Indian Ground Zero and Other Stories
Media and politicians keep getting things wrong
As promised, each week I will bring you a perspective on some of the most important stories being discussed around the world.
Today, let`s start with India and then move on to climate change.
India is apparently now ground zero for Covid.
Horror stories are circulating from the country about mass cremations and deaths from lack of oxygen.
I am sure this is true to some extent.
But once again, the devil is in the details - how the story is being told, and what is being left out of the story.
First of all, the statistics of Indian daily cases has suddenly zoomed upwards. You see this kind of graph everywhere, and it looks terrifying:
(If you look at the Google graph today, however, one can see the first dip, fortunately.)
But one should not be dazzled by shapes, like a child. For example, if one digs around online, you can find this graph, which is just as valid given the data that is in the public domain:
Or this one:
Some will say the numbers are wrong. Okay, they may well be. But what then do you base your “informed and sophisticated” opinion on Covid on, then? Facebook posts? And if the data is all unreliable, then we should stop discussing it, or using India as a cautionary tale.
Again, yes, I know Covid is real. I know it has caused excess deaths around the world. My wife has had it. Friends have had it. I know of one or two deaths among my extended acquaintances. It is bad.
But the story that comes out of places like India does not match what we know about the risks and mortality of the disease, especially in comparison with deaths from diarrhoea, malaria, and heart disease.
When any respiratory deaths occur in India, the first thing that should come to mind is this image:
Breathing in a city like Delhi is hard. The disgusting air these people are breathing in should be the headline.
There is also the question of diet - the Indian diet is rife with vegetable oil and sugar. And the nation is known for having poor average physical strength as well as millions of cases of diabetes.
Yet, the focus is not on the squalor of the air or the food, or on the purity of drinking water - but on a virus which will not be the chief killer of these people.
One day, when the dust settles on Covid, we will look back and realise that measures like banning vegetable oil and encouraging outdoor living would have made huge differences. Instead people found themselves indoors eating take-outs.
The problem goes further than ignorance, however. If one just has a modicum of curiosity about the Covid coverage in India, you find outright deception.
First of all, there has been a shortage of oxygen for a long time in India - not just now. It did not just happen yesterday. Similarly, when South African doctors told me the hospitals were full, my first thought was, yes, you have been telling me this for years, so why call to ban alcohol and smoking and going out at night only now? Governments have had years to sort this out. Blaming it on citizens living normal lives and spreading disease as a result is not an excuse worth listening to. In short, Covid is a scapegoat for governments, allowing them to avoid questions about how they provide basic services.
Second of all, the media blatantly uses false images which dazzle the eye just as much as graphs do. Look at this image from the New York Post:
Now look at this image:
It is the same woman, used for two different stories by two of the oldest and respected newspapers in the world, one year apart. There are many such cases.
Folks, almost nothing you see online can be trusted anymore. And acceptance of their narrative lead to insanities like this:
There has to be some middle ground between admitting Covid is dangerous and that it is so dangerous we need to cover our faces when we go outside under threat of military action. And it should start by looking at basic health like the food and water and air we consume to sustain quality of life.
This leads nicely to the second story I want to discuss this week. It comes from a profile written by the Wall Street Journal on Obama`s old energy advisor, Steven Koonin and his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
The profile begins:
Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.
Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.
This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a videoconference interview from his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.”
That does not stop the media trotting out climate change talking points, however, every time it rains. The profile continues:
His book lands at crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the U.N. climate panel—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2007—will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: How much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect?
The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations—testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature—varying by 3 degrees Celsius, three times the observed change over the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.)
Think about that - the models climate scientists are using do not even agree on the current temperature. Yet the models are what scientists use to justify proposing insect meat as a protein alternative. It was also the mysterious models which were used to justify lockdowns. Koonin is sceptical.
“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”
Koonin is a big fan of electric cars - but not because of climate change - he notes that electric cars are still charged on the grid - but rather because they make less noise and keep the air cleaner. This is symbolic of of where environmentalism needs to go. Focus on the local and the aesthetic. Smoke and plastic in your air, your streams, and on your streets.
For even if you do believe in CO2 emission being the end of the world, it makes zero difference what your country does given China and India policy. Instead, we should build broad consensus on the need to keep our homes and our countries beautiful. Instead, however, we bicker over carbon tax.
The sad part of this story though is that this highly educated and knowledgeable man knows, as he is publishing this book, that what awaits him is “the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.”
He quips at the end of the piece: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”
Doesn`t that just sum it all up? We love science so much in our modern world - except when it does not agree with our beloved narratives.
Read the whole thing here.
I will be back next Tuesday.
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