Computer Models, Wuhan Virus and Climate Change (Updated)

The Wuhan virus bears heavily on the global warming / climate change hoax the left is pushing on the U.S. as a stalking horse for socialism and consolidation of power.  The progressive left wants the message to be that the Wuhan virus is a mere foreshadowing of what will happen in the future due to climate change.

For example:

. . . [I]f the disease and our utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate change, it should, not just as a “fire drill” for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history.

NY Mag., The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future

The international COVID-19 pandemic is many things, but its deepest impact may be fostering a recognition that this machine of civilization that we built is a whole lot more fragile than we thought. And that is why, in the long term, the coronavirus will one day be seen as a fire drill for climate change.

NBC News, Coronavirus and climate change: The pandemic is a fire drill for our planet’s future

“(H)umans can expect more such illnesses to emerge in the future, as climate change shifts habitats and brings wildlife, crops, livestock, and humans into contact with pathogens to which they are susceptible but to which they have never been exposed,” according to zoologists . . .

Forbes, Lessons From Coronavirus For Future Climate Change Public Health Crises,

Except that the Wuhan Flu and our response to it presents a fundamental problem for the climatistas.  All of the ills forecast to come as a result of global warming are based on one thing and one thing only — computer models.  Disaster is only a few decades or a century out, really, because . . . the models say so.

If nothing else is clear, its that the world should emerge from this China-caused pandemic with an incredibly healthy skepticism of the accuracy of computer models that have not been thoroughly vetted and of proven track record.  For example, this today:

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been the stoic face of the state’s battle against the deadly coronavirus, but he recently acknowledged that his efforts to save residents’ lives and keep the regional economy afloat have been hampered by “100 percent wrong” projections.

“All of the projections, by the way, and the statisticians have been 100 percent wrong at this point,” Cuomo on Thursday told former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on his radio show.

Gov. Cuomo put in layman’s language what is readily apparent to anyone paying attention.   The models being used do not reflect reality.  (Update:  Andrea Widburg has a superb post on this topic at American Thinker.)

To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.

As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April 5 to about 136,000.

On April 8, the projected cumulative deaths were slashed to 60,145 (with the upper range again cut, to about 126,000). That is, in less than a week, the model proved to be off by more than 33 percent.

That same problem of unreliability has been apparent for decades in the climate models used by UN IPCC to forecast catastrophe for humanity, even leaving aside the problem of fraudulent temperature inputs.  If the progressive left wants to keep pushing the climate hoax after the Wuhan Flu is simply a memory, they are entitled to do so.  But we are also entitled to demand that both the temperature inputs and the models be thoroughly audited and vetted before we spend a single dollar more to fight the mythical catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.