect of life on the basis of a suite of alarmist projections. The main existential threat is claimed to be catastrophic man-made climate change. “Climate governance” has thus emerged as the “fourth pillar,” of the UN’s mandate, joining Peace & Security, Development, and Human Rights.
So far—as with the other three pillars—the UN’s climate efforts have been spectacularly unsuccessful. It has held 25 enormous “Conferences of the Parties,” or COPs, which have promoted a morass of uncoordinated national policies that have had zero impact on the climate.
COP 21 in Paris in 2015, for instance, was meant to hatch a successor to the failed Kyoto Agreement. But all it produced was a raft of hypocritical, voluntary, fingers-crossed “Nationally Determined Contributions.” The failure of Paris, and of temperatures to rise in line with flawed models, led to a doubling down of “ambitions.” One new commitment that seeped out of Paris was for the countries of the world to hold temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels before the Industrial Revolution (The Original Climate Sin). Staying below that level, UN policy wonks rapidly calculated, would require the world to become carbon neutral, or Net-Zero, by 2050.
In a video lecture to Chinese students earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres claimed that there was “No excuse” not to meet the Net-Zero emission target by 2050. “The time for small steps has passed,” he said. “What is needed now is transformational change.” For “transformational” read “revolutionary;” change that would involve the destruction of Western industrial society and freedom.
In fact, there is no climate “crisis” or “emergency.” However, as Orwell noted, the language of fear and panic is one of the main instruments of political control.
Today, just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classical liberal concepts of liberty and equality(of opportunity) are under relentless attack, as are the values of reason and objectivity. Liberty and equality were classified in Newspeak as “Crimethink.” Objectivity and rationalism were “Oldthink.” A doomed Newspeak lexicographer named Syme tells the book’s equally doomed hero, Winston Smith, that even the party slogans will eventually become incomprehensible: “How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?”
Orwell was hardly the first observer to point to the political dangers of linguistic manipulation, which go back to discussions of sophistry in Plato. The great economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed in particular to the left’s use of “social.” He dubbed it a “weasel word” that not merely sucked meaning from words to which it was attached but often reversed meaning. Thus, by classical liberal standards, social democracy is undemocratic, social justice is unjust, and a social market economy is anti-market. We have a prime current example in the phrase “social license to operate,” which in fact means a potential veto on corporate activities by radical environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), the stormtroopers of the Global Governance agenda. Private corporations were once socialism’s enemies; now they have been co-opted as its partners, agents of “Global Salvationism.” Nobel economist Milton Freidman pointed to the subversive, open-ended nature of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” where “responsibility” represents another weasel word. CSR’s purpose is to force corporate executives to abandon their responsibility to their shareholders in favour of an endless list of “stakeholder” demands.
Like the word “social,” “sustainable” tends to vitiate or reverse the meaning of words to which it is attached. Thus “sustainable” development is development retarded by top-down control.
Friedman has been regularly and ritually subjected to the Two Minutes Hate ever since. The most recent example was a collection of overwhelmingly condemnatory essays in the New York Times to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Friedman’s essay on CSR. Typically, it grossly misrepresented Friedman and wrote off his alleged bottom line as “Greed is Good.”
The shackles of CSR have now been tightened by the concept of ESG (Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance). ESG is, like the neologisms of Newspeak, “intended to impose a desirable mental attitude” on executives, who often seem intellectually and morally defenceless in the face of NGO campaigns of lies and intimidation. Business schools certainly don’t appear to equip them to counter such assaults.
The post Sustainable Newspeak by 2050 appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
December 1, 2020 at 06:17AM
In the wake of the Great Depression, the Midwestern United States suffered the hottest and driest weather on record and crops failed. Cattle had been allowed to graze freely across the plains, even in the dry months, eating what little cover there was, leaving the soil exposed.
As a result, across an area of 50million acres, wind blew the topsoil into intense dust storms sometimes called ‘haboobs’.
The haboobsare returning. Last month NASA filmed one from space: a moving mountain of sand 200 miles wide and swirling up to a mile high. It covered roads and buildings, silted dams and damaged crops.
According to the BBC Radio 4 programme, Inside Science, the cause is man-made.
‘The irony is that, in much of the Mid-West, expansion of maize production has been encouraged by bio-fuel incentives, intended to offset global warming,’ presenter Roland Pease told listeners. ‘And as other researchers have noted, this has meant grasslands with year-round cover have been ploughed up to make way for seasonal crops: echoes of what happened when tractors first arrived on the Great Plains.’
As in the 1930s, the affected area covers North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, western Minnesota and part of Colorado.
At the University of Utah, Andy Lambert wrote a thesis on atmospheric dust. He says the level at which large particles in the atmosphere become a risk is set by the US Environmental Agency and has rarely been exceeded in the past. ‘Now they are being exceeded once or twice every few years across many of the Great Plains states,’ he said.
In another paper, Lambert said the expansion of crops in arid areas lay at the heart of the problem. Winds lifting the sand also strip away the nutrients for vegetation growth that help to stabilise the soils. ‘This is the same thing we saw in the 1930s.’
In 1933, Congressman Edward Taylor introduced the Bill that still bears his name, licensing the use of pastures and, in marginal areas, limiting cattle to feed lots.
Eventually the dust settled, the grass came back, nature was allowed to restore a balance that had worked for millennia and haboobs became a thing of history. But the rush for biofuels in an effort to combat climate change has once again ripped away the protective layer.
NASA has also logged an increase in sandstorms across Africa. On a continent where an estimated 600million people lack electricity, firewood is used for cooking and to heat homes and the loss of trees has seen a rapid spread of desert. Along the edge of the Sahara, winds of up to 60mph move the dunes in such volume that they strip paint from cars and buildings. Forbes magazine warned that sand from the Sahara was moving fast and high enough to reach the US.
On its website, NASA blames the problem on ‘cutting of trees and overgrazing’, adding that ‘without vegetation to anchor the soil in place, wind erosion scours away the topsoil’.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), up to half a billion acres in Africa could be earmarked for projects similar to those in the United States. The African savanna, like the prairies, sustains a complex ecosystem that if disturbed could lead to similar problems. Large areas of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania have never been farmed intensively, with locals grazing cattle and growing market crops on a scale compatible with the land.
At the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, director Benny Peiser said he was ‘pleasantly surprised at the accuracy and balance’ of the BBC report.
‘The BBC almost habitually exaggerate the influence of climate change in their coverage,’ he said. ‘For once they looked at the main cause behind an event.’
The post The new Dust Bowl that even the BBC blames on green climate policies appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
December 1, 2020 at 05:49AM
This Article refers to a source called the Climate Action Tracker which claims to be ble to link pledges made by governments to cut their CO2 emissions with the actual changes in temperature of the atmosphere over the next century.
They produce graphs in the linked aticle to show the correlation.
Laughably they claim that the new pledges by president-elect Biden will actaully lower temperatures by an amazing 0.1 degrees Celcius.
They don’t show how this is calcuated nor do they give the cost of achieving it (put at a staggering $1,750,000,000,000 (that’s trillion) I wonder if the Americans will think it is such a good deal when they finally wake up to the reality?
via climate science
December 1, 2020 at 05:49AM
