Tanzania is the name of a country in Africa. Tanganyika is, among other things, the older name of that country, more or less. It is a formerly used term that should no longer be used to refer to that country.
Wikipedia has this wrong on the indicated page on August 16th, 2014. Any wiki authors out there, please feel free to fix. I recommend changing the term “Tanganyika” to “Tanzania” and deleting the rest of the sentence.
Why not change this myself? Here’s why.
I just realized that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a brief with the court in relation to Mann vs. the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg (variously). This is disappointing and will probably color my opinion of EFF going forward on whatever else they do. Their brief isn’t just ethically wrong, or something I disagree with. It is unintelligent and poorly considered. They simply got it wrong, as though they did not know anything about the law suit. It is embarrassing.
I wonder how they got talked/roped into this? I would really like to know that.
Anyway, I wrote them a letter and here it is:
To whom it may concern,
I’m generally a supporter of the things Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) stands for, but I object strenuously to your amicus brief and it’s meaning in relation to the suit brought by Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg.
Your brief makes the argument that open discussion of important public issues should not be fettered by law suits of this type. You are correct in principle but you have erred in this case. Mann’s suit is not about open public debate, and he has as a scientist been involved in open public debate in far more ways than most individuals have ever been. I’ll add that Mann’s research is all open source or open access with respect to data, methods, software, and results.
The suit is not about debate. It is about defamation. This is not a matter of interpretation. While one might (incorrectly) feel defamed when someone disagrees, Mann’s suit is not about that sort of reaction. It is about actual defamation.
Perhaps Mann is wrong. Perhaps the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg have not engaged in defamation with specific statements they have made. But that can be determined in court. Mann has the right to sue for this. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg have engaged in plenty of other forms of debate and public discourse regarding climate change and Mann’s research, but that is not at issue in this suit. You have failed to make that important distinction.
And please don’t make the mistake, or should I say, perpetuate the mistake you have already made (collectively with others), that opposition to Mann’s science is part of that defamation. It is not. Nor is science denialism or the seemingly nefarious distribution of false information about climate change by science skeptics or supporters of the fossil fuel industry part of this defamation. The National Review and other parties in this suit have lied, misrepresented, and also, simply gotten the science wrong. That is not what this is about, that is not the subject of Mann’s suit. This suit is about specific defamatory statements made as a much smaller subset of the communication and rhetoric among these parties.
It is a little embarrassing that EFF, usually much more thoughtful and intelligent about its decisions and activism, has somehow been roped into signing on to essentially support this defamatory practice. Shame on you.
I urge you do withdraw your support of the appeal as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Greg Laden
More information here.
This is also relevant, from here:
“The Court finds that there is sufficient evidence in the record to demonstrate that Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits,” said a DC Superior Court judge in her latest procedural ruling in the defamation case of Michael Mann v. National Review, et al. “The evidence before the Court indicates the likelihood that ‘actual malice’ is present in the [National Review’s] conduct.”
…
The Court clearly recognizes that some members involved in the climate-change discussions and debates employ harsh words. The NR Defendants are reputed to use this manner of speech; however there is a line between rhetorical hyperbole and defamation. In this case, the evidence before the Court demonstrates that something more than mere rhetorical hyperbole is, at least at this stage present. Accusations of fraud, especially where such accusations are made frequently through the continuous usage of words such as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the tree-ring circus” and “cover-up” amount to more than rhetorical hyperbole. …
The evidence before the Court indicates the likelihood that “actual malice” is present in the NR Defendants’ conduct. …
The court clearly understands the difference between people whinging about science details, science denialism, etc. on one hand and what may be categorized as defamation.
Tina Fey, ah, Sarah Palin, um, not sure, produces point by point rebuttal to Elizabeth Warren’s speech on progressive values:
And now …
Larry Clifton has suggested that Michael Mann’s law suit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg is ruining it for everyone, and a lot of his right wing conservative friends agree. But they are all wrong, so wrong that one wonders how they could be so wrong. It smells to me like willful ignorance.
The title of Clifton’s piece is “Climate change advocate sues over rejection of his work” which very clearly indicates that the suit is about Mann’s scientific work and over objections to that work. It isn’t. Perhaps the title of that post was added by an Intern in the editorial office, and if so, somebody should fix that, but if the title o the post is meant to imply the meaning of the post, then Clifton clearly misunderstand, deeply and completely, what is going on with the suit.
The judicial system is not being asked to arbitrate about the science or to address “rejection” of any scientific work by anyone. It is easy to prove that Michael Mann is engaged in a number of scientific debates. This one and this one come to mind. This is not about defining or interpreting the science, never was, can not possibly be interpreted that way by an honest observer.
This is not about public policy. Again, Mann is engaged in debates about that too. But the law suit is not about that. Never was.
A law suit about science interpretation or public policy would have been tossed out first thing.
The law suit is about a very specific and actionable libelous accusation of professional misconduct, not about the validity of Mann’s research, or the reality of global warming. Clifton and his friends make an utterly absurd claim that this is about criticism of Mann’s research, that Mann is suing someone who disagreed with him. No, it is not, that is not what happened, this is not what the suit is about, and any assertion along these lines comes from ignorance of one kind or another, either simple ignorance of the narrative or willful ignorance designed to produce a particular effect.
So, no, Larry, you’ve got this totally wrong.
(Sort of off topic, but Larry, you also have the bits about global warming in your post totally wrong as well. Sort of “bigfoot is real” level wrong, actually.)
A new paper advances our understanding of the link between anthropogenic global warming and the apparent uptick in severe weather events we’ve been experiencing. Let’s have a look at the phenomenon and the new research.
It is mostly bad. Sometimes it is ugly. I was looking at crop reports from the USDA and noticed an interesting phenomenon in Minnesota, that is repeated across much of the US this year: Fewer acres are in crops but among those acres that are planted there is a high expected per-acre yield. The higher yield will make up for the lost acreage this year. Unfortunately, that is about as good as it gets.
The lost acreage, at least in Minnesota as I understand it, comes from a late spring followed by a wet early summer. And holy crap was it wet, and fairly cool. My own tomatoes were utterly confused. One plant produced a single tomato that ripened a month and a half early, then waited for weeks to make its next move. I think organisms do that sometimes; when they think they are about to die they reproduce desperately, which for a tomato plant, is producing one premature tomato and then trying to not be noticed for a while. In any event, many Minnesota farmers live with an interesting conflict. There are parts of their farms they can’t plant in a given year because it stays too wet too long, and that varies from year to year. The rest of the farm is irrigated much of the summer. This year, it seems that there has been enough extra rain to increase productivity of the irrigation season, but acreage was lost between the encore of a sort of Polar Vortex mimic and a lot of rain.
The extra productivity was a lucky break, and is limited in its effects. The same weather phenomenon that made June nearly the wettest month ever in the upper plains has contributed significantly to a longer term drought in California, which is on the verge of ruining agriculture there. Severe flooding or extreme dry can do much more damage to agriculture than is accounted for by minor increases in productivity because of the extra water vapor provided by Anthropogenic Global Warming.
And the floods can be downright dangerous. I was talking to my friend and former student Rusty several months ago about the flooding in Colorado. I asked her about how her husband was doing (they both happen to be climate scientists by the way).
“Oh he’s probably fine but I’ve not heard from him in three days. His cell phone battery is probably out. I imagine he’s clinging to some high ground up on the Front Range about now.”
He is a volunteer first responder and had headed up into the canyons year boulder during the big floods there. Which were like the big floods in Calgary. And Central Europe. And the UK. And that rainy June here. And the flooding that just happened in several parts of the US.
All of it, all of those floods, and some significant drought, and the Polar Vortex that hit the middle of North America last winter, all caused, almost certainly, by the same phenomenon.
Wildfires are probably enhanced by recent weather phenomenon as well, with extreme rains causing the build up of fuel, followed by extreme dry providing the conditions for larger and more frequent fires.
On the more extreme end of effects for severe weather is the Arab Spring phenomenon. It is one thing to have a bad year for corn because of a wet spring. It is worse to have a multi year drought that could seriously affect our ability to buy almonds, avocados and romaine from California. But what happens when an agricultural system fails for several years in a row, the farmer abandon the land and move to the cities where they become indigent, a civil war breaks out, and next think you know a Caliphate is formed, in part on the wreckage of one or two failed regimes, failed in large part because of severe weather conditions caused by human induced climate change?
I’ve discussed this at length before. (See: Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming and Global Warming and Extreme Weather) The relationship is pretty simple, to know how it works all you have to do is remember one word:
AGWAAQRaRWaWW. Rhymes with “It’s stuck in my craw, paw!”
Let me parse that out for you.
AGW -> AA -> QR-RW -> WW
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is caused mainly by added CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuel. By definition, the burning of fossil fuels is the release of energy by separation of carbon previously attached to other atoms by biological processes typically a long time ago, and over a long period of time. We humans are spending a century or two releasing tens and tens of millions of slow storage of Carbon, all at once in geological time, causing the chemistry of our atmosphere to resemble something we’ve not seen in tens of millions of years.
The CO2 by itself would warm the Earth to a certain degree, but it also produces what are called positive feedbacks. Which are not positive in a good way. For example, added CO2 means there is more water vapor in the atmosphere (because of more evaporation and ability for the atmosphere to hold water). Water vapor is, like CO2, a greenhouse gas. So we get even more warming. In the Arctic, there are a number of additional positive feedbacks that have to do with ice. The Arctic, with its additional positive feedbacks, warms more than other parts of the planet. This is called Arctic Amplification.
A Rossby wave is simply a big giant meander in the jet stream. Quasi-resonant means “almost resonant” and resonant means that instead of the meanders meandering around, they sit in one place (almost).
That’s the term that refers to dramatic shifts between the extreme weather events created by Quasi-resonant Rossby Waves, the result of Arctic Amplification, caused by Anthropogenic Global Warming.
And that’s how you get yer AGWAAQRaRWaWW. Rhymes with “It’s stuck in my craw, paw!”
Which brings us to Quasi-resonant circulation regimes and hemispheric synchronization of extreme weather in boreal summer. This is the title of a paper by Dim Coumou, Vladimir Petoukhov, Stefan Rahmstorf, Stefan Petri, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Here is the “for the people” abstract of the paper:
The recent decade has seen an exceptional number of boreal summer weather extremes, some causing massive damage to society. There is a strong scientific debate about the underlying causes of these events. We show that high-amplitude quasi- stationary Rossby waves, associated with resonance circulation regimes, lead to persistent surface weather conditions and therefore to midlatitude synchronization of extreme heat and rainfall events. Since the onset of rapid Arctic amplification around 2000, a cluster of resonance circulation regimes is ob- served involving wave numbers 7 and 8. This has resulted in a statistically significant increase in the frequency of high- amplitude quasi-stationary waves with these wave numbers. Our findings provide important new insights regarding the link between Arctic changes and midlatitude extremes.
The effects of climate change have occurred (and will occur) on a number of time scales. Over a century we’ve had a foot of sea level rise, which is showing its effects now. Storminess, in the form of changes in tornado regimes and tropical storms, has probably been with us for a few decades. But Agwaaqrarwaww has probably only been with us since about the beginning of the present century.
I blogged about this before. In “Global Warming And Extreme Weather” I described an earlier paper produced by the same research team, in which they presented this graphic:
Followed by this graphic, which I made, with the intention of more clearly showing the trend in QR events:
I sent that to one of the authors, which may have inspired the production of a different graphic but showing the same trend, for the current paper:
Look how recent this phenomenon is. It is now, current, happening at sub-climate time scales. We don’t know enough about it, and we need to address it.
I asked Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the paper’s author and the scientists I was exchanging graphics with, to elaborate on the signficance of this recent study and to explain why it is important. He told me, “Previous studies have failed to find trends linked to global warming which could explain the recent spate of unusual extreme events. For example they have looked at trends in the occurrence of blocking or in the speed of the jet stream. But you need to know what you are looking for in order to find it. The planetary wave equation reveals what the resonance conditions are which make the waves grow really big, causing extreme weather. So we knew what trends to look for.”
I also asked him if severe weather events post dating the end of his study period conform to expectations as Rossby Wave events. “I can’t say for sure because we have not done the analysis for the very latest data yet – studies like this take time,” he told me. “But I suspect there have been more resonance events. They are not necessarily constrained to July and August either. The record flooding in May/June 2013 in Germany of the Danube and Elbe rivers, for example, was associated with large planetary wave amplitudes. Dim Coumou has assembled a young research team now that will work on further data analysis.”
Damian Carrington has written up this research at the Guardian, and notes:
Prof Ted Shepherd, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, UK, but not involved in the work, said the link between blocking patterns and extreme weather was very well established. He added that the increasing frequency shown in the new work indicated climate change could bring rapid and dramatic changes to weather, on top of a gradual heating of the planet. “Circulation changes can have much more non-linear effects. They may do nothing for a while, then there might be some kind of regime change.”
Shepherd said linking the rise in blocking events to Arctic warming remained “a bit speculative” at this stage, in particular because the difference between temperatures at the poles and equator is most pronounced in winter, not summer. But he noted that the succession of storms that caused England’s wettest winter in 250 years was a “very good example” of blocking patterns causing extreme weather during the coldest season. “The jet stream was stuck in one position for a long period, so a whole series of storms passed over England,” he said.
I’m not convinced that the seasonality of Arctic Amplification matter much here, and I note that we’ve not looked closely at the Antarctic. Also, “blocking patterns” and QR waves are not really the same exact thing. They may be different features of the same overall phenomenon, but QR Rossby Waves are a more general phenomenon, and a “blocking” is something that happens, probably, when that phenomenon interacts with certain kinds of storms.
It occurs to me that there is a huge difference between Agwaaqrarwaww happening randomly in space vs. blocking and steering waves setting up for long periods of time over the same place, and appearing in those places typically. Like Godzilla. We know that over time Godzilla will usually destroy Tokyo and not London, because Godzialla, while sometimes random, is usually geographically consistant. Can we expect Rossby Waves to usually causae drought in California, flooding on the Front Range or Rockies, and drenching rains in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Region, for example? I asked Stefan about that as well.
“We have not looked at this aspect yet, but the recent paper by Screen and Simmonds has indeed found such a preference of the wave troughs and crests to sit in certain locations.
Ruh Roh.
Above: Ferguson police spent the evening dropping tear gas containers on reporters to keep news of police repression from getting out. They are unaware of the deadly truthful combination of cell phones, citizens, and twitter.
My fellow American: You live in Ferguson, you just don’t know it yet.
NOTE:
BREAKING: Rep. Clay Says St. Louis County Police to be Relieved of Duty #Ferguson
— Derek Wallbank (@dwallbank) August 14, 2014
“Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son!”
Stop the police abuse. Send the National Guard to Ferguson.
Create a Michael Brown Law requiring police officers to wear cameras and record any interaction with the public at all times.
Please Enact New Federal Laws to Protect Citizens from Police Violence and Misconduct
Here are photos of the Saint Louis County cop who assaulted me yesterday. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/z8Y7jrCrRd
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 14, 2014
Photos: Chaos grows in Ferguson over shooting of unarmed teen http://t.co/UxUAVPSkcP #MichaelBrown pic.twitter.com/e3nsMjvHTN
— Matthew Nighswander (@mattnighs) August 14, 2014
So, just to be clear, 100% of murders in #Ferguson this year were committed by police officers. These "riots" are state-sponsored terrorism.
— Andrew David Thaler (@SFriedScientist) August 14, 2014
Mike was the FIRST Homicide in #Ferguson this year. Take that in. And it was the POLICE that killed him.
— Reagan Gomez (@ReaganGomez) August 14, 2014
#FoxNews: A study in word choice.
#BundyRanch : "DEFIANT", "DUST-UP", "RANCHERS"
#Ferguson: "RAGE", "RIOT", "MOBS"
— clydetheslyde (@clydetheslyde) August 14, 2014
Enough is enough in #Ferguson – time to take things out of the hands of local police http://t.co/Ue0caApGvo via @voxdotcom
— Madhusudan Katti (@leafwarbler) August 14, 2014
the same place you put your hand on when you stood in class to say "Liberty and justice for all" is the place cops are aiming at. #Ferguson
— bethany (@wiIted) August 14, 2014
people need to understand racism isn't dead and it still goes on, even in our own country #ferguson pic.twitter.com/7uaULHKYiB
— auserie chanel (@caliwifi) August 14, 2014
Snipers point guns at protesters & journalists in America. Who can deny the police state now? #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/ir7ssUznyR
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 14, 2014
This what they not showing you on the media. These young men cleaning up after the riot. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/ReeZtbTLzt
— Tabitha Henderson (@tabithalou) August 12, 2014
Tune into @allinwithchris Thursday at 8pm on @MSNBC They will be broadcasting live from #Ferguson. assuming police don't arrest them first..
— Rick S (@gratepool) August 14, 2014
'Cops in #ferguson are quite literally rolling up to reporters & tear gassing them to keep reports from getting out pic.twitter.com/ihFikqS5eS'
— Ahmadiyya Times (@AhmadiyyaTimes) August 14, 2014
People always say they wished they lived in the 60s. Here's your opportunity. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/pC6hmM0SP9
— nevena jovanovic? (@nevenator_) August 14, 2014
Update about five protestors were just arrested outside the #Ferguson Police Station for refusing to leave. pic.twitter.com/vsl02oT7M7
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 14, 2014
PHOTOS: Police fire tear gas near Al Jazeera crew, then disassemble the gear after they flee. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/It5FOxVWhB
— Cassidy Moody (@CassFM) August 14, 2014
Four military size tanks and a block full of "police" for a crowd of a less than 50. #Ferguson #DONTSHOOT pic.twitter.com/oOHmHZ8htb
— Liz Peinado (@LizPeinadoSTL) August 14, 2014
Massive respect to John Legend
#ferguson pic.twitter.com/csX1bT0H2c
— Celina (@WantingThe5Ds) August 14, 2014
I’ve spoken to a lot of Minnesota DFLer’s (that’s what we call Democrats ’round these parts) about today’s Primary, especially in relation to the auditor’s race. Rebecca Otto, who, full disclosure, I don’t know at all but whose husband is a friend and colleague, is the incumbent. Rebecca has really put a shine on the Auditor’s office. I understand that the previous auditor, a Republican, pretty much sucked, so that might have made looking good a bit easier for Rebecca, but it can’t be true that all of the other auditors across the country also suck, and the various professional associations that deal with this sort of thing have awarded Rebecca with top level official accolades over and over. So, she is clearly about the best Auditor in the country, and in Minnesota, the best one to come along in a while.
Now, it turns out, that two or three of our Governors were formerly Auditors. I don’t know why Auditor would be a stepping stone to Governor, or even, if it really is. That might just be a fluke, like every president elected in a year that ends in zero getting killed or almost killed. The point is, it has become local political folklore that Auditor is a good jumping off point for Governor.
So, there’s this guy named Matt Entenza who has run for Governor before. He used to be in the State Legislature. Mostly though, his political career consists of spending huge piles of family money on running races that he loses. I’m pretty sure Matt wants to be be Governor, and he wants it so badly that he is virtually delusional about the prospects. Or, perhaps, he simply has a deep and unabiding disdain for Minnesota voters. He thought he could just spend a lot of his family money on a campaign and unseat a well liked and widely respected incumbent.
In Minnesota, we use the Native American system of choosing our candidates by party to run in the general election. No one fully understand the process but it involves a lot of standing around in a special room that you need permission to be in. People join in groups and hold up symbols of their political beliefs and the candidates they support, then move between groups, sometimes combining groups. A Caucus Chief occasionally tells all the people in this or that group that they must disband, and those individuals then join other groups. If a group gets big enough and they are fast enough they can form two groups. The exact number of groups that are formed and their exact configuration can determine who ultimately is chosen by the Caucus. At various points the Caucus is frozen, and tough looking guys working for the Caucus Chief make sure no one crosses certain lines that are sometimes marked on the floor with Duct Tape. It might be unfrozen and refrozen a couple of times, but eventually the Caucus Chief calls an end to it and each of the clusters of people elect a certain number of representatives who are supposed to vote a certain way on the first ballot at a district convention. But no one knows who these people are because the Caucus Chief works for a secret society that maintains all the rules of the caucus system, and runs it, but does not provide any information from it, so the supporters of the various candidates have to rush to one end of the room where those elected by the Caucus groups are required to go to state their name and how they will vote to a group of very old people who can’t hear a thing. The friends of the candidates try to glean the names of the elected ones, and the elected ones often try to interfere with this process, which seems ridiculous because the first thing you get if you are elected is the candidate buys you a cup of coffee later in the week at Caribou or Starbucks.
Amazingly, this system works rather well, and eventually produces a set of “endorsed” candidates. Rebecca Otto, who is a successful well liked and widely respected incumbent, was endorsed by the party. Then moments before a special deadline, after the endorsement, this guy Matt Entenza, who really wants to be Governor, filed to run. So there was a primary challenge within the party.
Entenza lied and lied and lied. He lied about himself, he lied about Rebecca, he lied about what the Auditor’s job is, he lied about what he would do if elected (we know he lied because he’s not an idiot and he made claims that he would do things that the Auditor simply does not do).
So the Primary was today. They are still counting votes as I write this. And, as I said, I have spoken, especially today, to a lot of DFLer’s (Minnesota Democrats.)
Most of them strongly support Rebecca Otto and are annoyed at Entenza. I spoke today to one person who said he’d vote for Entenza, and I think maybe his wife was to. I spoke to an Entenza staffer — a paid employee of Matt Entenza’s campaign — who quit a couple of weeks ago “… because Entenza lied to me, he lied to us, we all told him to go to hell …” who is voting for Rebecca.
Last time I looked 17% of the vote was counted and Otto was ahead by over 80%. I’m calling it for Otto.
<
h2>New for August 16th
I will try to keep new information and updates in the same post for a while until I have a chance to do a comprehensive re-overview of everything.
The 16 August update from WHO indicates a large uptick in the daily number of cases. Over the two days of the most recent reporting period an average of 76 cases per day have been identified as confirmed, probable, or suspect, with a total of 76 deaths over that period of time.
Good news is that the situation in Nigeria doesn’t seem to be developing. There were no new cases over the this reporting period, and one death. The last new cases in Nigeria were reported on August 6th for the period between August 2 and august 4. So over ten days without a new case in Nigeria probably means that the “outbreak” is burned out.
Meanwhile, there is another suspected/possible case in another country. This has happened a number of times, where a suspected Ebola case is identified. Hong Kong, the Philippines, the US, etc. have had these, and of all of the cases none have been shown to be Ebola except possibly one, and that is in Saudi Arabia did not work out either, the Saudi case was not Ebola. The new possible case is in South Africa.
The updated graph showing the increase in daily cases is inserted below as before.
And now, a personal note to Laurie Garrett. Laurie wrote this post, and I wanted to comment on it but the commenting system there did not work for me. (Perhaps one has to be subscriber.)
Laurie,
I love you work. It was your book, based on your Thesis at the Kennedy School, that got me interested in tropical diseases. Well, that and at the same time going to the tropics, running a makeshift health clinic there, and getting some of the diseases. I often point people to your earlier writing on influenza to find out about the true pre-Wakefield anti-vax movement, to see how the US handling of Swine Flu made it very difficult if not impossible to have a sensible national vaccine program that was not byzantium (which is what we have now)
But I think your article on not being scared enough about Ebola has some problems. I agree that this outbreak has not been taken seriously. I nave noted in my own writing that WHO and CDC, even, are coddling the public about some of this. I also noted, which I don’t think you did, that Ebola “in Africa” is Ebola in America already. One of my neighbors died of Ebola, and one of his relatives in Liberia did as well, and some of my other neighbors lost relatives, I’ve heard. This is because Liberians and other Africans live in communities with one foot in Africa and one foot here. Those who died of Ebola did so in West Africa, but they are still neighbors who live here part time or African-based relatives of neighbors who live here full or part time.
So yes, for many reasons, be concerned.
Here’s where I don’t agree with you.
First, while the cures and vaccines are truly not deployed as you point out, you are more negative than necessary. In fact you are hyperskeptical. A common phrase in hyperskepticism is “there is not a shred of evidence of…” Well, there is not a shred of evidence that my four year old is upstairs eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of the nice dinner I made my family, but that does not mean it is anywhere near impossible. In fact, he’s probably eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, though I can produce not a shred of evidence from here in my basement that he is. There is in fact good scientific reasons to think that the cures that have been brought to the brink of testing are likely to work, and Ebola is not like Malaria (not even close) or even viral cousins such as Influenza when it comes to vaccine prospects. The prospects are good, if only someone would work on them.
Next problem: No, Saudi has not Ebola. No, there have not been a number of actual, non-panic-based cases of Ebola outside of the affected area other than my neighbor and those he infected, in Nigeria.
Next:No, Nigeria does not actually seem to be having an outbreak. No new cases in ten days is good news. It may be over there.
We’ll see about South Africa.
But yes, I do agree with you on two other points. First, all of the health care molecules have moved to one corner of the proverbial room suffocating other health care efforts in the affected countries. This is a big deal. Second, yes, it really is possible despite major media and major organizations insisting it is highly unlikely for this outbreak to seed an outbreak pretty much anywhere in the world. Not that likely. But I won’t say that there is not a shred of evidence that it could happen (citing that every single case outside the zone for which confirmation was completed has not worked out). I’ll just say that we have no freakin’ clue how likely it is, but it is not zero and the consequences would be dire.
So, I don’t want to tone-troll your article. You went for breathless, and you got to breathless, and that’s probably a good choice, you have the credibility to pull it off and people need to hear much of what you said. But no, Ebola is not leaking out of the zone now, and yes, there is better hope I think for the existing (as in on the table, not deployed or even tested) cures and vaccines (and by the way, the “ethical considerations” are a red herring, that is true for all drug development, but seems only mentioned frequently with respect to Ebola).
End of rant. Again, love your work.
Cheers,
Greg
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h2>End of August 16th update
Probably.
Yesterday I made the optimistic statement that the number of new cases a day may be leveling off, as for two reporting periods in a row, representing five days, the new cases were about half of the previous reporting period, normalized to a per-day estimate.
Today’s report from WHO covers two days and indicates 128 more cases, so the number of new cases per day for the latest known period is actually higher than at any previous time during this outbreak. Pursuant to this I’ve replaced the pertinent graphic below. I was optimistic, but I also provided caveats. The caveats won.
At some point, the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa has to slow down and stop. The disease is too hot to not burn itself out, and it has no human reservoir. Ebola accidentally broke into the human population earlier this year or late last year, probably once (see below), and despite the regular increase in daily reported cases over the last several weeks, the disease must at some point begin to level off.
The latest two updates from WHO indicate that the Ebola outbreak may be leveling off now, tough it is too early to be certain. The following graph shows the approximate number of new cases reported per day by WHO. This is calculated by taking the number of new cases in a report and dividing by the number of days covered by that report. A given estimate of daily new cases may be quite off for a number of reasons. First, even if there is a long term upward or downward trend, there is likely to be a lot of randomness in the data. Second, this is the number of cases reported in that time period, not the number of cases that manifest. It is likely that some cases manifest during the reporting period are not recorded yet, and cases manifest for the prior reporting period are included in the current reporting period. Over several reporting periods this would, obviously, even out, but a given number of days in a reporting period may be off by a day or so. So, these caveats mean that we should be very cautious in interpreting this graph.
NEWER GRAPH:
Note that what appears to have been a fairly steady increase in number of cases, with about the same number of ups as downs but with the ups adding to a higher sum, since late June, has been followed by two reporting periods with decreases in numbers of new cases. Note also, however, that in late May the number of new cases per day went up fairly quickly then dropped again before a new steady rise occurred. If we use a moving average of 3 data points, which would combine sets of 2-4 days each to obtain something close to a 10 day effective moving average, the upward trend is more evident than any recent downward trend:
The next two WHO reports may clarify this trend.
The mortality rate for this outbreak continues to decrease slightly, which is probably a result of increase effectiveness of the response to the outbreak, despite all the news stories about how things seem out of control.
The current mortality rate is dropping below 55% given confirmed, probable, and suspected cases and deaths. But the rate varies across different categories. The outbreak-long rate for all cases and all deaths is currently 55%, and looking only at confirmed cases and deaths, it is 56%. The mortality rate for all previous African Ebola outbreaks, taking total reported cases and total reported deaths, is 66%.
Currently there are over 1,800 confirmed, probable, or suspected cases reported in the West African outbreak, and 1176 confirmed cases. Using just the confirmed cases, to be conservative, the present outbreak is 277% larger than the next largest outbreak, which was in 2000 in the Gulu, Masindi, and Mbarara districts of Uganda, with 425 cases. The total number of confirmed cases for the present outbreak represents about 49% of all of the prior African Ebola outbreaks combined.
Patient Zero, who we assume is the person to whom the disease jumped from its usual animal reservoir, directly or indirectly, may have been a toddler in Guinea. The two year old child died in December 2013, which is quite a bit before this outbreak came on everyone’s radar screen, and after which it was fairly low level for a while.
I’ve long maintained that a likely way for Ebola to get into other species is from ground dwelling mammals, such as chimps, gorillas, or forest antelopes and duikers, ingesting or mouthing the discarded wadges of fruit previously handled by Ebola-carrying fruit bats. From such non-human animals the Ebola would then enter human populations from people butchering bush meat. In this case though, I wonder if the toddler may have been a direct recipient, picking up and mouthing fruit-bat spit covered fragments of fruit found on the ground. A parent’s worse nightmare, apocalypse style, to be sure.
There has been a bit of complaining about my use of the term “drug” or “cure” for ZMapp, a drug that was developed to fight Ebola but not used until just now. Some have said it is not a drug until it is tested and deployed, and until then, it is a possible cure and not a real cure.
This is wrong. A “possible cure” is when you take an existing compound or substance, apply it to a pathogen or an affected animal model, and get a hopeful result. This possible cure can then be further developed to make, most of the time, nothing because these things generally don’t work out. Or, to make a cure. Which can then be tested.
In the case of the treatment now given to three patients (two survived one died), the cure was developed for Ebola based on some pretty solid science and prior experience with similar type cures working for similar diseases, successfully, in the past. The cure was not in “hopeful” or “possible” phase, but rather in developed but untested phase. The WHO convened an emergency panel of experts, yesterday, which decided that the cure should be used in the field under certain circumstances. So now there is an untested but developed cure for Ebola being deployed in West Africa. The WHO discussion on this is here.
Don’t forget to go and vote in today’s primary!
I for one will be voting for Rebecca Otto for auditor. She is nationally recognized as one of the best Auditors ever in the country. Rebecca Otto is the DFL endorsed candidate. The person running against her in the primary, Matt Entenza, has run a highly questionable and dishonest campaign. See this for more details.
Please someone make this happen. Thank you very much.
A list of reviews of Nicholas Wade’s book “A Troublesome Inheritance,” mainly by anthropologists and others who have investigated issues surrounding the concept of “race” in humans.
Bethune, Brian: Inheritance battles
Daniels, Anthony: Genetic disorder
Dobbs, David: The Fault in Our DNA
Fuentes, Augustín: The Troublesome Ignorance of Nicholas Wade
Geneticists, Lotsofthem: An Open Letter
Goodman, Alan: A Troublesome Racial Smog
Johnson, Eric Michael: On the Origin of White Power
Laden, Greg: A Troubling Tome
Marks, Jonathan: The Genes Made Us Do It
Marks, Jonathan: Review of A Troublesome Inheritance
Myers, PZ: The hbd delusion
O, Josyln (AAA): Is Cultural Anthropology Really Disembodied?
Orr, Allen H.: Stretch Genes
Raff, Jennifer: Nicholas Wade and race: building a scientific façade
Steadman, Ian: “Jews are adapted to capitalism”, and other nonsenses of the new scientific racism
Terrell, John Edward: A Troublesome Ghost
Yoder, Jeremy: Cluster-struck
Yoder, Jeremy: How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong
Lots to talk about here:
Published on Aug 1, 2014
Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak On Melting Ice and Global Impacts (1080p HD)This film brings you the voices of climate scientists – in their own words.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called “Earth’s Air Conditioner”.
Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world – and the Arctic is central to these impacts.
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Scientists featured in the film include:– Jennifer Francis, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University.– Ron Prinn, PhD. Chemistry
TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.– Natalia Shakhova, PhD. Marine Geology
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska-Fairbanks.– Kevin Schaefer, PhD.
Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center.– Stephen J. Vavrus, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison– Nikita Zimov, Northeast Science Station, Russian Academy of Sciences.
– Jorien Vonk, PhD. Applied Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University– Jeff Masters, PhD. Meteorology
Director, Weather Underground
Three years after the disaster at Fukushima, science correspondent Miles O’Brien returned to the Daiichi nuclear plant for an exclusive look at the site. Follow Miles on a never-before-seen tour of Daiichi’s sister site, Fukushima Daini, which narrowly avoided a meltdown during the Tohoku earthquake. As the country debates turning its reactors back on, Miles asks: will Japan have a nuclear future?
I don’t like the messaging Holdren almost always seems to start with: “While we can’t attribute a single bla bla bla to climate change” (it is not the right way to phrase what is happening, this is a good video just out:
It is probably safe to say that Nigeria now has an outbreak, as a handful of cases contracted in country seem to have been reported, though it is too early to be sure this will stick. Hopefully it won’t.
There is also one suspected case, a death, in Saudi Arabia, of someone who would have caught it in Liberia.
The number of new cases per unit time seems to have increased, or at least, stayed high as it has been for the last several days. The following chart based on WHO data shows the cumulative number of cases and deaths, including probable, suspected, and confirmed, as per WHO reports which come out at irregular intervals but generally every few days, though today’s report (August 6th). The mortality rate continues to hover between 50 and 60% (the drop at the end of that line is probably an artifact of the rate of new cases added and does not mean a drop in mortality rate, most likely)>
See this post for a more detailed look at the dat up through the previous report, where there is a discussion of some of the nuances.
More posts on Ebola:
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/08/04/there-is-a-cure-for-ebola-we-have-it-we-just-dont-let-anyone-use-it/">There is a cure for Ebola, we have it, we just don’t let anyone use it.</a>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/08/04/ebola-outbreak-continues-probably-worsens-perhaps-spreads/">Ebola Outbreak Continues, Probably Worsens, Perhaps Spreads</a></li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/07/27/ebola-outbreak-in-west-africa-some-basic-information/">Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Some basic information (Updated)</a></li>