RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/earth-day-year-plague-bruce-thornton/

Last week’s Earth Day came in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. At a time of sickness, death, and an economy stunned into recession, the incoherence of the romantic idealization of the natural world that Earth Day epitomizes is more obvious than usual. As the current crisis shows, nature is not a benevolent mother from whom we have alienated ourselves, and against whom our ravages have sown existential consequences. It is, as Keats put it, “a fierce, eternal destruction.”

Because of that misguided idealization, modern environmentalism has morphed into a “black market” religion, as Chantal Delsol describes the various substitutes for the decline of traditional faiths. Like similar belief systems such as Marxism, romantic environmentalism drapes itself in the jargon and quantitative data of real science. This makes the cult even more dangerous, for it uses the prestige and authority of science as the realm of objective truth, to create and promote policies that are dangerous, if not deadly.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is exhibit number one. A century-old hypothesis about temperature increases created by elevating levels of atmospheric CO2 has become a scientific “fact,” even though our understanding of global climate is nowhere near adequate for such claims. Yet billions of dollars a year go to “research” based on computer models that––as we’ve seen with the shifting models of the coronavirus’s lethality––rely on filling the gaps left by our ignorance, a process rife with moral and cognitive hazard. Billions more have been spent on subsidies for “green energy” like wind-farms or solar panels, which are nowhere near to replacing the cheap, efficient energy that comes from fossil fuels and coal. Worse, warmists promote policies like the Green New Deal that have multi-trillion-dollar price tags with no chance of achieving its promised boons.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/22/earth-day-overshadowed-this-year-by-an-actual-crisis/

April 22 is Earth Day, a celebration conceived by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, however, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

However, if there was ever a time that Earth Day’s hysteria was completely overshadowed by genuine apocalyptic scenarios, the COVID-19 pandemic is providing it.

Passion and zeal now trump science on Earth Days, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility. The Earth Day Network, which organizes events and advocacy, regularly distorts science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its Big Government agenda.

With a theme of “Climate Change,” this year’s event is no exception. In the United States, the prototype of climate activism is the Green New Deal (GND), which is impractical, unworkable, monumentally expensive – and lethal.

Its price tag – tens of trillions of dollars – means that, were it to be implemented, the GND would lead to what has been dubbed “statistical murder,” because the diversion of resources to fund it would exert a so-called “income effect” on health and longevity that reflects the correlation between wealth and health. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/climate_models_and_covid19_models.html

Computer models are seductive even though they are very often completely wrong. The more complicated they are the greater chance that they are wrong. Like children, they copy their parents — the model architects. Confirmation bias involves cherry picking facts to obtain a result consistent with preexisting beliefs. A complicated computer model with many degrees of freedom is a perfect environment for confirmation bias to have its way. The investigator usually will believe, or at least claim, that his model is objectively setup without bias entering into the effort.

Not all computer models are wrong. Sometimes they produce good predictions. But all too often they fail and the failures are not acknowledged because the modelers are emotionally or ideologically attached to their creation.

The claim of objectivity by academic modelers contrasts with the standard leftist or academic belief that practically everyone is a racist, driven by unconscious motives. Google “implicit bias” if you want to know more. When professors are pushing racial justice theories everybody is driven by unconscious forces. But when constructing computer models all is well.

Complicated models are always full of escape hatches that can explain away any failure. Climate models still enjoy support in spite of 30 years of failure. The failures are alleged to be due to things like chaotic variation or data that has to be adjusted because it does not agree with the model. COVID-19 models are new but have had notable failures. For example, the IMHE model predicted up to two million deaths but has been repeatedly adjusted and now is down to 60,000 deaths. Usually it is claimed that the model is not wrong, but deaths are lower because the American people have been good boys and girls.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/12/one-more-regulation-for-reform-to-keep-you-safe-during-this-pandemic/

As the deadly coronavirus takes its toll on countless families, healthcare workers are doing their best to get patients the medicine and equipment they desperately need.

But medical devices can do more harm than good unless properly sterilized and disinfected by applying agents such as Ethylene Oxide (EtO) gas. And, because of deeply flawed federal studies and subsequent state and local actions based on this shoddy science, production of sterilizing agents such as EtO has been put on the backburner. Policymakers must examine all the evidence at hand and keep patients safe from COVID-19 contamination.

As any of the nearly 500,000 coronavirus patients in the U.S. can attest, COVID-19 is highly contagious and can spread easily on shared surfaces, making sterilization critical. The Advanced Medical Technology Association notes, “Ethylene Oxide (EtO) gas is the most common way to sterilize medical devices, a process which is critical for preventing infections and ensuring patients have safe surgeries and medical treatments…For many medical devices, due to their size, shape, complexity or material composition, EtO is the only option for sterilization.”

Hospitals need ample supplies of sterilized equipment now more than ever. But hospitals face the prospect of shortages due to irresponsible Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) risk reporting.

The culprit behind the shortage and misinformation is an obscure research program within the agency called the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) which monitors the risks associated with a host of chemicals and issues reports on toxicity.

In 2016, IRIS found that EtOs start to pose harm to human health at the infinitesimally low level of 100 parts per quadrillion, or approximately 19,000 times lower than the amount of EtO found in the human body.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pope-says-virus-is-natures-response-to-the-climate-crisis/

Pope Francis is certainly not letting a planetary crisis go to waste. He is trying to piggyback the religion of climate change on the back of the coronavirus pandemic.

MSNNews:

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

“I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses,” he added.

Huh? What? Have the glaciers all melted? Why didn’t you wake me up? That would have been pretty cool to watch.

For the record, you cannot cross the North Pole. Climate scientists are predicting that by 2050, it might be possible to “sail over the North Pole,” but not now, or 18 months ago, or 18 months from now.

The Vatican fact-checkers blew that one.

The theory that life systems on the world are all interconnected is a well-established one. But that doesn’t mean that a virus, originally found in bats, has anything to do with whatever stress is being placed on life on earth because the climate may be changing.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/07/we-should-have-funded-research-on-coronaviruses-instead-of-climate-change-musicals/

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is caused by a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, has killed more than 60,000 worldwide and completely disrupted normal life on most of the planet. Politicians would have us believe that it is an unprecedented, unanticipated, unpredictable bolt from the blue. Not true. The warning signs were ignored, and we were ill-prepared.

A review article in the American Society for Microbiology’s publication, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, entitled, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection,” concluded:

Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.

That review was published in 2007. (Yes – 13 years ago.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/welcome-back-plastic-bags/

They’re better, cheaper, and safer than reusable cloth bags. Liberals hate that.

Single-use plastic bags are a miracle of modern technology. Cheap, light, convenient, and ubiquitous, they provide an elegant solution to a problem. If you recycle them, as most people do, and put your rubbish in them, that creates a net reduction in carbon emissions compared with buying the heavier, thicker garbage bags sold in stores. Best of all, they’re sanitary.

Cue up a head-spinning headline: San Francisco has just banned the use of reusable tote bags and switched back to single-use plastic bags to help fight the spread of the coronavirus. In New Hampshire, on March 21, Governor Chris Sununu signed an executive order to the same effect. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker followed suit on March 25. A Maine ban on plastic bags was due to take effect on April 22 but has just been pushed back until next year.

Whoever could have warned us that cloth tote bags were unhygienic? Well, there was this New York Post columnist who wrote, six years ago, “Reusing that Earth-friendly tote gradually turns it into a chemical weapon” and noted that plastic-bag bans were associated in one study with a 46 percent increase in death from food-borne illnesses. Cloth tote bags are inconvenient, they’re eco-unfriendly (more carbon emissions than single-use plastic, unless you use them more than 14 times, which people tend not to do), and oh, by the way, they’re deadly.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/490001-the-coronavirus-pandemic-versus-the-climate-change-emergency

Protecting public health was a core function of governments long before the expansion of the state in the 20th century. “Great fears of the sickenesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up,” Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on April 16, 1665. “God preserve us all.” Londoners trying to flee the plague had to obtain a certificate of good health signed by the lord mayor, who also enforced a curfew and a lockdown of plague households. A generation after the Great Plague, Massachusetts was passing laws for the quarantining of smallpox patients.

Nineteenth century urban Britain experienced a huge rise in deaths from infectious diseases. In 1849, more than 50,000 people died from a cholera epidemic that swept London. The previous year, Parliament passed the landmark Public Health Act. According to historians of the act, “public health was not a party matter, nor was the need for comprehensive sanitary legislation controversial.” That year, the physician John Snow made the first great epidemiological breakthrough with his discovery that fecal contamination causes cholera.

A framework of public health law and improved medical knowledge led to the construction of vast networks of clean piped water, high-velocity sewers and recycling of waste. The Victorian sanitation revolution occurred during the zenith of classical liberalism, when public health was understood to mean measures that have to be applied to whole communities and not preventive activity, such as the campaign against the so-called epidemic of childhood obesity. A genuine pandemic, spreading geometrically across the globe in a matter of weeks, shows the phoniness of that “epidemic.”