- “Boris Johnson upbeat but cautious over June 21st reopening in England” – Boris Johnson said yesterday that he remained upbeat about ending lockdown measures on June 21st, but ministers are drawing up a fallback plan to push the date back by two weeks, according to the FT
- “Why delaying reopening could be so devastating to our economy, health” – The Daily Mail analyses the impact of continuing restrictions beyond June 21st on five sectors of the economy
- “Boris Johnson warns green list could be culled as Portugal faces axe” – Boris Johnson has warned that the Government “will not hesitate” to axe countries from the green list for travel, the Telegraph reports, as concerns grow that Portugal could be removed. Let the Summer travel chaos begin
- “I went to Wuhan to investigate the origins of Covid. Here’s what we can learn from Huanan market” – “We need not only to tackle diseases before they spread but also to address the underlying conditions that produce them,” says Hung Nguyen-Viet, who was among the WHO team that went to Wuhan, in the Telegraph
- “Prescriptions for Covid patients fuelling antibiotic resistance” – Numerous Covid patients were prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily, the Daily Mail reports, leading experts to warn about increased antibiotic resistance
- “How the Covid shock has radicalised generation Z” – Many young people have drawn one clear political conclusion from the fallout from Covid, the Guardian claims: Society is run by the old, for the old.
- “Concern at ‘very serious’ Conwy county cluster” – Eluned Morgan, Health Minister for Wales, is concerned by a cluster of cases of the Delta variant, the BBC reports. She fears it could affect the easing of restrictions
- “UK set to buy new Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine designed to protect against South African variant” – According to inews, Britain is set to purchase doses of a new version of the AstraZeneca jab that is specifically tailored against the Beta variant
- “Amazon starts testing UK staff for coronavirus variants” – Amazon is testing its front-line staff in Britain for coronavirus variants and feeding the data to public health officials, Reuters reports
- “Why I’m disinviting my unvaccinated friends to dinner parties” – Writing in the Telegraph, Kate Mulvey says she only wants vaccinated friends coming to her house
- “The WHO is acting like it wants to be defunded – so what are we waiting for?” – “Nobody’s perfect,” says Christopher Snowden in CAPX, “but the WHO is almost a parody of corruption and incompetence” and it “is almost as if it wants to be defunded”
- “Manchester Untied, the anti-Covid dream team” – In the Conservative Woman, Mark Ellse imagines a letter from Boris to Andy Burnham urging him to make Manchester the city that leads Britain out of lockdown
- “MPs are brought to book for allowing lockdown Project Fear” – The Conservative Woman‘s Kathy Gyngell celebrates the news that the Recovery group has handed each and every MP a copy of Laura Dodsworth’s book, A State of Fear
- “Is this the end of freedom?” – From the beginning, COVID-19 has been framed as “an enemy to fight and defend against, in order to keep us safe and to preserve our way of life”, says Sean Jones in the Conservative Woman, “but our way of life has not been preserved!”
- “Why this damning delay in probing a Covid lab leak?” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Neville Hodgkinson points out that “Chinese scientists are not the only ones to have suffered censorship and suppression during the global ‘frenzy’ surrounding the Covid crisis”
- “Counting Covid’s Deceptive Deaths” – “Of all the innovations that governments and media around the world have come up with, seemingly independently of each other, during the ongoing Covid period,” writes Bernard Marx in Off-Guardian, perhaps the most insidious is the daily running total of deaths
- “A Year of Lost Education” – “Children have least to gain and most to lose from school closures,” says Dan Astin Gregory as he evaluates the cost of a year of lost education in the latest episode of the Pandemic podcast
- “France extends COVID-19 vaccination to 12-18 year olds” – President Macron has announced that France will begin vaccinating to 12 to 18 year-olds from June 15th, Euronews reports
- “Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right” – “Has the Swedish model failed? Were the lockdowns justified? Were the economic and social upheavals in most of the world an unavoidable necessity?” According to Eyal Shahar the answer is “a resounding no”
- “Moscow among top three cities worldwide for tackling COVID-19 crisis while keeping life going & economy open” – RT reports that according to analysis by Ernst & Young, Moscow dealt with COVID-19 better than almost every major city in the world, both preventing economic catastrophe and keeping the virus under control. Should be taken with a large dose of salt, given that RT is funded by the Russian state
- “Emails show Fauci was warned Covid may have been engineered” – The Daily Mail reports all the revelations from the release of Dr Fauci’s emails, as calls grow for him to be sacked. Read all the emails here
- “Amazon, Barnes and Noble scrub Fauci’s book amid backlash” – Dr. Fauci’s is also facing cancellation, according to the Post Millennial, with his upcoming book Expect the Unexpected being scrubbed from Amazon and other online booksellers
- “Governor Cuomo’s Unconstitutional Vaccine Passport Program” – In launching the only vaccine passport programme in the U.S., New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “circumvented the constitutional separation of powers and imposed invasive directives on the people of New York with zero legislative oversight”, writes Jenin Younes in an article for AIER
- “Delhi’s COVID-19 positivity rate below 1% after 74 days” – The Covid positivity rate in Delhi stood at 0.99% on Monday, according to the Hindustan Times, even as the number of tests fell during the weekend
- “Empty streets, shuttered malls as Malaysia begins third nationwide COVID-19 lockdown” – A Channel News Asia report from Malaysia which has just embarked on its third nationwide lockdown
- “Scientists find no evidence strain is fast-moving ‘beast’” – Australia’s peak pandemic advisory group has found that the Indian Kappa variant at the centre of the Melbourne outbreak is not moving any faster or spreading any differently than any other variant, the Sydney Morning Herald reports
- “Dan Andrews urges Victorians to ‘keep fighting’ as lockdown extended” – As the Melbourne lockdown is set to continue for another seven days, Chairman Dan has urged citizens to keep fighting. “Just because we’ve had to do this before doesn’t mean it’s easy to do again,” he said, according to ABC
- “The fantasy prediction of 510,000 deaths” – A team at Imperial College London predicted that COVID-19 could cause 510,000 deaths in the U.K. This “was a fantasy number churned out by absurd modelling of a zero-probability event”, say Professor David Campbell and Professor Kevin Dowd in Spectator Australia
- “COVID-19 pushed over 100 million more workers into poverty, says UN” – The International Labour Organisation has reported that “relative to 2019, an estimated additional 108 million workers are now extremely or moderately poor”, Euronews says. But, of course, it wasn’t COVID-19 that did that…
- “If they were following the ‘actual science’, they would have opened up by now” – Mail+ journalist Emily HIll reckons that if it actually was about “data not dates” and following “the science” we would have opened up by now
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Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
.
The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
.
It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!