Free Republic

Federal officials say climate change is intensifying droughts, leading to wildfires far worse than experts or models have predicted. That is adding to the danger that accompanies one of the U.S. Forest Service’s primary methods of mitigation: the prescribed burn. “Fires are outpacing our models,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement this week. Moore pointed to escalating climate conditions as the reason why an otherwise routine prescribed burn in New Mexico earlier this year escaped to ignite the largest wildfire in state history. “Climate change is leading to conditions on the ground we have never encountered,” he...

Computer models that project future climates are widely used for adaptation, mitigation and resilience planning. More than 50 such models were assessed and compared in the latest round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6), run by the World Climate Research Programme1. It is crucial that researchers know the best way to use those outputs to provide consistent information for climate science and policy. We are climate modellers and analysts who develop, distribute and use these projections. We know scientists must treat them with great care. Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too...

Two women who were dumped unconscious at different Los Angeles hospitals late last year by masked men died of multiple drug intoxication, the Los Angeles coroner has ruled. Christy Giles, a 24-year-old model, and her friend Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola, 26, were dropped off at the hospitals on Nov. 13 by the men in a black Toyota without license plates, Los Angeles police said at the time. Giles, 24, died the same days she was dropped at the hospital of multiple drug intoxication, with cocaine, fentanyl, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) — a date rape drug — and ketamine in her system,...

Paris (AFP) – People driven from their homes as global warming redraws the map of habitable zones are unlikely to find refuge in countries more focused on slamming shut their borders than planning for a climate-addled future, according to a top expert on migration. From fleeing a typhoon to relocating in anticipation of sea level rise, climate migration covers a myriad of situations and raises a host of questions. But one thing is sure: the number of climate refugees is going to increase in the coming decades, according to a major UN report on climate impacts and vulnerability released on...

The UK is facing a substantial wave of Omicron infections in January without further restrictions, scientists say. The number of deaths from the variant by the end of April could range from 25,000 to 75,000 depending on how well vaccines perform, they said. But the experts behind the study said there was still uncertainty around the modelling. In the worst-case scenario tougher restrictions may be needed to stop hospitals being overwhelmed, they said. The study is by an influential group of disease modellers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) who also advise the government - but...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Cadell Walker rushed to get her 9-year-old daughter Solome vaccinated against COVID-19 — not just to protect her but to help stop the coronavirus from spreading and spawning even more dangerous variants. Scientists agree. Each infection — whether in an adult in Yemen or a kid in Kentucky — gives the virus another opportunity to mutate. Protecting a new, large chunk of the population anywhere in the world limits those opportunities. Vaccinating kids also means reducing silent spread, since most have no or mild symptoms when they contract the virus. When the virus spreads unseen, scientists say,...

Three scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work to understand complex systems such as the Earth's climate. Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were announced as the winners at an event in Stockholm. The work by Manabe and Hasselmann led to computer models of the Earth's climate that could predict how global warming would change the environment. The winners will share the prize money of 10 million krona (£842,611). It is very difficult to predict the long-term behaviour of complex physical systems such as our planet's climate. But computer models that can anticipate...

One of the Ukrainian models detained in Dubai for an X-rated photoshoot that made international headlines claims she was forced to take part in the stunt – and is still stuck in the United Arab Emirates. SNIP The curvaceous blonde slammed the alleged organizer of the event – Ukrainian-American Vitaliy Grechin, 41 – in messages to her boyfriend for allowing the raunchy images to be posted online and cause a furor, East2West News reported. SNIP Grechin — a businessman who has been seen pressing the flesh with Barack Obama, eating with George Clooney and posing with Hillary Clinton in photos...

Off the coast of England, there's a tiny, wind-swept island with the remains of a lifeboat rescue station from the mid-1800s. The workers who once ran the station on Hilbre Island did something that, unbeknownst to them, has become crucial for understanding the future of a hotter climate: They recorded the tides. The data, scrawled in long, handwritten ledgers, is just one example of the tens of thousands of pages of tidal measurements stored in archives around the world. Now, scientists and historians are racing to digitize them in an effort to understand how fast oceans are rising. The aging...

LONDON - Misuse of climate models could pose a growing risk to financial markets by giving investors a false sense of certainty over how the physical impacts of climate change will play out, according to the authors of a paper published on Monday. With heatwaves, wildfires, massive storms and sea-level rises projected to intensify as the planet warms, companies are under growing pressure to disclose how the disruption could affect their businesses. But the authors of a peer-reviewed article here in Nature Climate Change warned that the drive to integrate global warming into financial decision-making had leap-frogged the models used...

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently called for a national mask mandate That, in addition to survey evidence showing that people are still not wearing masks in public places, led Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last three decades, to advocate for a national mask mandate. Previously, Fauci has generally stopped short of saying that the American people should be required to wear masks under a mandate.The authors of the new University of Washington study arrived at their figures by using a model based on the following assumptions: Masks when worn properly offer a 40%...

Hillary Clinton headed into Election Day in 2016 with a lead in the polls so significant that even the establishment media outlets viewed the Democratic presidential nomineeÂ’s victory as all but certain.At the same time, a number of predictive models, three of which were highlighted by The Epoch Times before the election, against all odds forecasted a victory for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.Ahead of the 2020 election, two models again point to a Trump victory, despite the polls, while another is forecasting, with a significant question mark, a narrow victory for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.S&P 500 In...

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Douglas Axe and William Briggs. We had hoped Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of President Trump’s top medical advisors, had learned his lesson about trusting predictive models. After all, it was just such trust that sparked the pandemic panic in the first place. Recall that in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) favored an apocalyptic model from Imperial College London. The United States government took its cues from the Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. We now know these models were so wrong they were like shots in the dark. How...

Since the start of the COVID pandemic I have watched almost everyone get mission critical things wrong. In some ways this is not surprising. Medical terminology is horribly imprecise, and often poorly understood. In calmer times such things are only of interest to research geeks like me. Were they talking about CVD, or CHD? However, right now, it really, really, matters. Specially, with regards to the term COVID ‘cases.’

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19. =========================================================================== Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet. Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be...

The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZqGSnVt8c8&feature=emb_rel_end

Science and “Science” Politicians love to say that they are “following the science.” To hear them talk, you would think they spend hours poring over data and they go where the numbers drive them. If only.The COVID epidemic has brought out politicians’ faux reliance on “science” in spades. As good an example as any is my state, Minnesota, where our governor, Tim Walz, has offered one tribute after another to “science” as he has driven our state off the road and into the ditch with an irrational shutdown that protected all but the vulnerable.When Walz issued his harsh shutdown order,...

The coronavirus pandemic in the United States could be over as early as mid-November, new modeling has shown. Researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design have created a complex model predicting the exact date the pandemic will end in the US, UK, and other countries around the world. According to the data, the US is on track to be coronavirus-free by November 11, while the UK could see an earlier end date of September 30. The model predicts the trajectory of the spread of the virus over time while tracking the actual number of new confirmed cases per...

...In March 2020, during the Coronavirus outbreak, the Gates Foundation awarded a more than $79 million grant to Imperial College London. The Imperial College London model, spearheaded by team leader Neil Ferguson, projected 2.2 million American casualties. The disastrous model led to Elon Musk lambasting Ferguson, who resigned as an adviser to the British government when he was caught flaunting the very lockdown that his numbers inspired. Imperial College London admits on its website that its research on arboviruses, which includes work on vaccine projections undertaken by Neil Ferguson himself is Gates-funded, stating, “Our research is funded by the Bill...

It should be clear by now that most of the world's leaders were stampeded over the lockdown cliff like so many lemmings. What caused the stampede is even more remarkable: a tiny coterie of obscure, soft-spoken epidemiologists in white lab coats playing with numbers. Americans trying to keep up with the torrid pace of new developments over the past few months have been hearing about that work — the data-modeling these people do by feeding selected data and a variety of assumptions into a computer. The computer then disgorges diagrams and charts that attempt to describe the future progress of...