Last week I spoke with a man who had COVID a year ago. He's 64 years old and he and his girlfriend had refused vaccines and they were both admitted to hospital and he wound up in the ICU and she died. I asked him if he was feeling fully recovered from the COVID and he said, "Well, I had pneumonia and I'm over that."
And I said, "Well, but that was COVID pneumonia."
"Well, that's what they said."
"But your COVID test was positive."
"Well, that's what the hospital said. They make more money that way."
So there you have it. This man refused to believe in vaccines and even when he got COVID he refused to believe it. He and his girlfriend just happened to get pneumonia for the first time in their lives in the middle of a pandemic but it wasn't COVID.
Those authorities, they just lie all the time, you know. For their own financial gain, don't you know?
This is a man who, for whatever reasons, has embraced a belief system.
Today, I opened my New Yorker magazine which is part of my own belief system: The New Yorker writes the truth and in an elegant way.
But the first article, the "Talk of the Town" spun into a discussion of the Canadian wild fires which are causing havoc in American cities with smoke. I was told "in some states wildfires in recent years have reversed about half of the air-quality gains that resulted from the Clean Air Act,"-- without specifying which Clean Air Act.
And that left me wondering, how do you measure "air-quality gains?" And for how long is this reversal going to last? But before I could settle on more questions I was told, "Smoke now accounts for as much pollution as fossil fuels do, if not more." And I wondered: How do they know that?
Is it possible to distinguish smoke particles from fires from pollution from cars and power plants?
Maybe there's some technology which can do that.
Smoke "can be tens times a toxic as other forms of pollution, including car exhaust." Apparently, they can measure fine particulate matter called PM2.5, and they know these inhaled particles become blood borne and go to brain. I can imagine some technology might be able to do this--after all they can find fetal cells in the maternal circulation, so science is wonderful.
But then, "When the air quality is poor, studies have shown, that crime goes up, test scores go down, umpires make more bad calls and investors make more mistakes."
Wow! Those must be some special studies!
How could you connect "test scores" in some classroom to air quality? Try to imagine designing a study that could do that, something which could sort out all the variables. Correlation not being causation does not even begin to state that problem.
Then we get the "linked to" thing: "Exposure to air pollution has been linked to asthma and emphysema"--well, that sounds reasonable" but then, "Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; cancer and strokes; depression and suicide; miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality. Each year, air pollution contributes to as many as ten million deaths around the world."
Which evoked The Phantom's Law of Large Numbers, to wit, "When you see a really large number quoted, you can be 90% sure the guy using it has no clue what he's talking about."
"According to a 2020 report, the original legislation [The Clean Air Act] still produces 3.8 trillion dollars in economic benefits, and saves nearly four hundred thousand American lives each year."
Now, you usually hear a stream of numbers like this brewed into a long stream of declarative sentences, so fast and so thoroughly mixed in you don't have time to think about where each number came from, or the sort of study you'd need to design to derive such a conclusion, but if it's in print, you can go back and start teasing out statements.
How would you ever figure out if a piece of legislation which was designed to improve air quality worked, and that if it did work to improve air quality, that its effect was 3.8 trillion dollars? And how could you know this Act resulted in the saving of 400,000 lives?
During the pandemic, when they were trying to figure out the number of deaths caused by a relatively discrete cause--a new virus--they still had to resort to "excess death" studies, i.e. how many more people were dying in nursing homes than usually died during a given November. And even then nobody could be sure.
When you are in the hospital with a desperately ill patient it's tough enough to know whether what you did for him actually saved his life--he might have survived even without what you did for him--but to know that for 400,000 lives? Well, that must be quite study!
And then, from that bedrock of fantasy numbers comes the political/ideological use of such phantoms: "The air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition." That is, abandoning fossil fuels will pay for itself in just air quality downstream benefits.
Now, I'm all for wind, solar and renewal "clean" energy but saying the benefits will pay for the transition neglects that the guys who make and distribute and promote fossil fuels are not going to get paid. They don't believe windfarms and solar panels will benefit them personally, and maybe they have a point.
But, then we are told about more studies: "After a gas-leak scare near Los Angeles, the city school district installed air filters in classrooms and the students' math and English scores shot up, the magnitude roughly on a par with cutting class sizes by a third."
Yowser! Forget those teaching plans--just install air filters!
And, after that, paint the classroom walls bright green and I'll bet you'll see those scores go right through the roof.
Then, at the end of a couple of pages of numbers and definitive statements we get the message: "For much of history, that battle has been waged against microbes, mutations, and the ravages of old age. Increasingly, however, we find ourselves contending with the planet itself--a consequence of the damage that we've inflicted upon it."
Wait! Where did that come from? Okay, I get the fossil fuel thing as part of mankind's disservice to the planet, but we started off with wildfires, which are mostly the result not of mankind, but of lightning strikes. You can't pin all that on mankind.
Well, maybe you can. We played a role but preventing wildfires from getting too close to homes and other property and now we've got the problem of underbrush fed fires, but really, is mankind on the hook for every environmental problem?
Ronald Reagan dismissed efforts at clean air by saying that after years of laws restricting car emissions, a single volcano or a fire season in the West pumped more pollution into the air than all man's depredations. And, he was probably half right. But, the famous LA smog was largely ameliorated after car emission standards were imposed, and there may have been some cause and effect there.
But what's the harm in an article like this in the New Yorker? The likelihood is, energy from wind and solar are likely better for the planet.
But each solution presents its own problems: Hydroelectric power was thought to be environmentally pure--just use the power of the river or the water to generate electricity: How could that be bad? Well, if you're a salmon trying to get upstream, you may not like the dam much.
Adding corn alcohol to gasoline would displace gas for renewable corn and mean saving burning a million gallons of gas. But, then you have to remember that growing the corn takes oil driven tractors and water and soil and none of that has zero environmental impact.
Even the idea of planting trees, which seems so obviously good, may not be.
Before Europeans arrived in America and cleared the New England forests, the East Coast was covered with trees, breathing in all that CO2 and breathing out oxygen and keeping the planet cool.
But no, it turns out dark green forests are like black asphalt in the sense they absorb sun and heat large parts of the globe.
It's never simple in biology or earth studies.
The fact is, that guy who refused to believe he had COVID, when his COVID test was positive and he wound up in the ICU he simply refused to believe the stuff authorities told him... when you look at all the stuff thrown at us which fails scrutiny, it's not quite so hard to understand why.
