Links tagged “flashback”

2006 study on viruses lockdowns, social distancing & masks:

On masks: "But studies have shown the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus. The pores in the mask become blocked by moisture from breathing, and the air stream simply diverts around the mask."

The final paragraph begins: "Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted."

On "Prohibition of Social Gatherings": "During [flu] epidemics, public events with an expected large attendance have sometimes been cancelled... There are, however, no certain indications these actions have had any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic."

"But a policy calling for communitywide cancellation of public events seems inadvisable."

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Also see: The Case Against Mandatory Mask Regulations

A 2015 study on masks of 1600 health-care workers showed those wearing masks were 6 times as likely to have flu-like illnesses as those in the control group after 4 weeks..." - The conclusion: "This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks... moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks, and poor filtration may result in an increased risk of infection."

More here: 

Flashback: Associated Press article says:

“…it was 100 degrees on June 27, 1915, in Fort Yukon, [Alaska] according to official records of the National Weather Service. Records date back to 1904.”

Inconveniently, that pretty much cools down Bill McKibben's claim of “the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle”.  Both Verkhoyansk, Siberia and Fort Yukon, Alaska are well above the latitude that defines the Arctic Circle. How is it, that in 1915, when “climate change” supposedly due to increased carbon dioxide in our atmosphere wasn’t even a factor, it got that hot? Inquiring minds want to know.

According to the Moscow Times:

“Verkhoyansk holds the Guinness World Record for the highest recorded temperature range of 105 C, fluctuating from minus 68 C to a high of 37 C. The previous temperature record for the isolated town of around 1,300 residents stood at 37.3 C in July 1988.” 

In other words, such extremes are normal for the place. With just over a hundred years of temperature records there, and the planet being billions of years old, it isn’t at all surprising that we still haven’t measured the extremes of natural variation, both hot and cold, for this place.

2010 Prediction by UN IPCC's Prof. Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State University: "Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive." 

2020 Update: Paul Homewood's analysis: "Since then, however, Greenland’s temperatures have returned to normal, and are no higher than they were in the 1930s. Far from being the start of a new trend, 2010 was simply an outlier:

The Peterman Glacier is still more or less in the same position as it was ten years ago

Greenland’s major glaciers stopped retreating seven years ago

John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892: Muir, who felt fraternity with four-legged “animal people” and even plants, was at best ambivalent about human brotherhood. Describing a thousand-mile walk from the Upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, he reported the laziness of “Sambos.” Later he lamented the “dirty and irregular life” of Indians in the Merced River valley, near Yosemite. In “Our National Parks,” a 1901 essay collection written to promote parks tourism, he assured readers that, “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”

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This strain of misanthropy seemed to appear again in biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 runaway best-seller “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich illustrated overpopulation with a scene of a Delhi slum seen through a taxi window: a “mob” with a “hellish aspect,” full of “people eating, people washing, people sleeping. . . . People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating . . . People, people, people, people.” He confessed to being afraid that he and his wife would never reach their hotel, and reported that on that night he came to understand overpopulation “emotionally.”

While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated 1 and 4 million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000

The virus rarely made front-page news.