March 2, 2020: President Trump Damages Science

 

3/2/20: Hooray for Donald Trump! His stock market mojo is back. The Dow Jones soars 1,300 points on Monday. 

Then again, the coronavirus “hoax” he insists Democrats are pushing continues to spread in non-hoax-like fashion. 

 

“Similar to seasonal flu.” 

It hasn’t helped that top Trump administration aides and the Science-Moron-in-Chief keep bumbling their assessments. Larry Kudlow, an expert in economics, but not in medicine, insists Team Trump has a “pretty close to airtight” grip on the COVID-19 spread. But that grip has been loosening badly. Chad Wolf, acting head of Homeland Security, botched his answers completely, telling members of Congress, hey, why worry! This virus is “similar to seasonal flu.” 

To be more precise, the death rate from seasonal flu is roughly 1 in 1,000 cases. The death rate for COVID-19 has been roughly 1 in 30. (That would be 3,000 dead among 90,000 cases.)

 

Trump himself seemed to address the topic by winging it – or, worse – making shit up. He said that we would “essentially have a flu shot for this [virus] in a fairly quick manner.” Except it wasn’t a flu outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control had to disinfect that remark as soon as it left his lips. Experts said a vaccine was unlikely in the next 12 to 18 months. Then Dr. Trump said we wouldn’t need a vaccine, because the number of cases in the U.S. was “going very substantially down, not up.” There were fifteen cases at the time, and, he promised, “within a couple of days, [that number] is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

 

Dr. Trump, now known as “Dr. Zero,” predicted the virus might go away in April, as it got warmer, which scientists said no one could predict. Then Dr. Zero tried to explain why he attacked Obama for his handling of Ebola in 2014 – when there were only 11 cases in the U.S. and two deaths. Well, he said, he attacked Obama because Ebola was so much more deadly, and people “disintegrated.” With Trump trying to explain science you wouldn’t have been surprised if he had claimed Ebola patients were blown to bits by their own flatulence. 

The COVID threat may not be as severe as has been portrayed. But the “hoax” has killed six Americans and more than a hundred cases are confirmed. Infections have been discovered in twelve states, including New York, Nebraska, Florida, and Arizona. If either of the two known cases in Florida are within 100 miles of any Trump property, Dr. Zero might give golf a rest and stick around D.C. for once. 

Reports of new cases in China are tapering, but no one trusts communist officials to tell the truth. China reported only 125 new cases today, but an additional 31 deaths. South Korea has 4,300 cases. France, Germany, and Singapore all have a hundred or more. There are 900 confirmed cases in Japan, 1,500 in Iran and 1,600 in Italy. Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Morocco, and Jordan all report their first cases.

Trump has done more to damage science than all other presidents combined.

 

* 

STILL, GOOD NEWS!!! We now learn that scientists are wrong about climate change too! Stupid scientists, with their stupid science! 

 

“Gok’s uncertainty language.”

According to the sterling “scientific” work performed by Indur M. Goklany, a Trump appointee at the Department of Interior – and a man armed with only an eraser and an editor’s pencil – we’re all going to love rising global temperatures because we’ll stay toasty and warm. 

The New York Times, having reviewed internal documents, finds that real scientists at Interior are less than impressed. They refer to Goklany’s edits of studies and reports as “Gok’s uncertainty language.” 

Climate science, Goklany insists that all reports read, “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason.” Yeah, whatever reason! He has no idea what that reason might be. 

But sure! Who needs science?

 

Even better, rising temperatures “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” 

Indeed, a longer growing season should result. Maybe we should pump more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. 

Then we can grow wheat in Greenland.

 

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The language “takes very specific and isolated pieces of science, and tries to expand it in an extraordinarily misleading fashion.” 

Samuel Meyers, Harvard research scientist

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This is not the first report of Trump administration stooges “cleaning up” climate change language. The E.P.A. removed entire web pages from its site in April 2017, to bring the “science” into accord with the preachments of President Trump. Someone with a sharp editor’s pencil went to work in June, too. The site for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Tribal Climate Resilience Program got a sprucing. The word “climate” was cut from the title and 59 other mentions were erased, only a single use of the word “climate” surviving. The Union of Concerned Scientists condemned similar erasures in the Strategic Plan for Interior in October 2017. 

The assault on real science continued. In January 2018 the magazine Scientific American warned, “Thousands of webpages with climate change information have been removed or buried at agencies including U.S. EPA, the Interior and Energy departments and elsewhere across the government.” 

As the Times put it today, Goklany’s work is bad editing at best, fabrication at worst: 

Samuel Myers, a principal research scientist at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment who has studied the effects of climate change on nutrition, said the language “takes very specific and isolated pieces of science, and tries to expand it in an extraordinarily misleading fashion.”

 

Reporters from the Times asked the Interior Department to make Mr. Goklany available for comment. 

They also contacted him directly. Goklany decided he’d rather not explain his editing standards in a public forum.

 

* 

SO, WHERE DO WE STAND, if we want to come to grips with this topic? NASA still tells the truth on its website. So does the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. 

Here, in Cincinnati, we can do a little experiment. It’s been an unusually mild winter. If we check average daily highs, we find that starting December 21, we had a streak of ten days with highs above normal, including eight that were at least 12 degrees warmer. In January we had 24 days above normal, including thirteen at least ten degrees above average. February gave us 13 days above normal, including three warmer by more than 20 degrees. One day had a normal high. The other fourteen had highs below normal. On Valentine’s Day we were 18 degrees below the expected high. The first day of March saw Cincinnati register 65°, sixteen above normal. We were above average again today, and are forecast to hit above normal highs fourteen of the next seventeen days. Should forecasts prove correct it would give the city 63 highs above normal, 25 lows, and several normal readings. 

High temperatures in one city do not prove climate change, of course. But when we realize  – if we don’t fall for Mr. Goklany’s tricks – that 2019 was the second hottest year ever recorded – that 2016 was the hottest – that the five hottest years are the last five – and that according to NASA and NOAA, we have now had 43 consecutive years nominally above average? 

Yeah. 

Then we have a concerning trend. 

As for this past January, NOAA supplies us with this global map:

 

POSTSCRIPT: One reason this blogger is a liberal is because he can remember growing up in an era when women were told they should remain in the home and cook dinner at the same time every evening for the man of their dreams. 

Feminists should shut up if they didn’t like it and study the cookbook. 

It was said, in those days, that females were too delicate to participate in strenuous sports. So, this blogger remembers 6-on-6 girls’ basketball games, where no player could cross the center line, because running the full court would have taxed girls too much. 

For the same reason, marathon running was not an Olympic event for women until 1984. Yesterday, by comparison, Molly Seidel, running her first marathon ever, finished second in the Olympic trials for the U.S. team. She covered 26.2 miles in 2 hours, 27 minutes, 31 seconds. That’s an average pace, in cold, windy conditions, on an unusually tough course, of a little less than 5:40 per mile. 

Molly Seidel.

Congratulations to Ms. Seidel, who is joined on the team by first-place finisher Aliphine Tuliamuk and Seidel’s idol growing up, Sally Kipyego. Both women are natives of Kenya, proof again that not all immigrants who enter the country legally or illegally come here to kill Trump fans. 

The men representing the U.S. in the marathon will be Galen Rupp, Jacob Riley and Abdi Abdirahman. 

Abdirahman was born in Somalia.

August 26, 2020: Antarctic Ice Shelves Fracturing - Trump Lays Imaginary Groundwork to Contest Election

 

8/26/20: While Trump supporters were worrying about Joe Biden’s plans to “abolish the suburbs,” scientists were worrying about multiplying signs of climate change. In a newly released study, experts warn that 60 percent of Antarctic ice shelves may be subject to “hydrofracturing.” Cracking in the ice will be accelerated by melt water from the surface  flowing into crevasses and enlarging them. These ice shelves currently serve like dams to “buttress” inland ice. If shelves collapse, inland ice flows to the sea, crumbles and melts, and oceans rise.

Scientists are worried. President Trump is clueless.

 

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The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid. Do something!

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These “hoaxsters,” as President Trump might call them, published their report in the latest issue of the journal Nature. You can catch their drift if you read nothing more than the first paragraph. “Atmospheric warming,” is the cause. 

If you dive deeper, you will…okay…you won’t get most of what they’re saying (unless you’re smarter than this blogger). 

A typical sentence: 

We therefore used a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the U-Net29, to identify the fracture-like features in the relatively low-resolution, but continent-wide, MOA imagery. We trained the DCNN with a subset of MOA imagery in which fracture features were manually labelled (Extended Data Fig.1c).

 

So, let’s put it in English we can all understand. They used sophisticated satellite images to measure melting. 

The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid! Do something!** 

The End. 

 

** Scientists don’t really call readers stupid. What they really said: “If warming allows meltwater to enter the vulnerable buttressing regions we have identified, hydrofracture-driven ice-shelf collapse is possible, which could have major consequences for Antarctic mass [ice] loss and global sea-level rise.”

 

* 

SCIENTISTS aren’t the only ones worrying about climate change and its results. A hotter, drier California is going up in flames. Trump doesn’t care if a blue state burns. Florida is a different matter. 

Floridians might vote for him. 

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a 42-year-old Republican, doesn’t need sophisticated satellite imagery to see what’s happening to his city. (Miami is six-and-a-half feet above sea level – or less.) He warns that it is time for his party “to stop ceding ground on issues that are important issues to my generation [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].” One is immigration. The other is “the environment.” Suarez can see with the naked eye, what is happening. “Sea level rise,” he warns, “which is something we are seeing in our city and the environmental impacts we are seeing … have a huge economic impact.” He says the Republican Party “shouldn’t abandon an issue” like that. 

A little more digging, and we find a story from 2017, in the Miami Herald. Trump fans will ignore a story like this and argue that scientists – for example at NASA – are liars, and we should listen to Tin Pot Don. The story focuses on the threat from more powerful hurricanes, fueled, as scientists have long predicted, by higher water temperatures which turbocharge storms. 

“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team, a NASA collaboration. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”

 

Trump won’t be around to find out the answer. Future generations will. I suspect they will rue his name. 

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service is warning residents along the Louisiana and Texas coasts to evacuate in the face of Hurricane Laura. Expected to make landfall today, the Category 4 storm may bring an “unsurvivable” storm surge with it, with waves 20 feet high, and waters flowing 30 miles inland. Experts warn that “large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana.”

 

* 

PRESIDENT TRUMP is already laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the coming election, telling supporters that foreign nations plan to manipulate the mail-in vote. He hints darkly that it will be “the scandal of our times.” 

“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” Trump tweeted in June. “IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” 

The Office of the Director on National Intelligence responds with this statement: “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots.”  

The F.B.I. is also dubious: 

“We have not seen to date a coordinated national voter fraud effort during a major election,” an official said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of fraud alone.”

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, the Trump administration stops and starts and stops and starts new rules on COVID-19 testing. When it comes to important policy, President Trump has a turnstile mind. 

First, CDC issues guidelines for opening schools safely. Then those guidelines are scrapped in the face of White House pressure. Then CDC says we need more testing to get a grip on the virus spread. Someone in the administration puts pressure on the scientists and, lo, CDC announces Monday that people who are asymptomatic need not bother with tests. 

You know, as Trump says, if we didn’t have so many tests, we wouldn’t know how many cases of COVID-19 we have. 

The same logic applies to tests for breast cancer, tuberculosis, and smallpox, one would suppose.

 

When medical experts began protesting, and reporters began asking questions, no one seemed to want to own the new policy. The people at CDC said, hey, it wasn’t us. Contact HHS. The people at HHS said CDC did it, not them. Adm. Brett Giroir claimed that everyone had discussed the change, and they loved it, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

Fauci immediately cast doubt on that statement, saying that at the time the decision was made, he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room [for removal of vocal nodules] and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations.” 

Experts of all kinds were baffled by the change in position. Most responded with scientific warnings. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was more pointed in a tweet. 

“Now what the hell kind of CDC recommendation is this? We need to be doing MORE testing, not less,” she wrote. 

The Hill noted that, “According to multiple reports, top political officials forced the CDC to make the change.” 

Krys Johnson, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University in Pennsylvania, was blunt in response. “It is unconscionable that recommendations, which should follow only the science, are being modified to enable [maybe even ensure] underreporting of COVID-19 cases at this critical juncture.” 

Nor was Ms. Johnson some liberal college professor hating on Team Trump. The American Medical Association, representing hundreds of thousands of professionals was quick to say, in politer fashion: “HOLY SHIT! WHOSE BONEHEAD IDEA IS THIS?” 

Or to be more exact, Susan Bailey, president of the AMA, put her group on record against the change: 

Months into this pandemic, we know COVID-19 is spread by asymptomatic people. Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus.

 

The AMA was quickly supported by The Infectious Diseases Society, whose members called for an “immediate reversal” of CDC’s changed position. 

At least one insider, described as “a person who works with the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” told ABC News, “The people in the trenches are horrified by this. It gives the impression that asymptomatic people cannot transmit the disease, which is not true. Community spread is driven by asymptomatic people.”

September 4, 2020: Dr. Scott Atlas Whispers Sweet Nothings in President's Ear

 

9/4/20: Great news for President Donald J. Trump! He finally has a new Coronavirus Task Force member who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear. 

According to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, we’re almost out of the woods and into the sunshine of a beautiful meadow, filled with flowers and singing birds. And a win for his boss is coming in the next election. Dr. Atlas is telling the president that the science of wearing masks is unclear. Children, he says, don’t pass on the virus. 

And watch out for demon sex. 

No, wait, that was the other doctor Trump touted for a time. (See: 7/28/20.)

Dr. Atlas, right, Dr. Disinfectant, left.

 

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Dr. Atlas can tell you how to fix a broken skull.

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Dr. Atlas is a radiologist, who believes the government should let the virus take its course, only focusing on protecting the most vulnerable parts of our population. If only he will come out in favor of injecting bleach, Trump will have found the perfect advisor to serve his needs. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist. Nor is he an expert on infectious diseases. His skill is reading X-rays and telling you how to fix a broken skull. 

All indications are that Trump’s old experts are on the outs with their mercurial boss. Dr. Carlos del Rio is an actual expert in infectious diseases and close to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. He told The New York Times that the president didn’t like the advice he was getting from Birx,  or Dr. Anthony Fauci. So he dug up someone – who he watched on Fox News – who would tell him what he wanted to hear. 

 

“And he thinks what we’ve done is really good.” 

That is: the coronavirus is going away! And you, Mr. Trump, are doing a fantastic job in every way. 

(For the perfect suck up model, please refer to Peter Navarro, in the post for 9/3/20.) 

Sure, you might think Dr. Fauci is way more believable than Donald J. Trump. Sure, he’s considered the nation’s leading expert in infectious diseases. Sure, Fauci has served six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, without incident. But can he tell you if you broke your wrist? 

Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams also appears to have gone into hiding, perhaps appalled by what he has seen. 

And if you wonder why Trump likes Dr. Atlas so much, the president made that clear at a White House press briefing. “He has many great ideas,” the president said. “And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”

 

Earlier this week, the president sat down for a talk with that other infectious disease expert, Laura Ingraham, on Fox News. “Once you get to a certain number [of cases] – we use the word ‘herd’ – once you get to a certain number,” he told her, “it’s going to go away.” Trump said he thought we’d have a vaccine soon. Ingraham noted that many people said they wouldn’t take it. Trump said, well, he’d never had the flu vaccine, until he became president. But the stock market was at a new all-time high, he pointed out, with stunning irrelevance. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Atlas wanted to make it clear. He had never suggested that the U.S. work toward herd immunity. “There’s never been any advocacy of a herd immunity strategy coming from me to the president, to anyone in the administration, to the task force, to anyone I’ve spoken to.”  

So, where did our fearless president get that idea? Maybe, Mr. Trump is getting advice from an imaginary friend. 

(Even his imaginary friend is stupid.)

 

* 

WHAT WE KNOW, factually, is this: the August jobs report is out, with some good news, and some bad. Another 1.4 million Americans went back to work, as we rebound from the pandemic plunge. That’s the good. Unemployment, however, remains at 8.4%, and nearly 30 million workers are receiving some kind of assistance, roughly one in five. That’s the bad. 

As for the coronavirus, it’s still kicking red, white, and blue butt. The Centers for Disease Control reports that there have been 185,092 deaths from COVID-19 in this country. 

We’re a sad #1, worldwide, when it comes to loss of life. 

There have been faint glimmers of hope, although Trump was wrong again when he told Laura Ingraham the virus was going away. CDC reports that we are still averaging nearly 41,000 new cases per day, although that rate is in decline. Americans still find themselves in a deep hole, and unable to stop some of their more stubborn, mask-averse neighbors from continuing to shovel.

 

* 

FACEBOOK decides to remove a post by congressional candidate and Georgia Peach nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Thursday, she posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of  three Democratic members of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, collectively known as “The Squad.” 

Green labeled the photo, “SQUAD’S WORST NIGHTMARE.” In her post, she went on to attack “leftists” who “want to take this country down,” adding, American needs “strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.” 

Yeah. Save America. With guns! Facebook declared her post an incitement to violence and took it down.

 

On this same day, Politico reports on three draft reports from the Department of Homeland Security. All three, reporters explain, “describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.” 

Oh, yeah, all three of the congresswomen mentioned are people of color. So you might say Candidate Green knows her base.

September 22, 2020: Public Health Officials Being Blocked at the Political Level

 

9/22/20: Did Trump nominate a Russian for the open seat on the Supreme Court? And did Mitch McConnell get excited and agree to hold a vote tomorrow?

 

You know they might.

 

The blogger is on vacation and out of the news loop, which is good for his mental health.

 

We did hit 200,000 dead from the coronavirus, however. Heard it on the car radio. Trump gives himself an A+ for his handling of the crisis, even though we lead the world in deaths.

 

My wife and I go hiking at Sleeping Bear Dunes; at night, I check Worldometers. Germany has one-fourth the population of the USA. They have less than 10,000 dead. Canada had 875 new cases on September 20, the last day they have reported. We had 39,127 on September 21. Even when we adjust for population, we have four times as many cases as our neighbors to the north.

 

*

 

CURRENT AND FORMER CDC officials told reporters for The Hill, that they have never seen morale so low.

 

“It’s just, people are beaten down. People are beaten down partially by a public who not only distrusts us but who actually think we want to infringe on their civil liberties,” said one current CDC employee. “The other factor is the active undermining by senior members of our own administration.”

 

“As I talk to former colleagues at CDC, the feeling I get is just an overwhelming sense of despair. People are working incredibly hard to reduce the impact of the pandemic and the sense that they’re being blocked by people at the political level, and that the work that they’re doing is not being appreciated by the American public,” said Rich Besser, a former CDC director who now runs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

 

“The feeling right now is that public health is not being allowed to lead and to demonstrate the path forward to reduce transmission and increase economic activity,” he said.

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan. The man in the blue shirt, center, had trouble making the top.

The blogger and his wife are on vacation.

October 25, 2020: Trump Predicts that on November 4, COVID Will Go Away

 

10/25/20: The coronavirus continues to kick ass around the globe – except, mysteriously, in the U.S. – where Donald Trump swears that we’ve turned the corner on Gloom Street. Now we’re headed down Sunshine Avenue.

At a Trump rally, masks are only for bandits.

 

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Was being president making Trump measurably stupider?

____________________

 

 

In reality, a place Trump rarely visits, Friday was the worst day since the pandemic began for new cases in the U.S.

 

Yet, there he was, at one of his rallies, predicting that on November 4, news coverage of the disease would go away if Biden won. The media was making up scary stories because they wanted to harm his campaign. If a plane carrying 500 people crashed Sunday, the media wouldn’t cover it, the president wailed. They’d only cover 500 deaths from COVID-19.

 

At that point you had to wonder. Was being president making Trump measurably stupider?

 

First, let’s see if all the U.S. airliners falling out of the sky were covered this year. Okay. There haven’t been any.

 

There was one death, when a man found his way onto a runway at an airport in Austin, Texas, and got hit by a Southwest Airlines jet that was landing. But that accident was covered.

 

R.I.P. wandering gentleman.

 

*

 

NOW, IF 11 U.S. PLANES, each carrying 500 men, women, and children, went down this week? Definitely, that would be covered. That would make headlines in every newspaper and lead on every cable news program in the land. Even Fox News would cover the story. Sean Hannity would do all five shows for the week, blaming planes falling from the sky on liberals.

 

You don’t need x-ray vision to see through Trump’s attacks on the media. The problem for an alarming percentage of Trump fans is that they are profoundly uninformed and so won’t see anything the president doesn’t want them to see. A glance at the CDC website shows that in the past seven days, the U.S. has averaged 782 deaths from the virus daily.

 

If you are someone who believes Trump’s claim, and you think the media is the problem, I will talk slowly. 

Multiply.

 

You know, the “x” button on the calculator.

 

Multiply “782” by the number of days in the week. Seven. In case you forgot. 

The number you see pop up instantly: “5,474.” That is the number of people who have died in this country from COVID-19 in the past week.

 

The media hasn’t killed a single one; but Trump’s poor leadership has greatly increased the toll.

 

*

 

IF YOU ARE READING REPORTS from Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and I’m sure you hate to miss even one, you know that he is predicting a bad winter ahead for catching the virus. “We think the key point here is that there’s a huge winter surge coming,” he warned in a press briefing this week. Having blown our chance to tamp down the spread, a big wave isn’t fully preventable, but “expanding mask use is one of the easy wins for the United States.”

 

Murray and other scientists who worked on a recent report believe universal mask use could save 130,000 lives.

 

Or: 260 planeloads of 500 passengers and crew each.

 

*

 

IN OTHER NEWS, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, a man who has scoffed at those who wore masks, has been infected. Two others who have been in close contact with Mr. Pence recently, have also contracted the disease, including a second member of his staff.

 

Mr. Pence has tested negative (so far) and will continue to travel the country spreading good Christian cheer, and maybe some virus.