Utopia, you are standing in it!

While one should never consider a possible public health pandemic or human suffering as a good thing, the recent public concern about the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has provided us with some positive lessons on risk communications and public health management. While COVID-19 will not in all likelihood be the global pandemic health officials have been preparing us for, it has proven to be a useful “practice run”.

While I suspect this article may be too soon for those feeding from the lucrative trough of alarmism and the need to compulsively resort to precautionary measures, there have been many valuable learnings from this one-month public health exercise.

Here are the Risk-Monger’s Top Ten Good Things about COVID-19.

1. Increased public awareness on hygiene

“Regularly wash your hands … well.” … “Avoid touching objects like door handles, handrails, money, buttons and other people’s mobile phones.” … “Shaking…

Australia’s self-inflicted wind and solar calamity has just got serious; very serious.

Managing electricity grids is a finely balanced affair, requiring the ability to control what goes in and what goes out on a second-by-second basis.

The generation and distribution of electricity was relatively simple when synchronous, dispatchable conventional generation sources (in Australia, coal, gas and hydro) were the only game in town. Now, however, the erratic and chaotic and occasional delivery of large volumes of intermittent wind and solar has put paid to old certainties, and left grid managers struggling to prevent a complete grid collapse.

In this post STT takes a look at a brewing disaster waiting to happen. Precisely what the site has been predicting the best part of seven years.

The first article comes from the Australian Financial Review, which has been a very solid platform for wind and solar industry propaganda over the last decade…

I wrote last October about how poor nations that followed the pro-market recipe of the “Washington Consensus” in the 1980s and 1990s got good results. Johan Norberg addresses the same topic in this video.

Sadly, international organizations are infamous nowadays for the bizarre argument that developing nations should try to boost prosperity by imposing higher taxes and bigger government. I’m not joking.

I was even a credentialed participant at a conference on precisely this topic at the United Nations. It was a strange experience to be surrounded by anti-empirical people, but at least I wasn’t threatened with arrest, as happened at an OECD event.

Needless to say, these folks also think it’s a good idea to use foreign aid to finance bigger fiscal burdens in poor nations.

I’ve previously explained why this is a bad idea, at least if we care about achieving more prosperity for people. Simply stated…

The fact that Scotland’s wind farms have pocketed £650m for not generating power has attracted more than just a little attention.

STT has run several stories over the last few months about wind power outfits being paid very handsomely to NOT generate electricity. Perhaps it’s the sense of outrage that comes with knowing a group of unscrupulous thugs are being paid for doing nothing that’s prompted a flurry of articles, including this one.

Wind turbines generate more cash when switched off and Scots customers shouldering £650m blame
Daily Record
Paul Rodger
17 January 2020

Constraint payments have been paid to energy firms in charge of wind farms, when demand for electricity falls or winds are too strong for turbines to operate.

Wind turbines generate more cash when they’re switched OFF than when they’re working – with customers shouldering nearly £650 million in payments over a decade.

So-called ‘constraint payments’, a…

A new communication handbook for IPCC scientists is published. It is compiled by Climate Outreach and was commissioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I Technical Support Unit. They want this handbook out “ahead of the IPCC’s 1.5 degrees special report later this year”.

Interesting.

The handbook also comes with a video explaining the 6 principles to help IPCC scientists better communicate their work. They already lost me in the second sentence in that video though:

The facts are there, thanks in great part to the IPCC – the world’s leading scientific body on climate change

As a biologist, I get especially irked at the repeated claim that sex in humans is “a spectrum, not a binary.” In fact, as I’ve discussed several times before (e.g., here, here, here and here), sex might as well be a binary, because the overwhelming majority of people conform to the definitions of either male or female, which involve differential gamete production (sperm vs. eggs), and only slightly fewer fail to conform to a binary of other primary sexual characteristics (appearance of genitalia) or secondary sexual characteristics that appear at puberty (breasts, pubic hair, etc.).

To be a bit more precise, biological sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with “sex” on the X axis and “frequency of individuals conforming to that sex” on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at “male”, another huge peak at “female”, and then a…

As voters across the country head to the polls this month, we thought it was an ideal opportunity to look back at some of the research on 19th century elections we have featured in our blogs over the past few years. These draw on our work for the History of Parliament’s House of Commons, 1832-68 project, which is producing biographical profiles of the 2,591 MPs who sat between the first and second Reform Acts and accounts of the 401 constituencies in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales across the nine general elections which took place during this period. You can find more details about our project here.

The system under which electors cast their votes between 1832 and 1868 was very different in many ways from the modern British electoral system. As our editor, Philip Salmon, explains in this post, before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872…