Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains
A Thousand Times Worse: With the covid-19 pandemic likely to literally be 1000-times deadlier than it needed to have been, it is profoundly encouraging that the Labour Party is prepared to highly place candidates with strong health and scientific credentials. image Radio New Zealand
What should have been no worse than a four-thousand-death epidemic is determinedly on its way to becoming an at-least-four-million-death pandemic—a cruel and unnecessary global demonstration of the nothing-to-see-here-folks instincts of bureaucrats and politicians. In fairness, it is a human instinct—the twin of the human, and, also indeed animal, instinct to make mountains out of molehills.
With the global pattern of Brazil overtaking Italy’s reported covid-19 infection rate, but being months earlier into its first wave, and Sweden sweeping past Ireland and Spain, the extent of governmental and intergovernmental dysfunctionality could scarcely be more despicably demonstrated. That China, for all her covid-19 sins, has saved the lives of all but 4634 of its 1.4 billion citizens from the disease, is testimony to efficacy of its authoritarian governance. Any deficiency in China’s initial transparency was monstrously exceeded by the tardiness of all other countries in locking down and protecting their own citizens.
Giving Up on the Home Planet: It is striking testimony to the wickedness of the wicked problem that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can be allocated us$21.5 billion, including us$100 million towards this nuclear-powered space ship, and yet the satellite measurement of tropospheric aerosols that would greatly reduce the uncertainty of their contribution to climate sensitivity still not be funded, decades after the need was signalled. Stripping nasa’s mission statement of its glorious first line pledging to understand and protect the home planet, to humour the incurious Trump’s predecessor-but-one, the equally incurious the George w Bush, was fateful indeed. rendering National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The likely, literally one thousand times more deadly outcome of covid-19 might prove to be the climate-action-mobilisation wakeup call the world needed. To date, however, that would require an exceedingly optimistic estimation of how willing the world will be the address just how deplorably unfit-for-purpose present governance structures are. Long before Lafayette Square 2020, what most Americans regard as the World’s greatest democracy had slipped to be indexed as a flawed democracy. With work, the world’s first full democracy, Aotearoa, could lead the global redemocratisation process, starting at home with addressing its corrupt campaign finance environment, and its undemocratic 5% threshold for party representation.
There is possibly no more positive sign that Aotearoa can redemocratise than whistle-blowing Dr Ayesha Verrall being Labour Party-listed from nothing, to immediately beneath self-harmed lame-duck heath minister, religious theologian Dr David Clark. On 7 April, despite being a 2019 Labour district health board candidate, Dr Verrall had had to go on national radio to warn her party that the country was woefully ill-prepared in respect to testing and contact-tracing, and that the hard-won gains of the lockdown risked being jeopardised. She was in good company, as several health scientists shut out of the government’s technical advisory group had felt compelled to communicate their concerns via the mainstream media. Governments are known to not take kindly to state-funded scientists talking directly to the media. On 23 April 2009, globally respected climate scientist Professor Jim Salinger was sacked by niwaNew Zealand’s state sector National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research for breaching the institute’s then climate-scientist muzzling media policy. On that occasion, Dr James Hansen recorded his disgust, himself having been infamously bullied, when head of nasathe United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, by none less than nasa itself. Under the George w Bush presidency, which few non-Americans imagined was other than the lowest level of madness that the United States could descend to, nasa’s administrator, Michael e Griffin, had the first, crucial line of nasa’s mission statement erased:
Pushing Nuclear Power: Blinded to benefits of nuclear propulsion, by its association with weapons of mass destruction and Fukushima nuclear disaster misconceptions—1 death attributed to radiation-exposure cancer, 15 899 to earthquake and tsunami—opposition to nuclear shipping has led researchers to explore the option of deploying nuclear-powered pusher-tugs, in international waters. Tug-pilots, commanding other-than-nuclear-powered tugs, would deliver the container barges to their destination ports. Although workable—three-point pusher-tugs are proven in open-sea use—a better informed populace would welcome nuclear power ships into their ports and be grateful for the clean energy that powers the fully electrified shoreside operations, during their visits. The two-point pusher-tug Cape Ann pictured is powered by twin 1865-brake-kilowatt v16 Caterpillar diesel engines. image Master Boat Builders
Tragically, the terminally incurious Bush has been bested by the malignantly incurious Trump, putting aside the latter’s wondering out loud as to whether ingesting bleach mightn’t be a whole lot less confusing than the challenge of developing an efficacious, practicably deployable covid-19 vaccine. On Monday, the imbecile-in-chief bested himself with:
If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.
It is debateable as to which is more egregious: the sentiment, or the time it took the self-proclaimed genius to come up with it. What is inarguable, is that the anaemic intergovernmental pandemic response confirms that civilisation is currently abysmally poorly served by its leaders. Without rallying leadership and radical climate-action mobilisation, anthropogenic global warming, which is perceived as not having a fraction as urgency as covid-19, is guaranteed to obliterate billions of lives. If a timeline suggesting pandemic-style urgency could be presented, the jobs of politicians would be less diabolically difficult. In 1979mea culpa! For some 73-year-old-reason published this as 1971, President Jimmy Carter’s science adviser, concerned that his boss’s enthusiasm for unconventional fossil fuels could prove fateful, commissioned a report that warned:
Fooling with the Flywheel: As warned 41 years ago, the ponderous flywheel of the global climate system provided by the oceans has absorbed most of the additional heat trapped by the home planet’s ever-thickening eiderdown of greenhouse gases—more than 90% of it. Having gone neither hard nor early, radical climate-action mobilisation is now the only conscionable governmental response. Meanwhile, the 26th, shameless, intergovernmental climate conference ritual is rescheduled for November 2021. chart Carbon Brief
Forty-one years on…yet somehow still managed to get the elapsed years right!, the great and ponderous flywheel of intergovernmental inertia means that, for all the talk of greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, and setting up of climate commissions, carbon dioxide levels continue to climb—proof positive that nothing short of immediate climate-action mobilisation can now be defended as adequate. Having not been subjected to such a rapid increase in greenhouse-gas emissions in paleoclimate history, no certainties can be provided. The time in which carbon emissions need to be, or needed have been, zeroed will only be known in retrospect, so great are the known unknowns, the unknowable unknowns, and, of course, unknown unknowns, regarding climate feedbacks.
Arctic Home of the Nuclear-Powered Cruise Ship: While it has been possible to take luxury cruises in the Arctic since 1989, and is today, aboard the 50 Let Pobedy, the order for the first of a new fleet of Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers was inked in April, which will open the Arctic up for nuclear-powered cruise ships. Just how soon nuclear-powered cruise ships make inroads into the famously fossil-fuel-filthy 483-strong global fleet will be an instructive gauge as to whether, intergovernmentally, global warming can be meaningfully mitigated. Rendered here, provisionally named Lider, the first Leader-class icebreaker is scheduled to be in commission by 2027, powered by twin 315 MWt reactors—32 times the power of the Cape Ann’s diesels. rendering Rosatom
Climate-action mobilisation is, at last, being discussed. Some, while acknowledging the imperative, worry that World War II-style mobilisation would see an erosion of democracy. But before getting too precious, living under a full democracy, even by the Economist’s overly generous indexing, is the privilege of a miniscule 1.6% of global population. But nor, again, is it a binary choice. Countries can redemocratise and mobilise, citing the now beyond urgent need to mobilise as the reason campaign finance reform, for example, can wait no longer. Besides, failing to avert existential-threat runaway greenhouse is all-but guaranteed to result in martial law, the antithesis of democracy.
Meantime, with covid-19 cases continuing to breech what should have been impenetrable quarantine controls, the early-yearned-for trans-Tasman Sea bubble remains problematic. What could have been put in place day 1 of level 1, is fortnight-long, quarantine-at-sea, Auckland–Sydney cruises, and vice versa—almost half of New Zealand’s visitors are Australian. To begin to mitigate its aircraft emissions, Aotearoa needs to be linked to Australia by high-speed zero-carbon ferry. Then, if Australia was to fully electrify its rail system, and utilise some of the uranium it exports, rather than burn coal, to power it, Australasian transportation would approach exemplary. However, with less than 8% of its rail network currently electrified, the continent has most of its 41 000-kilometre network yet to be brought into the 21st century. Not that it is anything to crow about, New Zealand’s rail network is nearly twice as electrified, and has more rail-metres per person—about 0.12 to an Australian’s 0.08, which in turn is nothing to crow about, given it is barely on par with New Zealand’s old enemy Turkey, at the bottom of the European barrel at 0.12 rail-metres per personThe Social Atlas of Europe, Dimitris Ballas, Danny Dorling, and Benjamin Hennig.
De-Molehillising Sea-Level Rise: Detailed survey of the Antarctic seafloor in 2019 has revealed that, 12 000 years ago, ice-sheet-buttressing ice shelves retreated at up to 50 metres per day. If the wholly inadequate intergovernmental response to covid-19 is any indication, existential-threat runaway greenhouse will see coastal cities worldwide overwhelmed, some, particularly quickly. Democratic climate-action mobilisation must be demonstrated now, led by the one country that has capitalised its geographic distancing with good governance—Aotearoa. Agulhas II, the South African ice-breaker responsible for this critical revelation, landing equipment at the exact point Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance finally succumbed and sank in 1915, in 3000 metres of water. image MercoPress
In her adroit easing of physical distancing, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern deployed the descent-from-Everest analogy. But at the risk of heresy, covid-19 wasn’t New Zealand’s Everest. Anthropogenic global warming, or its part in it, is the bastard Aotearoa must knock off. Making a molehill out of the Holy MotherQomolangma, Tibetan of all mountains that is global warming, is to perilously underestimate the team of five million’s, and humanity’s, only guaranteed existential threatunless, of course, the species survives the next billion years of the Sun’s progression towards its red-giant phase.
It is to fail to understand and protect humanity’s home planet.
Governmentally generated waves Some writers are exercised by references to waves in the context of covid-19, concerned that it implies a 1918 Pandemic-style second, deadlier wave of the disease is likely or inevitable. While, theoretically, nothing about this pandemic is inevitable, what is though, are the waves the United Kingdom and United States, and other basket-case countries, are causing by prematurely and clumsily lifting lockdowns—the result of their pathological ideology of placing economy before public health, under the puerile premise of it being a binary choice.
West Wing virtue signalling While President Jimmy Carter famously had photovoltaic panels installed on the West Wing of the White House, 20 June 1979, in Kentucky 41 days later, he blustered:
I would rather burn a ton of Kentucky coal than to see our nation become dependent by buying another barrel of opec oil.
Long since known as the Charney Report, the document titled Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment was produced in an ultimately futile attempt to steer President Carter away from fossil fuels. Four decades of egregious greenwashing, and a relentless rise of greenhouse-gas emissions, have followed. The remarkably robust estimation of climate sensitively arrived at by the report, with the help of the extended team behind it that included Dr James Hansen, was of 3° warming for doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide, plus or minusplus or minus 1.5°. It now appears that 5° is more likely, as is existential-threat runaway greenhouse. Carter’s tepid goal for the United States of 20% renewablesfor not merely electric power by 2000, has, in 2020, barely passed the halfway mark.
Achilles’ Heel of current strategies The following are the two concluding paragraphs of Asymptomatic Transmission, the Achilles’ Heel of Current Strategies to Control Covid-19, published 28 May 2020:
Ultimately, the rapid spread of Covid-19 across the United States and the globe, the clear evidence of SARS-CoV-2 transmission from asymptomatic personsArons MM, Hatfield KM, Reddy SC, et al. Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections and transmission in a skilled nursing facility. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2008457, and the eventual need to relax current social distancing practices argue for broadened SARS-CoV-2 testing to include asymptomatic persons in prioritized settings. These factors also support the case for the general public to use face masks when in crowded outdoor or indoor spaces. This unprecedented pandemic calls for unprecedented measures to achieve its ultimate defeat.
Becoming Wise Before the Event: Despite now experiencing 17 pandemics—and 6 of those since 2002—the world was found to be pitifully ill-prepared for when, with predictable unpredictability, this current pandemic manifested. Preparing for the potentially far-deadlier effects of anthropogenic global heating, as well as being an inescapable existential imperative, can, simultaneously, better equip humanity to respond to epidemics, and prevent more becoming pandemics. Here, the initially all-but-imperceptible case-infection rates displayed for India and Indonesia were grave indicators of governments in desperate denial of their countries’ now-destined roles in the raging pandemic—and early exemplar Singapore demonstrates the ruinous consequences of neglecting its most vulnerable workers. Nigeria, however, scams all 207 million of its citizens, by testing fewer than 1% of them, thus hiding the appalling impact of the pandemic there. Australia long-since lost her battle to keep within cooee of covid-19-test-kit-exporter extraordinaire South Korea’s standout response. Aotearoa, meantime, has flat-lined in a good way. All countries’ infection rates are under-reported, some because a few cases, particularly early in the pandemic, are misdiagnosed, but in other countries monstrously, due to dysfunction and/or lack of transparency. The diameter of each line on this graph is proportional to the country’s population. graph Mahurangi Magazine | data Our World in Data 12 November 2020
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Salutary Lesson in Seasonal Influenza: Physical distancing has also paid dividends in reducing the annual toll extracted by flu that, despite its deadliness, is treated as an inconvenience rather than the killer it is, particularly of the very young, the elderly, and the pregnant—“On average, approximately 400 deaths are attributed to influenza and its complications annually.” covid-19 provided the opportunity to begin collecting flu-symptom data earlier than was done 2018–2019. graph Department of Health Australia | Ministry of Health Aotearoa | labels Mahurangi Magazine
New Zealand’s Altered Future: Moving nine days faster than Ireland, and more emphatically physically distancing, Aotearoa has avoided Ireland’s near vertical trajectory—until the middle of May—of reported covid-19 cases. Ireland’s prime minister then donning his sweats was perhaps great optics, but responding to, for example, fellow general practitioner Dr Marcus de Brun, or to nursing-home representatives more than seven weeks earlier, would have constituted a far more heroic course of action. Aotearoa, for its own survival, now needs to convince the world to alter its determinedly fossil-fuelled future. chart New Zealand Geographic | Te Pūnaha Matatini