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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

April 23, 2020: The Windmill Party and the "Four Corners of Deceit."

 

4/23/20: Time to face a simple truth. Trump is now the leader of the newly formed Windmill Party. The GOP is extinct. He can tell the rank and file anything and they will swallow his sentences whole. If he says windmill noise causes cancer, they won’t blink. If he says climate change is a “hoax,” they will nod. If scientists at NASA and NOAA are sounding alarms, they tune them out. If they believe wholeheartedly in Donald J. Trump, there’s no need to think for themselves.

Rush Limbaugh taught the ill-informed to trust science.

(He will later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

 

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“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.” 

Dr. Rick Bright, head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority

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Not to deny that the Windmill Party includes many fine folks. Some of this blogger’s friends, neighbors, and even favorite relatives have been known to vote the Windmill Party line. 

That doesn’t mean this party isn’t chock full of nuts. Unfortunately, those nuts usually drive party policy. You have Alex Jones, peddler of both absurd conspiracy theories and expensive coronavirus-curing toothpaste, for one. In this alternative denier universe, Barack Obama was never born in America. The slaughter at Sandy Hook was a “false flag.” The massacre of first graders and teachers wasn’t the work of a screwed up 15-year-old armed with his mother’s AR-15. It was pulled off by the government, so Obama could have an excuse to seize all of our guns. 

Now we find ourselves swamped by trouble, in large part due to President Trump’s ability to ignore science. The Windmill faithful believed him when he claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Their hero promised when it got warmer in April the virus would go away. They believed Trump and the other loudest deniers. They listened when Rush Limbaugh said the coronavirus was “the common cold, folks.” They believed because Rush had warned them about the “four corners of deceit” for years. Those four: government, academia, science, and media.

 

On an almost daily basis, Limbaugh and others worked to fire up the Windmill base. And the base believed. They listened when Laura Ingraham and Ainsley Earhardt and that whole goofy Fox News crew said there was no need to be alarmed. They took comfort knowing the virus was no threat. The president was nonchalant about taking action to address the spread. Party members assumed the nation was in good hands because they didn’t believe the media if they said we were not. The nation wasn’t in good hands. The president was a bumbling buffoon. 

The four corners of “truth” for Trump and the Windmill Party turned out to be superstition, simplification, bullsh*t, and lies.

 

* 

Fired for refusing to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

NOTHING this president or any other did could have kept our country from suffering serious pain. But there was a chance to blunt the spread and limit that pain in the first weeks of the crisis. 

That chance was thrown away. 

The science was ignored. Now we pay an astronomical price. Today, we learned that 4.4 million more Americans had filed for unemployment. That brings the total for five weeks to 26.5 million. 

That is what happens when you compare a virus with some of the characteristics of SARS and MERS (my daughter, who works in infectious diseases at the CDC, just explained the similarities in a phone conversation) to “the common cold, folks.” You don’t act with the urgency you should. 

And you pay and pay and pay.

Frontline nurses aren't messing around with this "flu."

 

WE HAD fresh evidence again yesterday of the damage that can result when deniers lead us in reverse. 

Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the federal agency working on a vaccine to fight the virus, released a letter, announcing he had been fired. He said he refused to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

If you haven’t been paying attention, because you’ve been busy trying to figure out how to pay last month’s bills, let alone the bills for this month, you may not realize the president has been touting an almost magical cure for COVID-19. The drug has never been tested for the purpose, but Trump says hydroxychloroquine could be “a gift from god.” He had “a hunch,” he has said, it could work to fight off the virus and he has been pushing hard for its use.

 

The problem was that the Windmill Party folks were sold. Ingraham made it clear on her nightly show that the drug would be a “game changer” and we could all thank Donald J. Trump. Hannity touted the drug. Tucker Carlson invited a guest on his show who swore that hydroxychloroquine had a “100 percent” cure rate in a clinical trial conducted by Stanford University. (See: 4/19/20.) 

Behind the scenes, Dr. Bright was making it clear he believed the drug would not work and might well do harm. 

What, then, was the sin for which he was fired? Dr. Bright says he was shunted aside because of his “insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit [emphasis added].” 

Bah! The Windmill crowd doesn’t trust science! Science is one of the “four corners” of deceit. 

In his statement, delivered by his lawyers, Bright said he was “speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths,” he added. “Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”

 

* 

FOR NOW, we live in a free country, where Dr. Bright can publish his statement and employ the word “trump” in unsubtle fashion. We still enjoy free speech. The New York Times can pick up the story. We still have freedom of the press. Trump might not like it, nor his most avid fans. We don’t live in China. (Yet.) In China they silenced whistleblowers who warned COVID-19 was a threat. 

In this country, a reporter – a person President Trump would tell his followers was an “Enemy of the People” – inquired  during the daily press conference: Was Dr. Bright fired for taking a stand? 

In this country, the leader of the Windmill Party could only respond, “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t; I don’t know who he is.”

While Trump Fiddles, the Planet is Burning

PRESIDENT TRUMP LIKES TO refer to journalists, at least those who do unflattering stories about him, as “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

Now the folks at the National Geographic Society have joined the brutal attack on our poor aggrieved President, by pushing more of damned science! In fact, if you watch a lot of Fox News, you might believe the Society has been peddling fake news since its founding in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 1888.

In other words, the swamp needed draining as far back as the first administration of Grover Cleveland.

Seriously—and this is serious—National Geographic magazine has run several stunning articles about climate change. Crisis on Ice can be found in the July 2017 issue. It’s well worth your time to read; especially in view of the news from Antarctica yesterday.

A 1 trillion ton iceberg, composed of enough water to fill Lake Erie twice, and roughly the size of Delaware, just separated from Larsen Ice Shelf (far left, gray, on the map below). 

In other words, as National Geographic has been trying to make clear in recent years, news from the region is grim. It’s likely to grow grimmer while Trump fiddles, a la´ Nero, as the planet burns.

THE ARTICLE IN QUESTION OPENS with a focus on the Pine Island Ice Shelf, bordering the Amundsen Sea (above, lower left). By Antarctic standards, Pine Island is tiny. But in 2015 and 2016 a chunk of shelf shattered and a 225-square-mile piece floated out to sea. That’s a large iceberg, roughly the size of Manhattan, but not what worries scientists most. 

Shelves of floating ice in the Antarctic hold back massive glaciers, almost like brakes on giant frozen 18-wheelers. Behind Pine Island you have the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, twice the size of Texas and two-and-a-half miles thick. Ice shelves act like floating dams, braced against isolated mountains and resting on ridges of rock just below the ocean’s surface and, reports National Geographic, these dams “are starting to fail.” Scientists worry—because they have ample evidence to worry about—because the Pine Island Ice Shelf, “about 1,300 feet thick over most of its area” thinned “by an average of 150 feet from 1994 to 2012.”

“These are the fastest retreating glaciers on the face of the Earth,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And to make the “fake news” even “faker”, National Geographic notes that Dr. Rignot “has studied the region for more than two decades.”

Unfortunately, President Trump has surely never heard of Rignot, or bothered to read National Geographic. He isn’t much of a reader and he’s proud of that fact. As for science, he gets all he needs straight from Ainsley Earhardt on his favorite show, Fox and Friends. Rignot? In Trump World, and for viewers of Fox News, he’s a schmuck, an elitist egghead. Ainsley? Now, Ainsley, you can trust! 

Before she graduated from the University of South Carolina, she married the star quarterback and was a member of the Homecoming Court.

So take that, loser scientists!

Who are you going to believe? Some leggy blonde, like Earhardt (right), or a glaciologist?

IF WATCHING FOX NEWS hasn’t already melted your brains (pun intentional) and you still believe in measurable facts, Rignot says the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is only a matter of time. It might not happen for 500 years. That would give humanity time to adapt. Or, it might occur in less than a century. “We have to get these numbers right,” he warns. “But we have to be careful not to waste too much time doing that.”

Rignot is backed up by the work of other scientists with “fake” Ph.D.’s in other “fake” fields of research. In 2012 a team led by glaciologist Martin Tuffer of the University of Alaska landed on the Pine Island Ice Shelf and set up camp for several weeks. Pine Island is an unstable place and no one had ever dared camp there before. Tuffer’s team “wanted to bore holes all the way through the ice shelf, so they could measure the heat eating at it from the seawater below.”

Again, the right wing might answer: Hey, we’ve got Alex Jones on our side! Jones doesn’t buy climate science crap, insists 9/11 was an inside job, and says no kids were gunned down at Sandy Hook. 

President Trump is a big, big fan.

Jones aside, what did Tuffer and his team discover while camped for weeks on the ice, with all their drills and their ice cores and their faith in science? In a little more than a month “the ice under their boots thinned by another seven feet.”

Most of us surely failed to notice, but interest in the region picked up in 1994 after the U.S. icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer reached the front of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, perhaps only the second vessel ever to manage. The Palmer remained for only twelve hours, when floating ice began to hem the vessel in. During that narrow window instruments lowered into the sea located a current streaming out from under the ice, water slightly less salty, as ice above created by thousands of years of snow falling and compacting and never melting began slowly melting away. 

Even worse, members of the expedition found evidence of salty, warmer water flowing down a canyon on the sea floor 3,000 feet below. This warm flow, sinking to the bottom because high salt content made it denser than less salty, fresher water flowing out, was undercutting the glacier itself.

Many miles inland, the warmer water, which originated in the South Pacific, was striking the “grounding line” where the massive glacier rests on the seafloor. According to yet another glaciologist, Adrian Jenkins, back in Cambridge, England after sailing on Palmer, the melt rates they found “were just crazy.” 

According to his calculations, the ice under the sheet was losing the equivalent of 13 cubic miles per year and near the grounding line, thinning by 300 feet annually. “It was just beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast,” he told National Geographic.

Jenkins and Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer aboard the Palmer, tried three times to return for further study. Not till January 2009 did they manage. This time they found melt rates had increased by 50 percent. They brought along a robotic submarine and unleashed it. Sonar images revealed an ice sheet slashed by upside-down channels, one 600 feet deep, all “carved, like rock canyons on land, by flowing water.”

IF ALL OF THIS SOUNDS OMINOUS, Trump—who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate—might counter once more. He might turn for support to the Koch brothers, who made their pile of loot by peddling coal and oil. According to Scientific American magazine, Charles and David Koch have been hard at work for years, funding scientists who leave no stone unturned to uncover “proof” that the planet’s climate has never been better. And we all know business leaders would never lie or pay others to lie for them merely to keep the cash flowing into their coffers!

(See: GlaxoSmithKline, Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, Enron, Bernie Madoff, Martin Shekreli, Don Blankenship.)

Meanwhile, scientists keep tabulating and worrying. According to National Geographic, “Large swaths of West Antarctica are hemorrhaging ice these days.” Average annual temperatures on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula have risen five degrees Fahrenheit since 1950. Winters “have warmed an astonishing nine degrees. Sea ice now forms only four months a year instead of seven.” As sea ice breaks up, glaciers in the area have accelerated “two, five, even nine times their original speed. They’re relatively small glaciers and won’t raise sea levels much—but their acceleration has reinforced concerns that the same thing might happen to much larger glaciers along the Amundsen Sea.”

Ian Howit of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center explains how warmer water, only 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit above freezing, flows under the ice. It doesn’t sound like much. But the 3,000 cubic miles of warmer water each year release “an amount of heat that exceeds the output of a hundred nuclear power plants, operating 24/7.” Crumbling ice shelves, says Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “are the canary in the coal mine. It’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious,” and sound the alarm. 

“Maybe you don’t care much about that [rising sea levels] for 30 to 40 years,” Rignot adds, “but from 2050 to 2100 things could get really bad, and at that point listening to scientists is irrelevant.”

“For now,” National Geographic warns, “the best estimates suggest that Antarctica will sweat off enough ice to raise global sea levels by 1.5 to 3.5 feet by 2100, depending on how quickly humans continue to pump out greenhouse gases. Throw in Greenland and other rapidly melting glaciers round the world, and sea level could plausibly rise three to seven feet by 2100.” And it could be worse.

(Stop and think about that a moment: How old will your children or their children be in 2050 or 2100?)

SO, LET’S GIVE THE LAST WORD to Don Blankenship—not Don Blankenship, the crooked coal mine operator (linked above)—but another glaciologist working at the University of Texas. He and a team are studying threats to the massive Totten Glacier, larger in area than the State of California. Totten sits on high ground along the east Antarctic coast, and so until recently was believed secure. The Australian ice breaker Aurora Australis reached the front of Totten for the first time in 2015. Already, there was evidence of powerful currents of warm water undermining the ice. If Totten collapsed it might raise sea levels round the world as much as 13 more feet.

“The fuse is lit,” Blankenship grimly explained. “We’re just running around mapping where all the bombs are.”

As for our President? He doesn’t seem to care. As far as most of us can tell, he probably spends his mornings in the White House glued to Fox and Friends, checking out Ainsley Earnhardt’s very shapely legs.