Author Topic: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.  (Read 31468 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #100 on: August 03, 2023, 07:53:38 am »
Also, when it comes to "global warming", has anyone stopped to consider the ultimate technical question, can we actually measure and track the temperature of the the globe accurately?
How do we know we are doing it accurately? How accurately exactly?

NOTE: I am NOT syaing that the globe is not warming, I'm just asking the technical question, how do we measure this, and with what degree of precision and reliability. Because, AFAIK, everything hinges on that.
And maybe, is it excessive technical hubris to think we can even do that at all?

Satellites (using infrared thermal sensors - we know the transmissivity of the atmosphere), land temperature sensors, air temperature sensors, water buoy data. 

So yes, we can track it pretty well.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/
 

Offline Zero999

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 20363
  • Country: gb
  • 0999
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #101 on: August 03, 2023, 08:07:32 am »
On my pension and investments I've shifted some towards ESG, but I have to retain some in high-growth or I'll have nothing to retire on.
ESG is something set up with the best of intenions, but is bad. Companies will just tick boxes, to gain higher ESG scores, but not have any real impact. They'll engauge in greenwashing and send their employees on stupid diversity courses, which many people here have complained about. It's something I steer clear of.
I REallllly didn't want to discuss the varied theories of global warming.

The psychological aspect is infinitely more interesting.  Why people take the positions they do, and how inflexible they become.

What are their motivations?

Reminder of my original point.  A giant of early quantum mechanics theory has gone to align himself with a political propaganda organization.
I don't know anything about the person you mentioned in your original post or the organisation.

The fact you're attacking him for his views is the worst thing.

We don't know how many climate scientists disagree with the mainstream narrative on climate change. There might be many who have serious doubts, which they can back up with evidence, but won't do, through fear of losing their jobs.

Quote
Does Clauser really believe the outcome of unregulated burning of fossil fuels will only be a small matter and that the main goal should be the concern for all those who are suffering from want of food and warmth.  I get that there is massive suffering in the world.
That's seems like a sensible position to me.

Quote
Seems easy to fix if we wanted to without burning massive amounts of CO2.
How? So far, no on has come up with an easy answer.

As I said before, I'm more worried about government over-reach at the moment, than climate change. I saw a lot of it during the pandemic. It was very frightening.
 

Offline BBBbbb

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 302
  • Country: nl
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #102 on: August 03, 2023, 09:37:58 am »
On my pension and investments I've shifted some towards ESG, but I have to retain some in high-growth or I'll have nothing to retire on.
ESG is something set up with the best of intenions, but is bad. Companies will just tick boxes, to gain higher ESG scores, but not have any real impact. They'll engauge in greenwashing and send their employees on stupid diversity courses, which many people here have complained about. It's something I steer clear of.
Yup ESG is a gamed metric used now basically for greenwashing. Recent article:
https://archive.is/UF7dt
 

Offline PlainName

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7509
  • Country: va
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #103 on: August 03, 2023, 09:43:39 am »
Quote
2,000,000,000Kg

You have one zero too much. Still a lot of course, just a nitpick.

Yes, thanks. Got stuck thinking 10 (g) rather than 10 in 1000 as a divisor.

Another thing about that is it looks pretty big, but on a global scale it's not. It's hard for us to grasp scale and what it takes to make any sort of difference.
 

Offline EEVblog

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Posts: 39026
  • Country: au
    • EEVblog
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #104 on: August 03, 2023, 09:52:54 am »
On my pension and investments I've shifted some towards ESG, but I have to retain some in high-growth or I'll have nothing to retire on.
ESG is something set up with the best of intenions, but is bad. Companies will just tick boxes, to gain higher ESG scores, but not have any real impact. They'll engauge in greenwashing and send their employees on stupid diversity courses, which many people here have complained about. It's something I steer clear of.
frightening.

It's a corporate virtue signaling con that is already collapsing as was inevitable. It was a clever ploy to link environmentalism to the woke agenda though. If you didn't like ESG because of one of those things then it provided a very convenient mechanism to accuse you of either racism of anti-environmentalism.
Yes, stay away.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2023, 09:56:16 am by EEVblog »
 
The following users thanked this post: amyk, Howardlong, Karel, SiliconWizard, RAPo

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #105 on: August 03, 2023, 10:21:07 am »
I have zero belief in any compensation or certification systems. Almost all are eventually proven as scams, those which aren't yet, will likely soon be, and those that are not outright scams have poor efficiency. It's just human nature. If you want to affect the outcome, you have to directly work towards it, not indirectly pay someone else to do that in a complex system with little transparency (or one where it's just moving from bin A to bin B).

And think about it, reducing your winter-time room temperature by 0.5degC would do more to CO2 than all those dozens of certificates and compensation systems you participate in during the same time frame, even if they were legit and worked.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2023, 11:01:18 am by Siwastaja »
 

Offline tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #106 on: August 03, 2023, 11:05:38 am »
I have zero belief in any compensation or certification systems. Almost all are eventually proven as scams, those which aren't yet, will likely soon be, and those that are not outright scams have poor efficiency. It's just human nature. If you want to affect the outcome, you have to directly work towards it, not indirectly pay someone else to do that in a complex system with little transparency (or one where it's just moving from bin A to bin B).

I seem to recall one in Scotland where carbon certs were paying to not cut down a forest - er... there's just one problem with that - it was already protected by national legislation so it would have been illegal anyway.

The only carbon offsetting worth anything is certified carbon removal - planting NEW trees, or using direct air capture.  The cost of doing such though is so much higher than pretending to actually do it.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2023, 11:07:18 am by tom66 »
 

Offline jonovid

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1546
  • Country: au
    • JONOVID
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #107 on: August 03, 2023, 11:37:08 am »
the 70 or 100yr goal of communism is the deindustrialisation of the western countries.
then have the useful idiots remain childless and strip men of their manhood.
its all in the communist manifesto.
Hobbyist with a basic knowledge of electronics
 

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #108 on: August 03, 2023, 11:43:07 am »
The only carbon offsetting worth anything is certified carbon removal - planting NEW trees, or using direct air capture.  The cost of doing such though is so much higher than pretending to actually do it.

Even then the question is, would those trees have been planted anyway? And is just someone making money planting more trees and cutting them (nothing wrong with that, normal forestry), i.e., normal relatively carbon-neutral business in disguise of something carbon-positive to suck public money.

It's all about how we brand things, not as much what they factually are; Finland is a perfect example, we have an excellent track record of relatively responsible forestry, we have most forest per capita in whole EU by a wide margin and this is not changing for worse at all. Basically unlike rest of the Europe, we have not cut down all of our forests starting in Middle ages because we see them as a valuable resource which we want to keep for unforeseeable future and not overuse. Actively planting new trees is natural part of that business, have been for more than half a century here.

Yet Russian trolls coined a negatively loaded term for a forest where trees have been planted, a tree field, and the political left spectrum here happily started using it against those who support use of forests and wood. Elsewhere in Europe, planting trees and making products out of wood is marketed as a good, environmentalist, woke-compatible thing, in Finland our leftist leaders, based on the Russian propaganda model, chose to brand the same thing as opposite, anti-climate action. It went so far as to accepting to pay 20 billion € sanctions to EU, while Sweden just simply opted out of that payment, but we did not want to.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2023, 12:05:29 pm by Siwastaja »
 

Offline Microdoser

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 423
  • Country: gb
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #109 on: August 03, 2023, 12:06:11 pm »
As soon as money becomes embedded into the framework of dealing with any issue, the issue for some people becomes : "How can I extract as much money as possible from this issue?"
 
This, of course, provides ammunition for people that do not agree with the issue as they can claim it is artificially created just for some people to make money. They can legitimately point to the people who do not care about the issue, and are trying to just make money, and say that what they are doing is what they are doing. They then go on to say that this completely taints the original issue and proves their case that it is artificially created. This is, of course, terrible logic as that claim does not follow from the facts they observe.
 
This applies no matter what the issue is. It's happened with Climate change, BLM, and many other issues.
 
The following users thanked this post: tom66

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #110 on: August 03, 2023, 12:12:09 pm »
Money can be a red flag but presence of red flag is only a hint, not proof of anything, and some red flags are thus false. Surprisingly many otherwise sane people fail to see this. Besides, money is not a very good red flag because human nature tries to make money out of everything. This being said, it's still important to remember the "follow the money" principle.
 

Offline bsfeechannel

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1668
  • Country: 00
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #111 on: August 04, 2023, 01:25:15 am »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
 

Online tautech

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 29813
  • Country: nz
  • Taupaki Technologies Ltd. Siglent Distributor NZ.
    • Taupaki Technologies Ltd.
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #112 on: August 04, 2023, 01:32:17 am »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Proper real vaccines prevent transmission.
Avid Rabid Hobbyist.
Some stuff seen @ Siglent HQ cannot be shared.
 
The following users thanked this post: Karel

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #113 on: August 04, 2023, 05:20:11 am »
Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Proper real vaccines prevent transmission.

And after proper real vaccines, we usually do not see peace-time record high increase in excess mortality, but the opposite. I had some hopes for the vaccine, too, and ended up taking two shots which I obviously regret - the product I got is now officially banned due to heart failures - but I wonder how anyone can act like this farce was anything else than utter disaster. I guess we can pretty easily see here the difference between scientifically oriented and religious people. In science, admitting failures and doing better next time is also a big thing. Only in religion is God perfect and never makes mistakes, such that even if God sometimes causes us misery, there must be reason for it and we must accept it and still praise the God.

For me, it is obvious I will be much much more careful when trusting medical authorities in the future. Our kid gets all the classic jabs but none of the new/weird stuff, whatever they come up with. If that makes us anti vaxers or social outcasts, then be it.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 05:31:15 am by Siwastaja »
 
The following users thanked this post: tautech, Karel

Offline Zero999

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 20363
  • Country: gb
  • 0999
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #114 on: August 04, 2023, 07:56:26 am »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Proper real vaccines prevent transmission.
Not true. The influenza vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, yet is widely given to vulnerable people. The goal is to prevent severe disease and death. It's true there's some controversy about whether it's worthwhile, but that's another thing.

The problem with the COVID-19 vaccines is many so-called liberal democracies made them mandatory, if one wanted to go to a public place, or work, even though they didn't prevent transmission. Even in the UK, the government mandated them for care home workers, when the R number for the current variant was 13 and the vaccine only reduced transmission by 30%. Fortunately it was scrapped, before it was pushed on to all NHS staff.

And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Science failled during and after the pandemic. The measures taken were not evidence based. There wasn't any evidence masks, or keeping 2m appart from one another, prevented transmission of respiratory viruses. No one proved closing schools and bussinesses wouldn't do more harm in the long run, than good.  There wasn't any proof of a risk vs benefit for many taking the vaccine, especially those with natural immunity. At best it just delays reinfection for awhile, but the risk of getting sick from reinfection is tiny, quite possibly lower than that of the vaccine.

Such authoritarian policies require a huge burden of proof, which didn't exist.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Proper real vaccines prevent transmission.

And after proper real vaccines, we usually do not see peace-time record high increase in excess mortality, but the opposite. I had some hopes for the vaccine, too, and ended up taking two shots which I obviously regret - the product I got is now officially banned due to heart failures - but I wonder how anyone can act like this farce was anything else than utter disaster. I guess we can pretty easily see here the difference between scientifically oriented and religious people. In science, admitting failures and doing better next time is also a big thing. Only in religion is God perfect and never makes mistakes, such that even if God sometimes causes us misery, there must be reason for it and we must accept it and still praise the God.

For me, it is obvious I will be much much more careful when trusting medical authorities in the future. Our kid gets all the classic jabs but none of the new/weird stuff, whatever they come up with. If that makes us anti vaxers or social outcasts, then be it.
Which vaccine did you have?

Some countries were more cautious than others. Many European countries banned Moderna in the under 40s, whist it was still pushed on everyone in Canada. AstraZeneca was ceased in the UK, but never banned and they didn't admit it wasn't safe.

I got two doses of AstraZeneca, when I was 39, even though it wasn't recommened for the under 40s. I belived it to be slighly safer for me, as the data I had seen showed the risk of blood clots from AstraZeneca, was mostly in women and they wanted to give me Pfizer, which carried a risk of myocarditis, but that was mostly in men. Fortunately I didn't have any complications, but I don't know whether I made the right decision now. I rejected the booster, because it wasn't subject to the same level of testing and it was the Pfizer, which I hadn't had an didn't want to take the risk, when there was not solid data to back it up.

Regarding excess deaths. There's still no definitive proof, they're linked to the vaccines. Some of them will be, others will be down to the virus weakening people and many will be due to the drastic policies put in place to deal with the pandemic.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 07:59:22 am by Zero999 »
 

Offline tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #115 on: August 04, 2023, 08:16:37 am »
Not quite sure how this got to COVID, but the thing about the vaccines is that they prevent transmission by turning someone who'd have a fairly significant (but survivable) case into someone who has an asymptomatic or mild case.  There is limited evidence for asymptomatic transmission of COVID (if you want to talk about bonkers policy, try testing asymptomatic people) and the more "severe" the case the more viral load shed, which is why COVID doctors were particularly at risk of dying despite being healthy people, lots of viral load overloading their immune system.  If you do develop a serious case, vaccines won't stop you transmitting the virus, but by effectively reducing the number of serious cases, they do reduce transmission.

And you can see this in the data for the UK and other European countries, when vaccines were rapidly rolled out, cases and deaths fell like a rock, and that remains to this day despite all socialisation rules being removed.
 

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #116 on: August 04, 2023, 09:12:25 am »
And you can see this in the data for the UK and other European countries, when vaccines were rapidly rolled out, cases and deaths fell like a rock, and that remains to this day despite all socialisation rules being removed.

Are you serious and do you ever fact-check yourself? I mean, this is extremely easy thing to check. I recommend you do that now, just open up the statistics (worldometer, your government's own, whatever, they all show approximately the same).
 

Online Siwastaja

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9337
  • Country: fi
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #117 on: August 04, 2023, 09:19:38 am »
And you can see this in the data for the UK and other European countries, when vaccines were rapidly rolled out, cases and deaths fell like a rock, and that remains to this day despite all socialisation rules being removed.

Are you serious and do you ever fact-check yourself? I mean, this is extremely easy thing to check. I recommend you do that now, just open up the statistics (worldometer, your government's own, whatever, they all show approximately the same).

This is Finland for example, I marked approximately when majority of population got their 1st and 2nd jabs. Specifically the delay from 2nd jab to the death toll increase seems totally in line with mainstream scientific research, see for example Christian Holm Hansen et all, Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study.

But I'm sure you prefer publications from political organizations and experts hired by governments instead of independent, peer-reviewed scientific research. The uneffectiveness of COVID 19 vaccines especially against the Omicron variant isn't even debated, questioning this and claiming they are effective for longer than 2-3 months is similar to claiming Earth is flat or there is no man-made climate change. Why this selective trust in science? Or you take the stance whichever allows more totalitarian practices, if yes, why?
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 09:24:23 am by Siwastaja »
 

Offline tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #118 on: August 04, 2023, 09:43:19 am »
And you can see this in the data for the UK and other European countries, when vaccines were rapidly rolled out, cases and deaths fell like a rock, and that remains to this day despite all socialisation rules being removed.

Are you serious and do you ever fact-check yourself? I mean, this is extremely easy thing to check. I recommend you do that now, just open up the statistics (worldometer, your government's own, whatever, they all show approximately the same).

Yes I'm absolutely serious There is no doubt that the vaccines have a significant reduction in mortality rate (the exception is that the AZ and J&J vaccines are no where near as effective, though they still conferred some benefit). 

This can be seen in UK data.

Look at the deaths following the vaccination programme which reached everyone following June 2021.  That's right when you'd expect another wave... yet it didn't come.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England

Vaccination data (bottom chart showing cumulative count):
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations?areaType=nation&areaName=England

about 50 million doses had been given by that point which was every vulnerable person having 1st + 2nd jab and many starting their 1st jab.  From early 2022 onwards no COVID restrictions applied any more.  The vaccine stopped the virus.
 

Offline nctnico

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 28429
  • Country: nl
    • NCT Developments
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #119 on: August 04, 2023, 11:32:16 am »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Agreed. Science saved our asses big time (just like it did in the past by eradicating other highly infectious diseases like polio and measles). It is just that foreign entities saw a big opportunity to spread false information and did so. To the extend that many now distrust the very people that work hard to keep them safe.

One of the primary failures is to selectively shop in research papers. Better follow the advice given by instutes that exist to supply governments with information.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 11:40:50 am by nctnico »
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline Wallace Gasiewicz

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1381
  • Country: us
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #120 on: August 04, 2023, 12:20:26 pm »
QUOTE:  Yes I'm absolutely serious There is no doubt that the vaccines have a significant reduction in mortality rate (the exception is that the AZ and J&J vaccines are no where near as effective, though they still conferred some benefit). 

You are making the assumption that the vaccines stopped the virus.  This is an assumption based on observation of this pandemic. 
So why did the 1918 have only  two deadly waves? 
There was no vaccine for that disease at that time at all. And no laboratory tests, really only physical examination of the ill and dead. 

Also please note that the COVID vaccine was only available after the second wave had pretty much ended.
Here are two other charts showing that there was a third wave: 

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=nation&areaName=England

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-cases-deaths?time=2020-01-03..2022-10-02&country=~GBR
In the above chart, Please note that the red line is cases, deaths are green line. Lots of third wave cases not so many deaths.
There is a lot of reasons thee data do not tell the entire story, one of the things would be the availability of tests to diagnose relatively minor cases were not as available in the earliest wave.We do not know anything about a third wave in the 1918 Flu pandemic, since we have no testing results and the third wave would not have caused a lot of deaths.



 

Offline tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #121 on: August 04, 2023, 12:31:17 pm »
QUOTE:  Yes I'm absolutely serious There is no doubt that the vaccines have a significant reduction in mortality rate (the exception is that the AZ and J&J vaccines are no where near as effective, though they still conferred some benefit). 

You are making the assumption that the vaccines stopped the virus.  This is an assumption based on observation of this pandemic. 
So why did the 1918 have only  two deadly waves? 
There was no vaccine for that disease at that time at all. And no laboratory tests, really only physical examination of the ill and dead. 

How accurate is the data from the 1918 pandemic compared to what we have today?   PCR testing was but a glimmer in the eye of epidemiologists.

Also please note that the COVID vaccine was only available after the second wave had pretty much ended.
Here are two other charts showing that there was a third wave: 

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=nation&areaName=England

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-cases-deaths?time=2020-01-03..2022-10-02&country=~GBR
In the above chart, Please note that the red line is cases, deaths are green line. Lots of third wave cases not so many deaths.
There is a lot of reasons thee data do not tell the entire story, one of the things would be the availability of tests to diagnose relatively minor cases were not as available in the earliest wave.We do not know anything about a third wave in the 1918 Flu pandemic, since we have no testing results and the third wave would not have caused a lot of deaths.

Indeed but this is my point about asymptomatic testing.  Because after the 2nd wave and vaccines we had a lot more socialisation, lots of things reopened, there was more opportunity for the virus to spread.  But the majority of the time it was spreading from vaccinated to vaccinated, or if it was spreading to an unvaccinated person, less virus was spreading each time.  And those it did infect didn't get as sick, they didn't end up in hospital, they didn't die as often.  This idea of viral load is one reason masks helped somewhat with the virus spread (though like lots of things in the pandemic, their effectiveness was exaggerated.)

Another issue with looking at case numbers instead of deaths/hospitalisations is that case numbers aren't corrected to the proportion of those tested - the UK really ramped up testing once socialisation was allowed again with the expectation of having to lock down quickly if the virus got out of control (indeed that did happen in December 2021, which I think was a mistake, but that's politics!)    Deaths and hospitalisations on the other hand don't require correction for somewhat obvious reasons (it's hard to ignore someone dying.)

What we do know is even against Omicron the current generation mRNA vaccines reduce illness by about 65% and while they may not stop you getting sick they reduce the severity of sickness, which in my mind is a win...  There is also a nice epidemiological benefit:  we possibly pushed the SARS-CoV-2 virus to this evolutionary outcome.  Since the vaccine trains the immune system against the spike protein, it was not as effective any more for SARS-CoV-2 to use that protein.  The spike protein mutated and became less effective, reducing the severity of the virus.  Note that Omicron only was spotted late Nov 2021 well after a majority of people had been vaccinated. While we will never know the true reason for an evolutionary benefit it's reasonable to surmise that vaccine evasion is a strong driver so this is a possible example of vaccines protecting even the unvaccinated.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 12:33:53 pm by tom66 »
 

Offline tszaboo

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8218
  • Country: nl
  • Current job: ATEX product design
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #122 on: August 04, 2023, 12:35:50 pm »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Agreed. Science saved our asses big time (just like it did in the past by eradicating other highly infectious diseases like polio and measles). It is just that foreign entities saw a big opportunity to spread false information and did so. To the extend that many now distrust the very people that work hard to keep them safe.

One of the primary failures is to selectively shop in research papers. Better follow the advice given by instutes that exist to supply governments with information.
In a way some of the institutions did fail. People realized that the WHO is politics first, that any science rom communist countries are subject to meddling from the governments. At the beginning the downplay of the events were exactly like the Chornobyl disaster, not giving clear info, not sharing the danger. Or the sputnik vaccine developed  and then the lead scientist getting murdered by the state.
An entire new generation have to realize how bad having dictatorships as neighbors is. And those dictatorships keep inventing and funding disinformation to undermine our trust.
 
The following users thanked this post: RAPo

Offline nctnico

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 28429
  • Country: nl
    • NCT Developments
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #123 on: August 04, 2023, 01:53:09 pm »
And we saw how the unwillingness to do that during and now after covid, not only caused them to fail epicly, but it destoryed almost all of the communities respect in science (and politics, if there was any respect there to begin with).
I see this same thing happening again with climate science and climate politics.

Science failed during and "after" covid? Didn't we manage to come up with multiple vaccines in record time? Didn't we discuss and learn about virus infection in schools, at home, on the net, whatever, like we had never done before? How can science have failed when we exactly improved our knowledge about  (and techniques to deal with) the issue at hand? I don't get it.
Proper real vaccines prevent transmission.
No, that is not how vaccines  work. Vaccines train your immune system to recorgnise a threat and deal with it properly. Reduced spreading of a disease is a secondary effect.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline Dr. Frank

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2440
  • Country: de
Re: heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
« Reply #124 on: August 04, 2023, 02:44:03 pm »
As always on eevblog, we have a factual debate on an emotional subject, which is fought near-religiously, especially in Germany.
I'm also an experimental physicist and natural-scientist. In physics, we have a clear view how to validate new theories.
I recommend the old 1964 video from Feynman, On scientific methods:



It's a three step process, in brief:
1) Observe the phenomenon, i.e. make precise measurements on the observable parameters
2) Guess a theory, best in form of closed equations, which combines the parameters from 1), and try to identify possible correlations amongst them.
As Weather and Climate are like Thermodynamics non-deterministic, you have to use statistical methods and numerical simulation instead.
Both methods have to describe exactly the known, historic data. The theory will allow extrapolation in e.g. geometrical or timely manner.
Usually there are several different theories, either contradicting each other (which is good), or giving different predictions.
3) The theories/simulations have to be validated, again by experimental methods, by checking their predictions

The theories, which fail versus experiment, are definitely false.
Those which agree with experiment are "not wrong" only.

Climate Research is therefore not yet a "complete" science, as the final experimental proof will be available in 30, 50, 100 years from now.
To my knowledge, there do not exist (yet) accelerated life methods or short termed monitoring which would correlate well with the Climate models.
The Climate simulations probably use strong averaging statistics with a time-constant of about 30 years.
The mean global  temperature trend itself is such a prediction which arises from a strong averaging statistics.
Therefore, they can't make any prediction about Weather events, or similar events on a short termed basis any more. They only provide long termed trends.
That's similar to the Allan Deviation (statistics) for clocks.. you can't correlate short term noise with long term stability, e.g. on Cs clocks vs. MASER clocks, also due to different time constants.

The IPCC AR6 results therefore deliver ideas about long term evolution of temperature, glacier melting, sea level rise, but barely any advice, how weather events will develop. There's a weak indication that Strong Rain events might happen more often.
And I'm not sure, whether Geologists or Biologists are able to identify early signs of changes.
One of my former school mates is a prof for Geology, and works on Climate Change by using satellite measurements. I have to ask him.

This obvious gap in perception is politically used in Germany and EU to justify painful changes of our economy and Power supply with recent catastrophic events like flooding of a narrow valley and those many forest fire events in Southern Europe and in Germany.
But there exists  no real scientific correlation, only religious like apocalypse visions. People are gluing themselves to the soil for that reason.
The root cause of the flooding is: long time settling in a danger zone, that's historically proven. Identical floods occurred in 1808 and 1910.
Wild fires are near 100% caused by arson.

In Engineering (my company) we use e.g. "A3 problem solving" for investigation on the REAL root causes and problem management, mostly (99%) by risk mitigation. In rare cases only, the problem itself can be solved. That's my daily experience as well, as I'm dealing with hundreds of terminations and changes on components (PCN / PTN) every year. You always have to find work arounds like re-engineering or long term storage, but only rarely you are able to convince the supplier to withdraw the PCN or PTN.
Probably the Global Warming can not be stopped (so fast), so we have to mitigate the consequences.
 
It would be better, if experience from "complete" fields of science AND the experience of engineers-in-industry would be consulted to make problem and risk analysis, technology assessments on these more technical oriented subjects.

Here in Germany we have the most dumb Climate politics and Energy change.
The politics and so called "experts" cut down our working, reliable energy system, formerly based on nuclear power and fossile energy, before the "renewable" energies can safely and completely take over. There are still several important technologies for energy buffering missing, do not have the necessary maturity level, or are too expensive, like battery storage or hydrogen conversion.

Me and my colleagues in Automotive Electronics company developed many new automotive compliant components and technologies, like SMD, Blue LED, LCDs, 25 years ago.
This now allows to terminate old analog instruments with dials, pointers, stepper motors, which were produced up to now, for over 40 years.
The new devices are already working and running in mass production for many years.

That's the way to bring innovations into life, but definitely not the other (German) way round.

Frank

PS: Phrases like "denial" ,"believing", "disbelieving", ""blame" "original sin" are often used in the daily discussion about Climate and COVID alike on TV, journals, by environmental activists and medical "scientists".
Those terms are all originating from the religions.
I have big problems with these terms, as I guess i never simply "believed" in something, but I always wanted to know how technical things worked in its core.
I always was questing for the root cause, and disassembled each and every device I could access.
What could not be proven, is not existing.
That's the materialistic view of a typical scientist.
So I have my big doubts on politics, religion, fanatic, any doctrine, medical "science", latter from personal experience.

Peter Higgs suggested "his" particle in 1964, and the whole physical community was fully convinced of his theory over all the years.
But only about 50 years later in 2012, the experimental proof was achieved with 5-sigma uncertainty @ CERN.
Only then he was granted the Nobel Prize. That's how Physics / Science works.   
« Last Edit: August 04, 2023, 05:55:14 pm by Dr. Frank »
 
The following users thanked this post: splin, Bicurico, vad, Microdoser


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf