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by Jo Nova
And you thought I was being satirical, but no, it’s just today’s installment of two-star climate porn from The Guardian.
What the journalist didn’t mention was that one degree of warming will save 166,000 lives a year, but maybe kill one more person per annum from amebic meningoencephalitis.
Let’s spend a trillion dollars:
How the climate crisis is fueling the spread of a brain-eating amoeba
Naegleria fowleri grows in warm fresh water, making it well-suited to proliferate as temperatures rise in the US
Katherine Gammon, The Guardian
Naegleria grows best in warm waters – temperatures above 30C, and can tolerate temperatures of up to 46C, says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. That makes it well-suited to spread in a warming climate.
“It likes warm surface waters during the summer in the northern latitudes,” he says.
The amoeba causes an illness called primary amebic meningoencephalitis, and while getting sick is rare – between 2012 to 2021, only 31 cases were reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control – it’s incredibly lethal. According to the CDC, only four […]
It’s like a team of obsessive compulsive scientists turned up to capture a magic show in slow-mo
They descended on Palmyra Atoll in 2009 and kept going for ten years, taking 1,500 photos across eighty plots of corals. They looked at all the living things on the ocean floor, and not just the hard corals, but the algae, the microalgae, and the turf. They followed plots where waves crashed and plots that were calm. Then they went through the photos with detailed digital-tracing and image analysis and tracked them — not just through one, but two full bleaching cycles and what they found was recovery. Stability!
In May this year their 10-year study of Palmyra Atoll was finally published
Palmyra is an isolated atoll, 1,300 km south west of Hawaii, with a tiny population. It’s about as pristine as anything can get, unaffected by human pollution, except of course, for CO2 — that fertilizer from the sky which is everywhere. If it was a problem, this was a good place to find out.
In 2015 a savage pool of warm water arrived that bleached not just ten or twenty percent of the corals but blitzed right through ninety percent. It […]
In a surprise to no one, descendants of plants that survived 350 million years of climate extremes, volcanoes, meteor impacts, mass extinction events and ice ages seem able to cope with moderate modern weather. Not only that, places where the weather varied a lot in the 1960s are still like that, and the plants that liked those conditions still like those conditions. I mean, really, give me your money.
Does this mean we can protect forests of the future by creating climate variability now?
Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change
Rachel Harper Institute of Physics
Close relatives of Ginkgo Biloba trees have been around for nearly 200 million years. | Photo Jean-Pol Grandmont |
A new study out today in the first issue of Environmental Research: Ecology assessed effects of past and current climate variability on global forest productivity. The work highlights sensitive regions where forests may be most at risk as the planet warms and temperatures become more extreme. The framework can help set conservation priorities, support forest adaptation efforts, and improve carbon accounting.
Lead author Winslow Hansen, a forest ecologist at Cary Institute of […]
Who knew? A study came out way back in 2016 showing that most people still had antibodies against tetanus, or “Lockjaw” even 60 years after their last vaccination. It’s a reminder of what successful vaccination can look like. It also shows the extraordinary ability of the human immune system to acquire lifelong protection — that doesn’t happen with all diseases, but it does with things like influenza, polio, measles, and mumps, and possibly tetanus and diphtheria.
The study tested the blood of 546 people. Given the striking results the authors suggest that the need for a ten year booster should be reassessed, but six years after the study came out the CDC and the Australian government are still saying we need “ten year boosters”. Is anyone even looking at this data?
Notably, shifting to a 30 year schedule could save the US government US$280 million each year. But Big-Pharma won’t be too happy about that. It may also prevent “80–160 cases of brachial plexus neuritis” — a rare side effect.
New Study Suggests We Don’t Actually Need a Tetanus Booster Every 10 Years
by Fiona Macdonald, April 2016
We’ve all grown up knowing that we need […]
Sometimes Randomized Controlled Trials are not the golden trophies of science that some say they are. (Like yesterday’s Ivermectin study). While some say that nothing less than an RCT will do, actually, sometimes it’s just silly to do one. And all RCT’s will wallow on the rocks of confirmation bias if they try to study something people already know the answer to.
For a long time there were no RCT studies showing benefits from parachutes — yet people continued to use them. It wasn’t until 2018 that a paper was finally published, surprisingly showing that there was no statistical difference in jumping with or without one from an average altitude of 4,000m.
This satirical paper makes real points about the flaws of the hallowed RCT’s:
It’s easy to design an RCT to show the opposite of the truth. Reading the abstract of a paper is rarely enough. Reading a news headline, even less so. Details are everything. RCT’s are not random if the test subjects have opinions and can self-select themselves out of the experiment.
These authors are black-belt professionals at medico-lingo. Those that appreciate the wit will want to read the whole thing rather than just the snippets below […]
Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures […]
Just another day in a cold Biotech War?
“The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.”
Image: Scientific Animations
To put this in perspective the whole virus is essentially a code with 29,000 bases in a row, and this story is about a sequence of 19.
The code is in the same four letter “alphabet”, more or less, as all life on Earth — A, T*, C and G. But in this new discovery there are 19 particular bases (or nucleotides) in a row. These are the bases that were so useful that Moderna patented the sequence in 2016. Oddly, no other coronavirus has that sequence. Indeed, nothing else in a virus or animal cell does either.
The reason these 19 bases are so interesting is that they make up the critical point called the “Furin Cleavage Site”. Furin is an enzyme inside our cells that acts like a specialist scissor, cutting only certain proteins in an exact way. A number of nasty germs sneak in and use our Furin snippy tools too — like HIV and Ebola, and […]
They told us the mRNA in the injections wouldn’t last long, barely a few days, and the protein spikes made from the vaccines would only stick around for “a few weeks”. But now, after 60% of the worlds population has been vaccinated, now we find out that the CCP bioweapon spikes are still there in lymph nodes two months after the last injection, and so is some of the mRNA. And we don’t know how much longer those spikes keep churning out, because no one has done that study.
Pause for a moment to wonder how it is that we could inject four billion people “for health reasons” yet no one knew the most basic things about how it worked, like, how long the vaccine mRNA might survive, and keep producing spikes for, or how many spikes it might keep making.
Now comes the bad news that mRNA-vaccinated people may be making more spikes than severely ill Covid patients, and that the mRNA survives much longer than anyone expected.
A Health Public Policy Nightmare
Robert Malone
The hidden highlight (lede) buried in this peer reviewed paper is that protein production of spike in people vaccinated with […]
. Scientific Animations
Handy!: A group at Johns Hopkins checked 295 people who had caught Covid before (and tested positive). Amazingly, all but two of them still had antibodies and there was “no indication” that the antibodies were declining.
Natural immunity doesn’t always work this well. There are plenty of diseases where protection wanes after six months, like RSV, or Norovirus, and many common cold coronaviruses.
Natural Immunity to COVID-19 Detected at 20 Months After Infection: Study
Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times
Protection against the virus that causes COVID-19 among the recovered was detected by researchers at 20 months post-infection, adding to the body of evidence that such protection, known as natural immunity, is long-lasting.
Researchers found antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) in 99 percent of study participants who tested positive for COVID-19, with some having had the illness as long as 20 months prior.
“The major takeaway is that natural immunity … is strong and durable,” [Dr Dorry] Segev told The Epoch Times in an email.
Dr. Dorry Segev, the director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins University.
[…]
A Bomb: Last week a lawyer for military personnel spoke about the extraordinary rise in medical conditions that occurred after vaccination against Covid. This is one of the largest and best kept medical datasets in the world, the people in it are mostly young and healthy, and the whistleblowers have signed legal declarations.
The military data suggests most national vaccination databases suffer from gross underreporting of adverse events.
In the World-We-Thought-We-Lived-In, this would have been Frontpage news the next day. Calls should be coming in from all around to pause vaccinations immediately until it can be reviewed.
The three whistleblowers noticed strange patterns in the patients they were treating. They trawled through data on medical billing from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED).
Aside from the [300%] spike in miscarriage diagnoses, there was an almost 300% increase in cancer diagnoses (from a five-year average of 38,700 per year to 114,645 in the first 11 months of 2021). There was also a 1,000% increase in neurological issues, which increased from a baseline average of 82,000 to 863,000.
—CovidWorld
The event was a five hour hearing held by US Senator Ron Johnson. Lawyer Thomas Renz has […]
It’s a miracle. Common sense. For the first time in two years government rules are shrinking.
A lot of this is thanks to Omicron, the gift from Africa.
In terms of infections the UK is past the peak, but most of Europe is a viral Firestorm. France just recorded a half a million new Covid cases in a single day, and with a test positivity of 31% awesome percent. Something like 1 – 3% of the entire French nation caught Covid yesterday.
All the past awful waves shrink before Omicron. | Source OWID
Despite the bonfire of cases, the deaths are lower than any wave:
A glorious contrast in graphs:
Deaths per million in Europe | OWID ..
With the disaster averted in the hospitals, suddenly political leaders are changing tune. We might think this is all just thanks to the magic of Omicronic nicety, but cases are still rising in places like Denmark and France and yet the Governments are already pulling back. That’s surely thanks to the pressure of mass protests. Without that pain and anger, political leaders wouldn’t be acting so early.
Though it helps that millions of people are catching Omicron and […]
The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.
It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?
From the commentary in the video below:
“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of […]
flockine
Plastics are a free dinner for life on Earth so it was just a matter of time before microbes evolved to eat it.
A PET bottle normally takes 16 – 48 years to break down, but if it were lunch for microflora it would take weeks instead. Hydrocarbons are ultimately just different forms of C-H-O waiting to be liberated as carbon dioxide and water. The only question was “how long” it would take bacteria and fungi to break those unusual bonds.
Sooner or later all plastic will be biodegradable.
Polyethylene-terephthalate (PET)
The first bacteria known to chew through PET bottles was discovered at a Japanese rubbish dump in 2016. But we had no idea then just how advanced the microbial world of plastic processing was.
Instead of hunting for single bacteria Zrimec et al mined through collected metagenomes of soil and ocean and found not just 5 or 10 new enzymes but 30,000. It appears that they could metabolize at least ten different types of plastic.
And in places where there was more plastic pollution, there were more enzymes. All over the world a whole new ecosystem is rising out of the puddles and bubbles […]
Absolutely no one who writes for newspapers has any idea of why Covid may have almost completely disappeared from Japan since the sudden Delta wave in August. The trajectory collapsed on August 25th and vaccines don’t explain it.
“While Omicron explodes around the world, COVID cases in Japan plummet and no one knows why”
Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 23
Call it the hunt for a potential “X factor,” such as genetics, that may explain the trend and inform how Japan could deal with the next wave. While the new highly transmissible Omicron variant has appeared in the country and experts suspect there is already some community spread, the overall transmission rate of the virus and coronavirus-related deaths in Japan have remained low. “
” “Honestly, we do not know the exact reason behind the sudden drop in COVID deaths in Japan,” said Taro Yamamoto, professor of global health at Nagasaki University’s Institute of Tropical Medicine. “
There is no mention of the-drug-that-shall-not-be-named — Voldermectin. But on August 13th as the third major wave was running out of control, a high ranking doctor in Tokyo recommended doctors use ivermectin. Dr. Haruo Ozaki, the […]
In more news you can use before Christmas, here’s another cheap easy way to put the brakes on Covid — this time with the antiseptic Povidone-Iodine (PVP).
While Carrageenan can clog up the virus in the passages behind your nose, it doesn’t necessarily do much to stop the virus replicating in your mouth and throat. But a regular swish or a sniff with Povidone-iodine can reduce the viral load to nothing in a matter of 15 to 30 seconds. Note, you’re supposed to spit it out again, not drink it and make sure to use a very dilute solution.
Saliva can contain as many as 100 million infectious copies of Covid per ml, so the aim here is to reduce the number drastically every four hours. It’ll reduce the risk of you infecting people around you, and probably help buy yourself time to fight back against the virus.
Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator
Between February and August last year Choudhury et al enrolled 600 people in Bangladesh. Half were asked to use a 1% povidone iodine solution to gargle, use in nasal drops and eye drops. They were asked to do this every 4 hours for 4 […]
Irish Moss, by Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen. | 1896
More than one hundred years ago the Irish believed an extract from a red seaweed could cure sick cows, and humans with colds and flu’s. In terms of early treatment modern medical science is slowly catching up with 19th Century farmers. In a small trial this year medical workers were 80% less likely to catch Covid if they were using a nasal spray with the “Irish Moss” carrageenan extract. It’s only a case of 2 out of 200 catching Covid in the test group, compared to 10 out of 200 in the placebo group, so the “80%” is a rubbery number, but it was a randomized control trial, and there are other lab test results which suggest the effect is real.
And because we recently figured out it was useful against common colds and influenza’s, nasal sprays with this common safe food additive are already on sale at the Chemist. So you can pop in and get one before Christmas Parties.
Carrageenan or “Irish Moss” is a polysaccaride gel from a red seaweed. It works by gumming things up for quite a few viruses — basically getting in […]
…
So imagine you live in a house with six people and you elect one of them to do a deal with the chemist to supply the whole house drugs. When you get back from Hardware Mart, he’s done the deal, but you can’t see the contract, or the trial data, you don’t know what it costs, or how long it lasts, but the money will be auto-drawn in unmarked tranches until such time as it is not. Then you find out you have to take the drug, or you won’t be allowed in the kitchen.
It’s a crime in the house, but ok for a nation?
There have been several allegedly leaked contracts with Pfizer, one from Albania, and others from Brazil and South America. They all make extraordinary claims, they can’t be backed up. They might all be fakes but here’s the thing, we don’t know they’re fake because we can’t see the real thing.
Is Pfizer the bully that asked Argentina to accept all liability on its behalf and put its bank reserves, military bases and embassies at stake as collateral? “That the rules of the land don’t apply”. That the government may not discuss […]
…
In March 2020 a group of doctors working in nursing homes in Toledo, Spain faced a new pandemic with no effective treatment plan. They figured out their own protocol as best they could with what can only be described as freakish success. In nearby Albacete when Covid struck 1084 nursing home residents, 303 of them died, a 28% fatality rate. But in Toledo, of the 90 patients in nursing homes under Doctor Blanco’s care, only 6 died, and they all died before the team figured out their own new treatment plan. Of the 84 residents who were then treated with antihistamines like Polaramine, all 84 would make it. Every single one, even though their mean age was 85.
It seems too good to be true. Antihistamines are used to calm an overactive immune system (itchy, sneezes and runny noses) but they are not known for their anti-viral activity, though it turns there is some.
And while the antihistamines are possibly very helpful, the whole treatment protocol was so much more, and also included nasal washes, antibiotics, and prednisone, as well as something called “respiratory physiotherapy”. Somehow these doctors, saints or geniuses, had figured out a combination that […]
A scandal of epic proportions
The data in the UK is some of the best in the world, but if a person has a vaccine and dies in the next two weeks, it’s classed as an “unvaccinated death”. People are not counted as fully vaccinated until 14 days after their second dose, which makes sense if we’re only looking at Covid deaths. But it doesn’t make sense when looking at other deaths. This delayed categorization leads to enigmatic effects, to say the least.
Strangely, the unvaccinated are increasingly likely to die from the week after other people in their age group get the vaccine…
The graph below of the 70-something age group in the UK, charts the non-Covid deaths — all the heart attacks, strokes, cancer and accidents. But notice how the first dose of Covid vaccines peaked in Week 5 (the grey dashed line), but the mortality of the unvaccinated (the blue line) peaks 2 weeks later? These are the non-covid deaths, so heart attacks, strokes, all kinds of things are killing the unvaccinated two weeks after the peak in vaccination for other people in their age-group.
Most 70-somethings who did get vaccinated, got their second dose […]
The short: Get excited but not too excited yet.
Omicron is not putting as many people in the ICU as Delta did (so far) which is very promising, but it’s still early days, and in South Africa 60% of urban adults have already had Covid so carry the best kind of protection there is. In the UK, only 20% of the population carry these antibodies. In Australia, which has some of the most extensive testing in the world, only 0.8% of the whole population has tested positive.
Omicron appears to be fiercely contagious, which may turn out to be a good thing because it will replace the Delta strain at lightning speed. The spread is just extraordinary. Up to 4,000 Britons are catching Omicron each day, about 10% of Covid cases in the UK are already Omicron, and many of those are children. Projections are that Omicron may have completely displaced Delta by New Year in the UK. But even if hospitalizations are a third as likely, it could still overwhelm hospitals.
Hospitalizations are up 80% in South Africa in the last week. But cases in the original Gauteng region have leveled off, and are already starting to fall.
I’m […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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