The Times leads with Nicola Sturgeon’s exit plan for Scotland. “The First Minister published a 26-page ‘framework’ for easing the lockdown and discussed plans for reopening schools, businesses and allowing small gatherings,” it reports. Sturgeon didn’t say when this might happen, but argued there should be a “better balance” between tackling the disease and protecting the economy. In addition, Arlene Foster, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, suggested that lockdown restrictions could be eased at a faster pace there than in the rest of the UK. Guernsey has already put an exit strategy in place, with gardeners, mechanics, estate agents and builders returning to work tomorrow. And in an encouraging sign, various senior Tories praised Sturgeon’s initiative, including Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and former Chancellor George Osborne who said we need to start talking about “the hard trade-offs”.
According to the Telegraph, Boris will return to work next week (as predicted on this site on Tuesday). Will he make an appearance at the Downing Street press conference on Monday and unveil an exit plan? Sturgeon apparently thinks so. After all, why start talking about her own exit strategy yesterday unless she thinks Boris is about to do likewise? She evidently thinks a big announcement is imminent and wants to make it look as though she bounced the dithering Prime Minster into making a decision. She may be wrong of course, but Boris will have to do something to make it clear he’s back in charge. The holding line – that it’s premature to talk about an exit strategy while deaths are still peaking – won’t survive his return to Downing Street. Once Biggles has recovered from his injuries and is back in the cockpit, people will expect action.
But is the general public ready for a phased exit? One of the things I’ve been puzzling over during this crisis is the willingness of freeborn Englishmen to acquiesce to the greatest suspension of their liberties since the Second World War. And not merely acquiesce – most of them think the Government should go even further. According to an opinion poll published last week, only 6% of people think the current restrictions are “too severe”, while 44% think they’re “not severe enough”. James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation, has tried to unravel this mystery in UnHerd. One of the points he makes is that the 35% of the English electorate who identity as “very strongly English” are also the most authoritarian, according to research done by Paula Sturridge at Bristol University. “The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly,” he writes. You can read his article here.
Thankfully, not everyone has fallen into lockstep with the new orthodoxy. A letter in today’s Telegraph is a reminder of how unimpressed many older people are by the official response to the crisis. Worth quoting in full:
SIR – Russell Lynch (Business, April 22) is right to warn the Government that to prolong lockdown for the over-70s would be “suicidal politics”.
There is widespread “elderly” contempt for the woke-driven pandemic policy: the craven subservience to discredited scientists; insulting war comparisons; deification of the heroic but ill-managed NHS; totalitarian hand-clapping; arrogant directives; officious policing; closing houses of worship; the brute ignorance of Christianity.
If lockdown is not speedily lifted, we 8.8 million “elderly” voters will take our revenge at the general election.
John McEwen
London SW1
There are some encouraging signs that attitudes are beginning to shift more widely. On Monday I noted that my local park in Acton was more crowded than it had been at any time since March 23rd and readers have been reporting similar experiences all week. For instance, one writes: “My eldest son, who lives in Thamesmead, goes out every early evening with his daughter for a walk. He assures me that in the last seven days or so there has been a dramatic increase in cars on the roads, more and more people about – often in groups that are quite clearly made up of children and adults from more than one household, and some evidently visiting other people. Prior to that it was silent with virtually no traffic.”
The Mail picked up on this new mood yesterday, noting that it was the hottest day of the year so far: “Britons all over the UK have ignored lockdown rules today to flock to parks, beaches and promenades as temperatures hit 75F.” The Mail reports that there were long queues outside B&Q stores across the country, as well as the Five Guys hamburger chain, and the AA says journeys were up 10% this week compared to last. If the public are tiring of lockdown it will be hard for the Government to keep it in place, particularly without an exit strategy. And the hot weather looks set to continue:
One sceptical website I’ve neglected to mention until now – and should have flagged up earlier – is COVID-19 In Proportion. It’s full of great graphs such as the one below showing that the the number of deaths in Week 15 of 2020 were lower than they were in some previous flu seasons:
The Media section is also worth looking at, particularly the bit comparing the hysterical alarmism of the BBC News website this week, when the ONS announced that 3,760 had died of COVID-19 in the week ending 10th April, with the home page of the same site on the 13th January 2018 when 3,075 died of respiratory disease. Needless to say, the latter contained nerry a mention of the unusually high death toll. As COVID-19 In Proportion reminds us, the cumulative death toll by the end of Week 15 in 2018 (187, 720) was higher than it was this year (184,960).
And here’s my favourite graph so far. If you take the assumptions that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College used to predict the death tolls in the UK absent a lockdown (510,000 if we carried on as normal, 250,000 if we continued with mitigation) and use them to model what should have happened in Sweden absent a lockdown, you get the following:
In case you can’t read the small print, the blue area is the daily deaths per 100,000 the Imperial model would have predicted in the “do nothing” scenario, the yellow area is what would have happened if Sweden had stuck with mitigation – which is what it did, obviously – and the red area is the actual number of Swedes who’ve died.
One of the reasons Professor Ferguson estimated such a high death toll in the UK absent a lockdown is because he assumed that <5% of the population had been infected and the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) is ~0.9%. As each day passes, those assumptions look more and more shaky. Yesterday, the results of an antibody study done in New York were published in which 3,000 people were randomly tested at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities. The result? 13.9% tested positive, indicating 2.7 million New Yorkers have already been infected. In New York City the number is 21.2%. (In Stockholm it’s 25%.) And, of course, the higher the number of people infected, the lower the IFR, which is the number of infected divided by the number who’ve died. Mario Cuomo, the Governor of New York, puts the IFR at 0.5%, but in all likelihood it will turn out to be lower.
We’ve heard about the five tests our Government has set before lockdown can be lifted. Arch-sceptic Heather Mac Donald has devised five tests US state governors should set themselves before extending lockdowns. They are:
- How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
- What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
- How many workers will have lost their jobs?
- How many businesses will have closed for good?
- How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?
When I made my original sceptical argument in the Critic last month, I pointed out that an extended lockdown would likely result in a greater loss of life than lifting it. But I was just talking about the UK. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the people who’ll pay the heaviest price for decision of Western governments to sacrifice their economies to keep the virus at bay will be those in the developing world. In this week’s Spectator, Aidan Hartley spells it out:
Starkest of all will be Africa’s economic collapse, wiping out jobs for many of the continent’s 1.2 billion people. Tourism, vital to the conservation of wildlife, forests and monuments, has fallen apart. Mining, oil and gas are close behind. Exports of tea, coffee and cocoa are also being hit hard. Until recently Africa served as a giant nursery, raising migrants to supply cheap labour for rich countries. Every month these workers send money home to their families, and remittances are now the largest source of foreign exchange in many countries. As diaspora Africans fall out of work, these funds are evaporating. In the high-density slums, each breadwinner might feed ten mouths. Nairobi city governor Mike Sonko promised mass distributions of Hennessy cognac because ‘alcohol plays a major role in killing the coronavirus’ — but such clowning aside, slum-dwellers have no cash reserves, nor a welfare state to rescue them. As global supply chains collapse, it becomes horribly clear that out of 54 African states, only Zambia is a net food exporter. Many Africans routinely rely on food aid. For oil-dependent Nigeria’s nearly 200 million people, life is about to get tough.
Another piece worth reading in this week’s Spectator – the 10,000th issue, no less – is Matt Ridley’s. Forget about finding a vaccine, he says, and focus on the treatments: “Within a month or two, one of the 30 or more therapies currently being tested is likely to prove effective and safe.” And there’s my column of course, although it’s not about the virus this week. (I also appeared the Last Orders podcast yesterday with Christopher Snowdon and Tom Slater.)
A bizarre article appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday arguing that it would be a shame if Oxford University wins the race to develop a vaccine because that could be used by knuckle-dragging nationalists as way to belittle the universities of other countries. Written by Emily Cousins, who teaches women’s studies at Oxford, it argues that any triumph for the ancient university “will be used as it has been in the past, to fulfil its political, patriotic function as proof of British excellence”. But as Andrew Neil pointed out on Twitter, if Oxford does develop a vaccine, won’t that in fact be proof of British excellence? After all, Oxford is consistently ranked in the top five universities in the world, often it he top two. You can read her bonkers argument here.
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The fallacy that the planet and its climate exists for our sake, and that its current state is ‘optimal’ and deserving of our efforts to maintain it as such, demonstrates the height of human arrogance.
Do you mean the height of human ignorance
Both, I’d say.
.I find it odd that a bunch of committed environmentalists, who want to save trees, should aim at dropping CO2 to the ‘pre-industrial level’ of 280ppm.
Which will put a major strain on all plant life…
How major a strain?
Quote some facts on this.
Oh, about this much he said, holding his hands apart.
Never wondered why people pump co2 into their greenhouses/aquariums?
anyway, here you go:
There’s at least one tree on here suffering from a lack of CO2.
Don’t tell climate Genius Al Gore – it might be an ‘inconvenient truth’.
Apart from the ones that can no longer grow, due to drought etc.
And evidence please? Obviously you’ve got your deserts, semi-deserts, artic regions.
We all await an evidenced response.
Wrong as usual.
As CO2 levels rise trees require less water due to the stomata have to stay open for shorter periods so less water is lost.
I’m sure he’d be happy to, just following you posting your first fact ever on this site.
This site seems to be an inappropriate place for facts.
This site? I think you mean your brain.
With regard to climate science, it seems you wouldn’t recognise a fact if it bit you on your snout.
Plants consume CO2 when photosynthesising to generate energy to grow.
CO2 is plant food.
before life on earth the atmosphere was overwhelmingly composed of CO2, algae, plants and anything else that can photosynthesise changed the atmospheric composition over billions of years to the tiny amounts of co2 we have now.
you can google “early earth atmospheric composition” and find out for yourself.
I learnt about photosynthesis in infant school.
id consider knowledge of how plants make their energy to be elementary science, in the same league as adding water to something makes it wet.
not knowing that co2 is plant food is probably why the young are all get up about this.
”Fake invisible catastrophes and threats of doom” by Dr Patrick Moore.
There – have a read. That should inform you.
Twelve Teslas Queued Up For A Charge
https://rumble.com/vy6wei-twelve-teslas-queued-up-for-a-charge.html?
tonyheller
Saturday 26th March 1pm to 3pm
Yellow Boards LONDON
Junction Victoria St/Bressenden Pl
London SW1E 5NA
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens
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Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
It’s pretty obvious from the charts, that 250,000 years ago and every 100 thousand odd years before that, humans existed with a vast industrial polluting civilisation that caused their manmade climate warming and caused catastrophic events that wiped any traces of their existence off the face of the planet.
Any parent knows that ‘because I say its so’ is the mark of a lost argument.
Also if I might be so bold, can I mention that there is no money in telling the truth on this or many other subjects.
Off subject
Under the terms of the Online Safety Bill you are not allowed to tell anyone about the below article
‘Incredible’ teenager died from blood clot after receiving AstraZeneca Covid jab – North Wales Live (dailypost.co.uk)
I would like to know why her life doesn’t matter; why charges have not been brought.
I’m not even sure I believe there’s such a thing as ‘the climate’
There isn’t. It was a convenient term to describe regional weather variations to schoolchildren.
What alarmists mean when they refer to climate is temperature change, they are just too stupid to realise that.
They are ‘just too stupid’ – period. And they are not alone in this sad crowded little Island.
No CO2 connection – no need for net zero. Keep chipping away, Mr Morrison.
No point in chipping away… he’s only talking to a handful of deniers.
They are already on his side and there is no cogent argument put forward to deny the reality of climate change. Good enough for you lot, but not for sensible folks.
Which reality is that? the one represented by the first assessment by the IPCC, or the second, or the third …….. We are now on the sixth now and they still haven’t got it right. Good to know the science is settled.
Hello tree. CO2 is your food. More CO2, deserts shrink, record crops, fewer starve. Try https://notrickszone.com/2022/03/19/higher-co2-concentrations-mean-better-plant-water-use-enhanced-photosynthesis-expanding-sahel/
plenty more where that came from.
You’ve ended up on the wrong website again. Try http://www.bbc.co.uk – you’ll find all sorts of interesting news and lifestyle articles that will satisfy your need for establishment viewpoints. Wonderful recipes too, happy browsing!
Still waiting for one of you to make a cogent argument. Looks like it will be a long wait.
It’s http://www.bbc.co.uk; there’s a menu bar at the top where you can access all the main stories and the recipes are under Food. There’s Have Your Say too if you’re interested, you can share ideas with like-minded members of the public who I think will really enjoy your commentary.
Your hypothesis, it’s on you to provide evidence. That’s called science, by the way.
No one’s denying the reality of climate change we’re just questioning the claim that a) the anthropogenic signature has been detected b) that increased CO2 is the cause of global warming c) that a warming of the planet will end life as we know it. So Mr. Tree, what evidence have you got that you can share?
I don’t know a single person who denies the climate, or even that it’s changing.
Running round with your hair on fire screaming ‘we’re all doomed’ isn’t science.
Bring something meaningful to the conversation.
Is there anyone quite so blind and obtuse as this person “Tree” who will not acknowledge that there have been periods of much more intense warming and cooling long before man-made emissions? Carbon dioxide may play some small part today but current warming is nothing like we have had in the past. I have looked down from the hills above Harlech in North Wales and seen the remnants of terraces where vines grew freely during the Roman warm period. And, trudging through a rank and miserable bog above Machynlleth, I was amazed to be told by an archaeologist in our hiking party that we were standing in part of a pre-Roman kingdom, where digs had shown it was once a land flowing in milk and honey whose people created dazzling artefacts. “Tree”? He or she is barking up the wrong one. More to be pitied for blind ignorance than laughed at.for sheer folly.
Was anyone around to witness any of these very warm periods of time?
Were they trying to grow crops to feed billions of people.
Using excessive timeframe trends to argue against real trends now seems to be standard denier tactics. Doesn’t stop it being stupid.
You have confirmed to me that no one should take you seriously. You ask did anyone witness these warm periods of time. The vine terraces speak for themselves to anyone with half an ounce of common sense. It was t hot enough for people to grow grapes, for goodness sake. And of course I explained that archaeological digs have attested to the bogs above Machynlleth once having been rich agricultural land capable of supporting a vibrant culture. With people like your good self around it is no wonder we have had two years of dreadful collateral damage from the Covid lockdowns. The warming psychosis echoes the similar Covid fear, panic and blindness.
http://www.bbc.co.uk
I’m sure someone must have around in those days, though I’ve never met one. Should I then conclude that they didn’t exist?
Meanwhile, focussing obsessively on ridiculously short timeframe trends with no historical context seems to be standard alarmist tactics. Doesn’t stop it being stupid, though.
Take a look at the wholly unrealistic and clearly stupid temperature projection used by Al Gore.
Using miniscule timeframes is standard climate panicker tactics. Doesn’t stop it being stupid
You’ll find all sorts of sensible folks in the Have Your Say section on the BBC website. With your way with words, you’ll get tonnes of
Good luck!
Use of the word ‘denier’ betrays your ignorance of both science and reality.
Climate Change ….
Another attempt to deny the undeniable.
DS keeps doing coming up with this selective garbage and the readers just buy it.
They are duty bound to oppose anything that is an accepted truth.
So just publish a dodgy article and let their ignorance and preconceptions to the rest.
If you tilt the graph it can agree with your version of reality. It’s all the rage with the modelling community these days.
Your epistemological and psychoanalytical sense making is too advanced for us, tree
. What are we buying?
Try coming up with something yourself to convince us all the planet is warming catastrophically.
You see.. making things up isn’t for me.
You are pushing a large gas-bag of CO2 uphill!
Where are your objective facts and how do you differentiate them from your hysteria??
Look there are 30 such idiots with their downward thumbs.
The BBC has an excellent Climate Crisis section I think you’d really enjoy. Up to date reporting of the myriad impacts extreme weather is having around the world. Sobering stuff ..
Do you think you are funny?
You clearly think you’re clever, but I’ve seen no empirical evidence of that either.
Deny the undeniable.
Accepted truth.
I think the ignorance and preconconceptions are clearly yours.
Look up up logical fallacies, first formalised by Aristotle 2500 years ago.
Though I haven’t met him either, so he probably didn’t exist.
“don’t worry the next ice age in 50000 years should cool us down”
You know what they say, make hay while the sun shines.
Gates wants to block out the sun – the giver of life. – with dust
That fugures.
Gates: a truly evil being.
And this is why it’s vital that Nigel Farage and other leading figures opposing the carbon madness stop giving credence to the man-made CO2 threat.
AGW is the great deception employed by the Reset Gang to crush working and middle class oiks.
Agreed. Farage and Tice hit the easy target of Net Zero, but back away from disputing the “settled” science around CO2. Politics, eh.
Defeat NetZero and ‘climate change’ is defeated.
Get Johnson out of Number Ten and this increasingly rotten Tory Party is defeated!
Surprised that you would prefer Labour.
There is no such thing as ‘settled science’ or else the sun would still be going around the earth as a matter of “scientific fact”
F=MA
P=V^2/R
What’s wrong with these.
Got it in one!
I’m getting a strong feeling of deja vu with these climate articles. Even when preaching to the choir you might want to mix up the parables a bit.
Have you listened to the BBC or read the Guardian lately?
What politicians say: it’s vital that we massively reduce emissions.
What politicians do: spend 25 years rapidly increasing the population through mass immigration of people from countries where per capita emissions are much, often very, very much, lower. With Channel -crossers, people from Hong Kong, Ukrainians and “Ukrainians”, the current government seems determined to achieve new records.
British passport holders from Hong Kong, of which there are many, by definition, are British and entitled to come here.
BBC, 1 February 2021
“British National Overseas (BNO) citizenship is a type of British nationality created in 1985 that people in Hong Kong could apply for before the 1997 handover to China to retain a link with the UK.
The lifelong status, which cannot be passed down to family members, did not give holders any special rights.
It meant only they could visit the UK for six months without a visa.
But the new system, in place from 31 January 2021, allows these BNO citizens and their close family to apply for two periods of five years to live and work in the UK.
After the first five years, they are able to choose to apply for indefinite leave to remain, which means an individual can live and work without applying for a visa.
And after one year of this status, individuals are able to apply for British citizenship.”
That’s just your racism talking.
That’s just your drooling imbecility talking.
Bad News, everyone.
I remember watching this lawyer testify to Reiner Fuellmich’s Coronavirus Committee.
She has been arrested
One of the attorneys assisting Reiner Fuelmich in proving world leaders have committed crimes against humanity in the name of Covid-19, has been arrested in France on suspicion of terrorism and treason.
Virginie de Araujo Recchia, a French attorney living in France who is participating in the work of the Citizen Jury with Reiner Fuellmich, was arrested in her home at dawn on March 22nd in front of her children. The arrest comes three weeks before ahead of the French presidential elections.
Fuellmich’s team have allegedly been informed the charges involve counterterrorism and possibly treason
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03/24/fuelmich-lawyer-arrested-treason-for-exposing-covid-fraud/
https://www.conspiracywatch.info/virginie-de-araujo-recchia
https://archive.ph/Ed8es
An interesting article, thank you. It’s such a shame our cloth-eared, brain-dead political leaders ignore facts and science and make policy on the advice of soothsayers.
A sigh of Relief At last British joins lists are being red pilled and finding the courage ( the balls ) to write the truth about this climate fraud , the likes of pierce Corbyn, Vernon Coleman & Tony Heller has been saying this for donkeys ( forgive the spelling ) .
Yet another dismissal of the climate change scam. However, one of the main benefits to the globalists and their minions, such as Boris, is to impoverish normal people whilst building their own wealth and exercising a truly Orwellian level of control over us. We are at war with them and we simply have to win, whatever it takes, for the benefit of our descendants. Of course “climate change” is only one of their weapons…
Those four glacials/interglacials. Turning points top and bottom roughly align. Some sort of natural governor at work. Overlay CO2, and it peaked at, what, 280ppm? Not much doom-loop runaway catastrophic global warming climate change. And now CO2 is over 400ppm, shouldn’t temperature be off the scale?
It’s logical that there is a natural relationship between the two, in as much as when it’s really frozen, the number of plants that extract CO2 is bound to be lower. Apart from the temperature and lack of available water, low carbon levels in the air would also inhibit the growth of plants. A bit like turning down the heat and slowing the clock, as it were.
Chris, excellent acerbic piece, with a great counter-riposte at the end.
There are plots of (estimated) temperature going back 500m years, also showing CO2, proving that rises and CO2 are never tethered, the latter mechanistically driving the former – as we are currently forced to believe.
I was very depressed to watch Steve Baker on a video saying that the chance to counter the narrative that “carbon” is responsible for rising temperature, and that a minute rise in one inevitably meant a rise in the other, was lost. That train has left the station he said.
Thank for your generous comment. It’s the same with Farage and Tice. They want a Net Zero referendum but seem to accept that we need to reduce CO2 emissions. You can’t have both, since Net Zero is a logical solution if you think the planet faces an existential threat from CO2. It’s just politicians playing their usual games.