Amid crisis Progressives contemplate their navels.

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Apr 2020

The Hannon Times continues to push an progressive mindset in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.  On April 3^rd, it ran no fewer than four articles that amount to nothing but idle speculation, the daily editorial, and articles by Craig Wallace, Jennifer Good (a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines), and a signed piece by AP writer Cara Anna.  Wallace thinks we need to go backwards in time, Good thinks that climate change is bad, The Time’s editorial provides evidence that Good needs to rethink her position, and the AP proves that it does know what the word “existential” means.

Craig Wallace, an author of misanthropic novels, believes that this COVID-19 crisis shows we need to return to the society of 1970, when tax rates were high and social welfare generous.  He left out of his analysis that churches were much fuller then, debt levels were much lower, the Vietnam War had just crested, and Canada went through the FLQ crisis.  There is no going back.

Jennifer Good is another one of those Arts majors who thinks her expertise in popular culture, film, and communication qualifies her to opine with the weight of an expert on climate change.  Her opinion is that climate change is bad too.

The Times’ own editorial hit on something that ought to ring a bell with climate alarmists, the mathematical model.  The mathematics of modelling pandemics is good, and all that is needed for projections to be accurate is for the right data to be plugged into the variables.  But in climate modelling, the math is not good, in part because the modelers don’t know all the variables, never mind having good data to plug into the variables they know.

Accurate modelling of the pandemic is problematic because the data can change so rapidly.  Accurate modelling of climate is plain hopeless by comparison - its projections cannot be even as reliable as those of pandemic modelling.

All the climate alarmists have are models, and those models have over-estimated actual temperature measurements for the last twenty years.  Perhaps this experience with pandemic modelling will make the public more skeptical of the catastrophic projections of the climate alarmists.

If the article by Cara Anna of the Associated Depressed shows anything (Africa faces an existential threat) it is that she doesn’t understand what the word “existential” means, nor do any of the experts she quotes.

Demographically, Africa is a young and rapidly growing continent.  It is riddled with malaria.  Both these conditions, youth and malaria, have been found to be barriers to fatalities due to coronavirus infection.  In addition, because of the poor health care in Africa, people who are alive don’t tend to have underlying lung conditions, which are what tend to make a coronavirus infection especially lethal.  In short, the conditions required to render the African population vulnerable to a near extinction – which is what an “existential” threat is - simply don’t obtain.

The article’s proposition that, in the coronavirus, Africa faces an “existential” threat is arrant nonsense.

Perhaps the Times, in the absence of other news, have nothing else to do but offer navel contemplation.
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