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.

 

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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.

 

____________________ 

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

____________________

 

 

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.

 

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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.