etudiant

Agree that the hype about the Pfizer offering is silly, the testing was done on healthy adults (most of whom reported pain, chills and fevers, some severe, from the vaccine). who developed substantial antibody titers quite reliably with the vaccine. No tests as yet on the old or the infirm, nor how long the protection lasts. There is a good road ahead before this is ready for general use.

Let him who is without mistakes lead the posting. We learn a whole lot more from the edge forecasts, as long as they are well articulated, not just plopped on the boards. If they fail miserably, we can learn what was mistaken. By contrast, we don't learn much from a sort of OK forecast, even if it seems closer to what actually happened.

Don't they also eat tin cans? Hoping for an organic trash processor.

You raise a valid concern. The Asian testing regimes all have as a common basis the ability of the authorities to track all phone carriers, indefinitely. That is quite unacceptable to many Americans, even as they blithely allow Google and others to monitor their location along with every keystroke they make. Absent the Asian approach, it seems that Sweden has chosen a viable alternative, which is to prevent mass gatherings which would generate huge surges in caseload, but keep business as usual mostly, letting the health services cope with the victims. That minimizes the toll fairly effectively while also limiting the catastrophic economic damage generated by lockdowns. I just wonder how Dr Fauci reconciles his push for extensive lockdowns with his Hippocratic oath: to above all, do no harm. The lockdowns have not really helped, but they have certainly ruined many and made us all much more indebted, with no visible benefit.

What I do not understand is the incoherent nature of the approach in the US and elsewhere in Europe. What is the purpose of testing people other than to allow people who are infected to isolate themselves. Yet it still takes days to get a result, so a good spread to those around the person can be confidently expected and contact tracing is hopeless. Bill Gates, who is no dummy, has called our testing useless, perhaps for that reason, but it continues unchanged. That is very different from the approach followed in Taiwan and South Korea, where the virus has been reasonably contained. Frequent testing and fast tracking appear to work. But neither Europe nor the US appear interested in that course. Perhaps there is an acceptance that the virus is not containable, much as the Swedish health authorities recognized earlier.

I've no idea whether the CDC was prohibited from allowing other countries or industry tests, but they failed to provide a working test themselves because their material was contaminated. That is a failure which the CDC owns, not the White House or others. Likewise, the Fauci flip flops on masks did not serve the country well. I recognize Dr Fauci's long service, but in this case, I think he and his organization failed abysmally. He had lots of access to the microphone, if he felt pressured, he had the power to push back, but he never did.

That seems seriously silly. We should be disappointed by the abject failure of the CDC and of Dr Fauci, as well of Trump if he was dumb enough to believe them. The CDC and Dr Fauci were actively harmful to the efforts to curb this epidemic. Specifically, during the first 3 months of 2020, when there was still a slim chance of controlling the epidemic, they insisted that only their own test be allowed, rejecting any industry or foreign options. Of course their own test was slow and defective, which prevented any prospect of curbing the outbreak. Since then, Dr Fauci has added to his failures by his flip flops on masks. from 'we don't need them' to ' we all need to wear them'. Credibility is precious and imho neither the CDC nor Dr Fauci deserve any in light of their performance this year.

The only societies that have managed to curb this pandemic have been Asian. No Western nation has developed an effective response in the 9 months of grace we were given.. Now with winter coming and the case load again soaring, much as happened during the Spanish Flu, the Western politicians only idea is another lockdown, ruining yet wider swaths of the societies they are leading. Did 75 years of following US leadership make all these countries stupid?

Think the 1821 hurricane had a bigger storm surge than Sandy and is probably the strongest in recorded times. However, Wikipedia notes that there was a stronger storm around 1300+/-, based on evidence from diggings. The weather will always confound our expectations, think of Dorian glued in place for days and then transpose that to our NJ/NY/ Ct corner of the world.

Sadly very much true, for instance some of the best old growth forests in Poland, notably the Białowieża Forest, have been decimated. An outbreak of bark beetles provided the pretext for wholesale logging. The pellets were sold to the UK subsidized 'green power' stations. Similar deals were implemented elsewhere along the Baltic.

Maybe save the lettuce at least with a blanketed cold frame? Although 24 degrees is tough.

Tell that to the people pelletizing the old forests of Eastern Europe to feed the boilers of the 'green renewable fuel' electric power plants.

Forest fires are an issue. In general, all the reforestation schemes that I've seen have been execrable, spindling pulpwood conifers planted way too close together, obviously worthless as ecosystems or even habitats. Here as everywhere else, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ensuring a proper execution of the 'green' design requires hard headed management, something in very short supply.

Quite true and the desire appears to be there to get rid of DST, but it seems to take forever to get any actual progress.

Thank you, that helps some. Guess these things are a lot more complicated than they look at first glance. Time to hit the books again. Suggestions would be very welcome.

Bourbon St in the French Quarter is pretty much the highest ground in NOLA afaik. Guess they just got lucky. In any case, the cameras are back on and the winds appear to have died down, presumably the eye passing.

You're surely right, but the images until they went dead were of a garden variety thunderstorm, nothing massive or damaging. The potted plants along the balconies were doing fine and the barricades in front of construction were not moving.

NOLA cameras seem to have cut out. Is there a blackout or some other cause?

Can someone please explain the 'bands'? It seems that these storms have a structure, but why does it develop in bands?

Thank you, that makes sense. From a climate monitoring perspective, that suggests area is the one to focus on. In that context, I note that area is the lowest ever for the date, https://cryospherecomputing.tk/ Hard for me to understand why this is a disputed fact.

Which is the better metric, area or extent? I've been focused on area, thinking that extent just adds another variable, yet most contributors prefer to use extent. What are the pros and cons driving the choice?

Seems a sensible piece of work. Unfortunately, more people will read about President Obama's purchase of an ocean front home in Martha's Vineyard than NBER research.

Windmills are selective killers, they preferentially kill large soaring birds, eagles, hawks and other large avifauna. The victims, who seek out the same windy spots to stay in the air without much effort, cannot see the blade coming down of them from above. Removing the slow breeding large birds this way is not a sensible policy imho. They also are efficient bat killers, as the vacuum left by the blade speeding by (tip speed is close to sonic velocity) ruptures the bats lungs, but bats get less attention.from the media. That said, no argument about the damages inflicted by the fossil fuel industry. But that is no reason to give the other 'green' power initiatives a license to destroy either.

When considering the validity of conspiracy theories, Bismarck's axiom, 'Never believe anything until it has been officially denied', would be worth keeping in mind.

At least in Europe, the deforestation is not because people cannot afford to heat their homes, it is because the 'green' incentives for 'renewable' energy have made it attractive to use pelletized wood chips instead of coal to fuel the power stations. So vast stretches of old forest have been razed to provide these pellets, which incidentally are a much dirtier fuel. This kind of senseless policy has been vigorously condemned by conservationists, but is hugely profitable for the recipients of the incentives, so ihe damage continues.