Dr. Alice C. Hughes is one of many scientists whose research on bats has been stifled by the Chinese Government. The Associate Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Hong Kong, recalls how research into the origins of Covid was encouraged at first. But that changed abruptly early in 2021. She analyses major flaws in a recent study published by Nature to elaborate on this state intervention in academia.
Hughes argues that if we want to be better prepared for the next pandemic, it is time to stop focusing on finding ‘animal zero’, and direct efforts towards understanding the process of viruses spilling over into human populations.
She has written about this in the Spectator.
As Covid spread through China, scientific institutes were initially encouraged or requested to develop task forces to chase down the origins of Covid. Even researchers who had never worked on bats – which at the time were believed to be the most likely origin of the virus – were suddenly going into the field to find a wild source. At the same time these institutes were placed under intense scrutiny. Any publication had to be vetted and approved prior to submission if it mentioned the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2, and scientists were virtually forbidden to talk to journalists, even about their published work.
Then the political climate began to shift once again, and the Chinese Government began to make research into Covid’s origins more difficult. By early 2021 the ability to conduct field research on bats became more and more challenging, and within provinces such as Yunnan, where the most similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 had been found in bats, scientists were told that bat research was no longer permissible by the middle of the year. This included me and my research team. Whilst we had conducted our bat work unhindered in Yunnan since 2013, and like so many scientists were encouraged to take more samples in 2020, by 2021 we were the subject of intense scrutiny, sometimes involving police checks, interviews and monitoring even before our sampling became impossible. …
In early 2022 China finally acknowledged that it had taken swabs from the Huanan wet market, when it published a preprint (a study which has not been peer-reviewed) by George Gao of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, along with several other academics. The underlying data it was based on was not publicly released.
This preprint is the basis of a peer-reviewed study in Nature which was published this month by China’s CDC, on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. How this paper came to be published in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, when it contains so many apparent errors and obfuscations though, is not clear.
The Nature publication is based on swabs from the Huanan wet market, the cages, and other samples taken directly from animals. Unlike the cage swabs, it’s impossible to know where these animal samples came from and how they relate to the market. Several stray animals around the wet market were tested at the end of March, after the virus had already peaked and waned in Wuhan. The value of the animal data, three months after the market was closed, is very limited. …
Perhaps rather than continuing to try and find ‘animal zero’, it is finally time to refocus our efforts on understanding why viruses like Covid spill over into human populations, to better understand what conditions may increase this risk. Because Covid will not be the last pandemic we witness, and we are yet to learn the lessons needed to prevent making the same mistakes again.
Worth reading in full.
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There is no formal proof of what is a very simple hypothesis – that C02 levels control temperature.
Real world data – in the geological long term, and the relative short term, show that this hypothesis is nonsense; hence the use of models over real world data
The greatest lie is the greenhouse nonsense.
There is no ceiling, roof, or closed system. There is no greenhouse effect. None.
We have an open system. Trace chemicals cannot be ‘radiated’ to blanket Gaia in warmth.
Plant food falls out of climate, it does not cause it.
Gaia emits 95% of it. It is used for oxygen. No plant food, no life.
If there is no greenhouse effect, how do you explain the difference between the temperatures on the earth and the moon?
And what do you mean by ‘trace chemicals cannot be radiated’?
Gravitational pull on an atmosphere following the Ideal Gas Equation PV=nRT (Pressure x Volume = number of moles x Ideal Gas Constant x Temperature). Thus Pressure is proportional to Temperature i.e. if Pressure increases, Temperature increases and if Pressure decreases, Temperature decreases. E.g. As you ascend a mountain it gets colder and places below sea level are warmer than they would be at sea level.
So the stronger the gravitational pull and/or the heavier the atmosphere (as is the case with the Earth compared to the Moon), the greater the pressure and thus the greater the temperature.
Some people think that this effect and not the Greenhouse Effect is the reason that the Earth is habitable.
It’s the atmosphere, not the gravity itself, that retains heat
and that’s called the greenhouse effect.
“Greenhouse effect” implicitly concedes that the ability to control climate is within the purview of humanity.
That is nonsense.
Not it isn’t, look it up from the IPCC.
Obviously gravity isn’t retaining heat, but it is the pressure that is important – caused by the gravity. There is still an atmosphere higher up, but the pressure is lower, hence the temperature is lower.
If there were no gravity, but an atmosphere (which of course couldn’t be the case, because the gravity is needed to retain the atmosphere), the temperate would be significantly lower.
I didn’t say that there wasn’t a so called Greenhouse Effect (a stupid name because it is not why a greenhouse is warmer), just that some people think that the Earth is habitable because of the gravitational pull on the atmosphere rather than the Greenhouse Effect i.e. the former is more significant than the latter.
Science tip no water no atmosphere on the moon
We have a 12 layered atmosphere and oceans
Yes atmosphere – made of gases. Obviously water vapour is the main one, but suggesting there is no greenhouse effect is just ridiculous.
science tip, don’t treat me like an idiot
Why?
Greenhouses operate by preventing convection, heat under glass near the ground cannot escape because the glass prevents convective exchange of hotter and colder air.
The atmosphere has no glass layer, therefore there can be no greenhouse effect as defined.
This a good point. There is no atmosphere on the moon and the highest temperature on the sun side is about 106C, showing that without an atmosphere on earth we would be fried. The atmosphere keeps us cool. On the dark side the temperature is -180C, so at night the atmosphere does the opposite and keeps us warm. The temperatures on earth without an atmosphere might not be so extreme because the moon rotates much slower than the earth.
I don’t believe that “Anyone who believes in climate change is a f*ing moron, or corrupt, or a criminal, or a fascist, or all of the aforementiond. As simple as that.”
It’s not as simple as that. I’m sure there are things you believe which either aren’t true or there is insufficient evidence to be convinced they are true, it doesn’t make you a moron. The people I know who believe in climate change are certainly not morons or corrupt or a criminal or a fascist.
It depends how you define “moron” and “fascist”. I understand the thrust of what you are saying and have some sympathy with the sentiment, but when supposedly intelligent and wel
educated and ostensibly well meaning people sleepily go along with malevolent collectivist projects like covid and net zero which end up trampling on individual liberty and prosperity, I lose patience and regard them as an enemy.
A very reasonable and commendable summary tof.
What do they say if asked how 26 years of by far the highest immigration in our history, almost all from countries with lower per capita emissions, is compatible with a “climate crisis”?
I’d probably say what you’d say, but I wouldn’t say or believe that they are necessarily a f*ing moron, or corrupt, or a criminal, or a fascist, otherwise I’d have to believe that some of my best friends are f*ing morons, or corrupt, or criminals, or fascists.
“I’d have to believe that some of my best friends are f*ing morons, or corrupt, or criminals, or fascists.”
I am not sure I would use quite those words, but what words would you use to describe those of your friends who bought into the covid scam, for example? I’m afraid I took covid personally. Any one of my friends and family who failed to oppose covid measures being imposed as best they could I am afraid I no longer consider them a true friend, and they have lost my respect forever, barring repentance (which has not been forthcoming).
As always, a little prosecco has further clarified my thinking (I always chuckle when I see the Chief Medical Officers’ warning on the bottles). I am here talking about people I have known for a long time in the main, who I think respected me as a thinking, rational person, who would be considered “intellectual” and “politically aware”. I presented them on numerous occasions with information-backed arguments as to why the covid scam was a scam. I was compared to Hitler, called a conspiracy theorist, ignored, blanked, or they simply spluttered and/or put their fingers in their ears and hummed. If not morons, certainly capable of moronic behaviour in the face of one of the biggest and most plainly obvious crimes in human history.
Anybody who can’t understand that the medium- and long-term effects of experimental gunk can’t be known until many years have passed is, at the very least, not terribly bright.
Indeed, and who were too lazy or smug to spend any time finding out for themselves the facts behind “covid” and the “vaccines” including the IFR, the fact that manufacturers never claimed the “vaccines” would stop transmission of “covid”, the fact that standard vaccine protocols were not followed, the success of cheap treatments for covid like illnesses. Simply believing everything they were told by evil Tories who in their eyes in every other respect were lying incompetents. These people were either a lot more stupid than they had appeared, or were delighted to see collectivism and fake niceness implemented globally. Either way they are no friends of mine.
Seconded
“Any one of my friends and family who failed to oppose covid measures being imposed as best they could I am afraid I no longer consider them a true friend, and they have lost my respect forever, barring repentance (which has not been forthcoming).”
Reluctantly I have to go along with this position. I cannot properly describe the hurt and alienation I feel from close family, friends and colleagues but it is deep and it is bitter. Furthermore it is not as if I didn’t warn them all and from very early in 2020. I am angry and the anger too often bubbles to the surface when with people.
Enough, before I become too maudlin.
With you tof.
I prefer the term “drooling imbeciles”, and I think they’re in a different category to the “corrupt, criminal and fascists”: I’d apply those terms to people who know it’s an evil scam.
Indeed
Why have Greta and her disciples not moved from cold countries to Africa?
Green Nazis who believe in fairies and violence to achieve totalitarian control
Dressed up as science
As with Rona, if any believe and participate they are exactly what described
Science tip pollution has 0 to do with climate and that includes hydrocarbons
Really, for the first time I’m wondering what’s happening to this site. 43 likes (so far) for a post that says ‘anyone who believes in climate change is a f*ing moron, or corrupt, or a criminal, or a fascist’… just incredible.
Maybe FerdIII forgot to add the ‘manmade’ bit to his sentence but I think most people would have thought this was what he implied.
I have to agree. Not exactly a measured post.
FerdIII can be overly forceful with his comments, but the essence of what he writes I agree with almost entirely. They are clearly angry about what is going on and I can sympathise with that. Every day that I see or hear a member of the public believing or going along with the current nonsense, I get more and more angry. Unless there is a big revolt by the General Public very, very soon, it will be too late.
Thanks – such fascist fiction as manmade globaloneywhatevering leads to our enslavement
All of the dogma contradicting reality and actual science
Follow the money
evidence for your extreme statement?
Your rudeness is not exactly endearing.
I know what you mean Deborah T, but the anger, and what you might see as an undignified lack of respect in some of these comments, are indications of just how much entirely reasonable anger there is out there. I feel overwhelmed by it sometimes. Yesterday I went on a very enjoyable wine tour of the Winbirri winery in Norfolk, which I nearly ruined with an unguarded remark in response to something the tour guide (and wine maker) said about the need to be “doing our bit to avoid producing CO2”. Luckily the remark was glossed over skilfully by the speaker, but the atmosphere, ironically, turned frosty from that point. With the tastings, things warmed up again and even my wife seemed to have forgotten my grotesque lack of judgement. My point is that at the moment of my response, what I felt was anger – not incomprehension or amusement, but anger, amouning to fury – for many reasons but principally because weirdos like me just have no to go to avoid the crap. And it’s been going on a while now: Brexit, however you voted, was an outrage because one side of the argument tried desperately to overturn a democratic vote; the re-election of Donald Trump (whatever your opinion of the man) was similarly a frustrating experience because democratic standards were trampled on; BLM, the rise of Transgenderism, Covid… all characterised in the majority of people by a sheep-like adherence to media narratives, and in the minority by anger that so much self-evident truth was being ignored. I’ve never detected so much anger in ordinary, previously placid people. Sadly, with the total dominance of mass media and social media platforms, I see no end to the rise of sentimentality, the death of scientific methodology and the cult-like willingness of so many people to harm themselves if only they can remain members of a reassuring tribe. I’m 60: my 92 year-old mother, still pretty lucid, lives firmly in about 1954 and is unaware of what’s going on in the present; my children, in their later twenties, are pretty firmly with the narrative on all these topics other than Covid, on which for some reason they agree with me, although they know next to nothing about it. So all these world-shattering topics are out of bounds. This makes me sad and, there it is again…angry. I, like a lot of 50/60/70-somethings, have a foot in both camps and I bemoan the wholesale throwing out of the baby along with the bathwater, being the activity in which the Long March has been engaged for decades and which is now coming to fruition: the conscious replacement of a world – in many ways was a better world – with a much worse one. Sorry, didn’t mean to ramble…
Spot on
Net Zero policies are regressive taxation. Combined with transferable carbon credits they will result in a reintroduction of serfdom whereby the poor are forced to remain within a small geographic area whilst their lords and masters travel the world.
Agree
The man-made, CO2-generated, climate-change propaganda is the same level of b0ll0cks as the 72 virgins Muslim Jihadists believe they’ll get if they blow up innocent people in the name of Islam.
And it’s b0ll0cks with the same purpose: So the powerful can remain powerful and control the masses through fear.
I have been looking at this issue since about 2007 when I first saw the “Great Global Warming Swindle” on Channel 4 by Martin Durkin. I have commented many times on the Daily Sceptic and most people seem to agree with my comments, but the problem is that we are all on this site of a similar sceptical mindset. The serious task is to get the message that the climate crisis pseudo science is a political agenda called Sustainable Development that has hijacked and distorted science for political purposes to the general public because as many people on Daily Sceptic will have found that when you point out a fact like eg that Polar Bears numbers are increasing people will look at you like you are from Mars, despite that information being freely available. When you try to tell people what the smart meter is really for they see you as some kind of conspiracy theorist because how could you possibly know more than the BBC? There are huge uncertainties in the science which you will never ever hear about on the BBC which means they and 95% of the rest of the media are deliberately trying to manipulate you. Most of the scary scenario’s that support the idea of a climate emergency and the need for huge cuts to living standards and the removal of affordable energy are based on the output from speculative models. ———-BUT MODELS ARE NOT SCIENCE, and they are NOT EVIDENCE OF ANYTHING. Scientific matters are not decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters providing the excuses for political agenda’s.
Very true. I think the way to winning people over is humour and ridiculing the ideas,although very importantly not humiliating the believers.
Humour is utterly toxic to totalitarians, which is why it is so often blocked on social media platforms and prosecuted in the courts.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is a retired teacher in her late 60s (so educated before State Indoctrination really took off).
She has a Smart Meter and when I told her that if you have a Smart Meter you have given the Energy Supplier the ability to turn your power off remotely at any time of their choosing she didn’t believe me. I told her to go away and check what I’d said and she subsequently admitted I was right but wasn’t at all concerned about it because in her little world “the authorities” would never do that to her
I’ve got one and will be making a Faraday cage for it if they start to turn off the leccy.
That despite Lockdown? Some people never learn
Couldn’t agree more, varmint. We tend to exist in our own sceptical bubble here largely ignored by the 77th and other shills. That has always been the question on my mind too – how can we can these messages across to the general public? And I have come to the realisation that we can’t. It’s a pointless exercise. The globalists, or whatever you want to call them, have weaponised dissent. Dissent is not tolerated and must be minimised by calling it some or other variation of ‘denier’ or the usual ‘conspiracy theorist’ label. Try arguing oneself out of that one! You are sunk before you’ve even cast off the mooring. I agree with DJ about the ‘ridiculing’ method because earnestness trips you up and you get the glazed eyes look. These hopelessly indoctrinated and brainwashed people just don’t get it that their government is actually their enemy and is working 24/7 for their impoverishment and enslavement. Still we go on…
Thanks Aethelred and where have you been?
Hip replacement operation, HP, been off the internet for a while.
Oh I do hope all has gone well and you are making a good recovery.
That’s pants.
Yes, very skimpy evidence
I have been making very similar comments as varmint for the last three years.
We will get to the bottom of this and lets hope it’s brief.
That is exactly the problem and it is worse because some people think that by getting both sides together that they will somehow reach the truth. They won’t they will just argue. It is also impossible to have a person to judge who is correct because neither side would accept the decision.
This message may be slowly getting through.
Have you noticed how Khan and his C40 gang have pivoted away from climate change and are more about air quality, health and sustainability.
This is a well trodden path. Whenever I get a chance to discuss climate change with a believer and poke holes in their faith, sometimes I’ll see a similar pivot along the lines of: ok but even if it isn’t true, dont you agree that it’s better not to pollute, don’t you want a cleaner planet?
It’s a ridiculous argument that conflates CO2 with pollution but it serves the purpose of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of the moment.
In the case of the C40 radical environmental group, it is a way to continue to project their hideously undemocratic shadow power.
“false notion that the climate is collapsing”
How can climate collapse? Change yes, that’s obvious, but collapse? I don’t even know what this means. It seems stupid to me that we fall for the language of the oppressors.
If the climate ever “collapses” what will it collapse in to? A black hole of nothingness?
We must stop discussing the weather as if it is some sort of functioning being. We must take control of the language.
Well said, HP. Language is vital. Their words: emergency, collapse, catastrophe, boiling(!!) are all by design as if we are in a Hollywood movie. Our words: lies, ridiculous, laughable, nonsense.
Thanks Aethelred
Quite. People experience weather and think this is climate. And then there was the summer just gone where the Met-Office managed to convince people that this summer in the Med was unusually hot and dry. Of the various climates that there are in the Med the majority are either Hot/Dry Summer or Hot/Arid. When was it ever thus. Out of interest I have attached a climate map of SE Asia which shows the extraordinary range of climates in that region and considering a climate is an average then the range of weathers experienced will be all that is possible and will appear even more dramatic at the boundaries.
Thanks
The climate always changes, but not by our actions. We’re in an inter-glacial period so warming is expected.
A recently cancelled scientist (it was posted here but can’t be bothered to dig out a link) claims the last six ice ages all began with CO2 levels far higher than today.
Hottest temperature since records began? Well that’s an artificial starting point and utterly meaningless.
The Maoists will keep shrieking about ‘settled science’ and ‘far right’ ad nauseam.
Confront them calmly, but resolutely, and demand that they show you the peer-reviewed, published papers that supposedly prove their nonsensical assertions.
When they produce studies based on computer modelling, dismiss them out of hand as propaganda tools, rather than proper science.
Better still, read the papers on the relevant topic for yourself, rather than relying on appeals to authority like they do.
The funny thing is that none other than Yuval Harari, that articulate ‘scientists have looked for the Soul and they couldn’t find it, so it doesn’t exist’ (from Homo Deus) psychopath, made that precise point some time ago: if you care deeply about an issue, read the source scientific papers on it.
To which point – I would very much like to see a formal, user-friendly index on the DS site, whereby every assertion is linked to original published, peer-reviewed science.
I no longer believe that peer-review has much, if any, value. It is a mechanism for suppressing dissent and advancing groupthink.
That is all.
Also, have no doubt that the 77th is actively trying to create division and aggravation on all platforms, including of course this website.
…and are unable to resist a downtick, thereby proving your point.
If you haven’t worked out yet that the phrase “follow the money” applies everywhere and always, and that every institute, every organ of the state, and every branch of science has been utterly corrupted, you haven’t been paying attention, or you are a naïve, trusting, credulous fool.
We do have to remember that “climate science” (sic) is not really science. It is a branch of geography. That is not to say it has no value, merely to point out that it does not follow the scientific method that physics or chemistry follow.
Because of this, climate science can never get beyond accumulating observations and coming up with theories that might explain the observations. A pretty flimsy basis for dismantling our whole civilisation.
Theres a long list of names, politicians and business folks who are the guilty folks of this “collective” ! Many you can also name them ?
There are numerous articles and experiments proving the lies. Why doesn’t this article deal with them?
The greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases got the name from the belief that greenhouses get hot because of trapped radiation. This has been proven to be false with experiments of model greenhouses made of rock salt which does not trap infrared radiation. Trapped radiation does not heat them, the enclosure prevents mixing of the air.
In addition, the idea of gases trapping heat came from the experiments of John Tyndall working with tubes of different gases. He made the mistake of thinking that if radiation he put into one end of the tube did not come out of the other end that it was trapped by the gas. He failed to consider that it was being dispersed by the gas and was both heating the metal of the tube and returning in the direction it came from.
It needed Max Planck to explain how radiation causes heating. The fundamental mistake made by many people is that radiation is thermal energy, but it isn’t. It is electromagnetic energy and it only transfers heat when it obeys the laws of thermodynamics, that is when it transfers from a high temperature to a lower temperature. The so called backradiation from the atmosphere to the earth is from cold to hot and does not transfer heat.
There have been various modern interpretations of Tyndall’s work. The well known one involves a glass tube, a candle and a thermal camera, promoted by the BBC and available on YouTube. This was nothing more than a magic trick created by Sussex University and Dr Jonathan P. Hare published a brief description on the internet on how it was faked. I have a copy and it might still be available. Thermal cameras are used to detect gas leaks in industrial plant and the one used was tuned to detect carbon dioxide. But anybody who has seen the images taken of houses and heat loss from windows only see this because thermal cameras cannot detect the temperature of air. Hence, in the experiment when the glass tube contained air, it saw the candle at the other end. When the tube was filled with carbon dioxide it saw the gas and not the candle. There was another experiments done by a chemist Andrea Sella and he used gun cotton to show that light contained heat but he needed a magnifying glass to concentrate the light. He then put a tube of carbon dioxide in the light beam and the gun cotton did not ignite. Proof that carbon dioxide trapped heat and was warming the surface according to Sella. But his experiment would not of worked without the magnifying glass and he proved that the heat would not reach the surface with CO2 in the atmosphere, exactly the opposite of his claims.
This is not difficult science, it is schoolboy level stuff but the brainwashing starts in schools.
It is a fundamental scientific fact that trapped heat cannot cause any heating. Imagine needing some warmth in bed on a very cold night with no central heating. You have a choice of taking a normal hot water bottle or a thermos flask. Which would you take and why? A thermos flask traps heat and would provide no warmth. But more fundamentally heat cannot be trapped in the atmosphere because heat, by definition, is thermal energy transferring from a high temperature to a lower temperature and in nature there is always a temperature difference.
One of the biggest lies was that of Al Gore in “Inconvenient Truth”. He, and others, claim that the temperature and carbon dioxide proxy measurements from ice cores show that carbon dioxide change was causing the temperature change and it could be “seen” be looking at the graphs. It is impossible to see correlation with such complex graphs, but we do have a mathematical technique to determine the correlation. Why don’t schools explain this as way to teach maths and scientific understanding and how we are lied to. Because teachers are absolutely clueless.
SUPERB WRITING CHRIS!!