NOT MUCH

                      From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14      4142    15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194

April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786       59 

June    1         287    10637        2346      3205       95

 July   7          251      8440        1595        817      411

Aug    4          656    10120        1118        532      423 

Sept   1        1480    10470          703        505      235

          8        1700      9836          250        339      253

        14        1934      9001          709        281      300

        22        2228      9326          839        279      124

        28        1836      7924          818        375      201

        29        2190      8859          643        309      108

Summary:  just when you think all will be well, an uptick, for both the USA and World.

More and more you'll read about COVID-19 oral antiviral pills, especially from Merck, Pfizer, Roche and Atea.  The good thing is that it is a pill, not a shot.  But this is not a vaccine.  You still need to be vaccinated to be safer.  These pills are taken AFTER YOU CONTRACT COVID-19 to shorten the duration of the illness and mitigate serious symptoms.  First to appear could well be Merck's molnupiravir.

Incidentally, ImmunityBio, a U.S. company, has acquired worldwide rights to develop in the UK a COVID-19 vaccine in tablet form.  Clinal trials of the oral vaccine are being held in the U.S. and South Africa.  A pill is almost always cheaper and easier to store.  This option will help induce those who fear injections to get vaccinated.

I worked in the U.S. Senate for three years.  Back  then, bipartisanship was everywhere on everything.  Today, not only is there almost none, now intra-party posturing is prominent.  The amalgam of debt ceiling, government shutdown and two budget bills totaling $4.7 trillion or so, seems hopelessly quagmired with self-imposed deadlines.  So what will happen? Both parties can't afford to do nothing, so something will eventually pass, maybe next month.  Not worth your while to even follow those happenings.

We just got over the Tokyo Summer Olympics.  No one blames this gathering for causing the peak of COVID-19 in Japan, but, let's face it, the stringent measures they took still did not stop the spread of this outbreak in Japan, which is only now back to almost normalcy.  Yesterday, the country had 40 new deaths and 1742 new cases.  The USA?  2190 and 123,276.  But you say we have more people.  So the comparisons are:

• Japan new deaths = 0.3/million to U.S. new deaths = 6.6/million
• Japan new cases   = 13.8/million to U.S. new cases = 370/million

Why is the USA 20 times worse than Japan?

Incidentally, China's Winter Olympics open in four months on February 4, 2022.  Unlike the summer olympics, spectators will be allowed into winter venues.  However, no foreign spectators.  Yesterday:

• China new deaths = 0/million
• China new cases  = 0.02/million

Let's see if these numbers increase in March and April of 2022.  Why is China's new case rate 690 times better than Japan and 18,500 times better than the USA?  Well, for one, Japan only today ended its COVID-19 lockdown emergency.  China has had this virus under control since passing it on to the world.

My posting on this last day of September will focus on almost nothing.  The past two days were a bit too scientific for most of you.  Let me start with some history.

In 1777 what strategy won the Revolutionary War was George Washington mandating smallpox vaccinations.  90% of troop deaths came by disease, and by far the worse was smallpox.  You keep reading in your history books about all those battles, and this form of truth that had more meaning never comes up.

Imagine he trying to do this today with Republican opposition?  Washington had contracted small pox when he was younger.  The process for vaccination was crude, and today would be avoided by most.  It was not until 1796 that English doctor Edward Jenner found that milkmaids who got cowpox were immune to smallpox.  Then came the real vaccine.  Smallpox is the only human disease that has ever been eradicated, in 1977.  Hasn't polio?  Close, but not yet.

The private sector and some states are taking the lead for vaccination mandates.   Biden has restricted his to those under his command, like the military.  Courts have almost alway judged in favor of mandates.  Vaccines will lead the way to herd immunity and normalcy, and it turns out most Americans are highly supportive of mandates.  Still, 22% identify with anti-vaxers, and this has something to do with social identity and a sense of freedom.  They are more individualistic and don't trust scientific experts.  This also explains why so many Republicans and the uneducated fall in this category.  The most exasperated are friends who care who can't quite understand why.  

Speaking of freedom, don't know why I'm clogging this posting with anything about Brittany Spears, and I wonder most about why her escape from her father's conservatorship is news, for she will be 40 years old by the end of the year.  Maybe because I wanted to show this, which I think is her:

I'll close with the Lizzo burrito brouhaha on Tik Tok:

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Izu Island is bracing from an encounter with Typhoon Mindulle, now weakening, but still at 90 MPH:

Hurricane Sam in the Atlantic is continuing to move north, and, strangely enough, is strengthening, with an expectation of increasing to 145 MPH tomorrow.  Still, though, even St. John's island should not be impacted too much:

The Atlantic has a new storm named Victor (note, only one more name left...Wanda...then it will all be Greek) spawned off Africa, and, interestingly enough, is moving more north than west.  Will Spain be a possible target?  Has it ever been struck by a hurricane?  Nope, although around this time in 2005 Vince made landfall as a tropical depression.

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BACK TO VENUS

                      From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14      4142    15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194

April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786       59 

June    1         287    10637        2346      3205       95

 July   7          251      8440        1595        817      411

Aug    4          656    10120        1118        532      423 

Sept   1        1480    10470          703        505      235

          8        1700      9836          250        339      253

        14        1934      9001          709        281      300

        22        2228      9326          839        279      124

        27          689      5376          218        181      164 

        28        1836      7924          818        375      201

Summary:  As expected, the new deaths figure had small declines.  Clearly the U.S. and World reveal the familiar trend shown when the wave hits a peak and begins to drop.

If you're so unlucky, or an idiotic anti-vaxer, to contract COVID-19, get seriously ill and suffer from acute respiratory distress, you could be intubated:

How would you like to be so incapacitated for a week or so in that condition, hoping you will survive?  It would be a whole lot easier to get vaccinated.  Also consider also your family, friends and co-workers.

On the global warming front:

Greta Thunberg Attacks Leaders’ ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’

The future is drowning in “empty words.” The young climate activist mocked world leaders’ efforts to tackle climate change at the Youth4Climate meeting in Milan yesterday, saying, “This is not about some expensive politically correct dream of bunny hugging, or ‘build back better,’ blah blah blah, green economy.” Politicians are “shamelessly congratulating themselves,” Thunberg added, while “emissions are still rising.” About 400 youth activists from 200 nations are forging a statement ahead of November’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, where world leaders will aim to draft a new agreement pledging to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Sources: AFP, The Hill)

The September issue of Scientific American was entitled, BACK TO VENUS.  Finally, after almost 30 years, NASA apparently is sending two missions to Venus.  To quote:

• A turning point came in June, when NASA announced its latest choices for new interplanetary missions as part of its Discovery exploration program. The space agency had considered four missions: one to visit a moon of Neptune, another to rendezvous with a Jovian moon, and two, named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, each independently aiming for a return to Venus.
• To the shock of Venus researchers, NASA...selected both VERITAS and DAVINCI+ for flight. The two complementary missions are designed to study the planet’s bygone habitability. For the first time in three decades, NASA had chosen to go back to Venus—not once but twice.

• 
  That was not it:  Just a week after NASA’s eagerly anticipated announcement, the European Space Agency declared that EnVision, an orbiter that would carry out scientific surveys of select parts of the planet (Venus), would be joining the party.

• 
  Venus’s thick, suffocating atmosphere is about 95 percent carbon dioxide. Its cloud layers are packed with sulfuric acid—enough to chew through skin, bone and metal in moments. If you stood on the surface, you would escape the corrosive acid rain, but only because rain down there is impossible: the ground bakes at more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to broil any astronaut or robot. If you were miraculously heat-resistant, you would still have to contend with a surface pressure that is about 90 times that on Earth, making the experience like being a mile or more underwater. No matter which part of the planet you visited, you would die a quick but agonizing death.

A few interesting facts about Venus:

• Earth is only slightly larger than Venus.
• The only planet named after a female god.
• All the planets are named after Roman gods, except for Earth, although there is an association with Gaea, mother and wife of Uranus.  The Romans borrowed from the Greeks.
• At the atmospheric elevation of around 30 miles, the temperature and pressure can be close to that of Earth.

• 
  At its nearest we can be as close as 38 million miles apart.  The Moon is around 0.24 million miles from Earth.
• Venus very slowly rotates in the opposite direction as Earth, with one day being 243 Earth days long.

• 
  There is not much tilt (Earth's is 23 degrees), so not much of seasons.
• Has no moons.
• Has no rings.
• Has a hotter surface than Mercury.
• Has a mountain taller than Mt. Everest.

Back to Scientific American:

• In 1996 Mars got a boost of interest when reputable scientists published a paper saying they had found microscopic fossils in a Martian meteorite that had fallen in Antarctica.
• I thought that was preposterous, but President Bill Clinton gave a White House speech on this finding and earmarked funds for Mars.
• While still controversial, this bit of information has mostly been proven to be false.
• However, people have tended to forget this ridiculous potential, and remember the outrageous but maybe part.

• 
  Somewhat similarly, last year, researchers reported they detected phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere.  This seemed significant, for the only way that compound could have gotten there was through biological life.
• Soon thereafter all three back to Venus projects were okayed.
• Then earlier this year, a different study suggested this was not phosphine, but sulfur dioxide, casting doubt on possible life.
• However, too late to cancel those two American Venus discovery projects, each to cost around half a billion dollars.  
• Launching planned for 2028 to 2030, which means you know what.  
• Want to guess what these projects will ultimately cost?

• 
  Perhaps the James Webb Space Telescope, which could finally be sent out on December 18, can serve as an example of how NASA operates.
• Began in 1996 with an initial budget of half a billion dollars.
• By 2009 the price rose to just under $5 billion.
• Looks like the price is now around $10 billion, 25 years after initiation.
• Then the operational costs for perhaps 10 years still needs to be added.
• 
  Quick facts:
• To be launched on a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana.
• Will not replace Hubble, which will continue to operate.
• Will not be serviceable, for the James Webb will be placed at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, 940,000 miles away.  Why?  Hubble is only 340 miles up, and JR needs to be kept cool to measure heat from objects in universe.
• James Webb was NASA's second administrator and led the Apollo Project.
• Here is one write-up of what this telescope hopes to accomplish:

We have yet to observe the era of our universe’s history when galaxies began to form. We have a lot to learn about how galaxies got supermassive black holes in their centers, and we don't really know whether the black holes caused the galaxies to form or vice versa. We can't see inside dust clouds with high resolution, where stars and planets are being born nearby, but Webb will be able to do just that. We don't know how many planetary systems might be hospitable to life, but Webb could tell whether some Earth-like planets have enough water to have oceans. We don't know much about dark matter or dark energy, but we are expecting to learn more about where the dark matter is now, and we hope to learn the history of the acceleration of the universe that we attribute to dark energy. And then, there are the surprises we can't imagine! 

While it might seem like I am making fun of NASA and deprecating these billion dollar travails, the reality is that we should be able to afford certain high priority discovery opportunities at these rates.  

• Two years ago the cost of all Middle East wars since 2001 amounted to $6.4 trillion, or $6400 billion.  What have we gained?  
• A $10 billion NASA project amounts to 0.15%.  Another comparison is that, if you have $640 to spend on essentials, the equivalent of these $10 billion efforts would be $1.  

• 
  The two Biden budget bills gestating in Congress amount to $4.7 trillion, or $4700 billion dollars.  While Venus is not in those packages, surely our country can invest in these two On to Venus projects, for using that same comparison as above, the cost would be 10 cents for a $470 spending budget.
• 
  A final aside:
• Half-inch thick stack of hundred dollar bills amount to $10,000
• A billion dollars of $100 bills would weigh 11 tons.
• A stack of $100 bills equal to a billion dollars would be 67.9 miles high.
• A trillion dollars of $100 dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into space.
• The International Space Station is only 254 miles away.
• The Moon is 239,900 miles away.

• Humanity could well someday use the resulting information to avoid The Venus Syndrome.

Incidentally, this is a special month for Venus-viewing:

• As almost always, next to the Moon, Venus is the brightest light in the sky, where it can now be seen near the western horizon immediately following sunset.
• As October progresses, Venus will get closer to the bright red giant star Antares (Lehuakona) in Maui's fishhook.
• On October 29 Venus will go furthest east, setting at 8:46PM.
• As Venus prepares to set in the west, Jupiter and Saturn can be seen high above in the south direction.  
• With only good binoculars you should be able to actually see Jupiter's largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto Europa and Io, as well as the rings of Saturn.

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Typhoon Mindulle was a super typhoon on September 26 at 165 MPH.  Then it weakened to 105 MPH the next day.  Over the next few days Mindulle has continued to strengthen, and is now up to 130 MPH.  However, the Japan Times indicated that this typhoon will turn right and only skirt Japan:

Almost a mirror image, Hurricane Sam in the Atlantic hit 150 MPH on September 26, and today is also at 130 MPH.  Like Mindulle, Sam will be sufficiently offshore of the USA to not be a threat.

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THE VENUS SYNDROME

                      From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14      4142    15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194

April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786       59 

June    1         287    10637        2346      3205       95

 July   7          251      8440        1595        817      411

Aug    4          656    10120        1118        532      423 

Sept   1        1480    10470          703        505      235

          7          815      8469          342        358      282

          8        1700      9836          250        339      253

        14        1934      9001          709        281      300

        22        2228      9326          839        279      124

        27          689      5376          218        181      164

Summary:  Hmmm....something looks too good, so must be somehow questionable.  Well, I usually don't show Monday figures, so let's see how these numbers look tomorrow.

Ray Kamada, who blogs from the state of Washington, sent me his analysis of the current debate regarding the morality of the USA moving ahead with booster shots when developing countries are at vaccinations rates below 10%.  Two telling points are that this is not a simple matter, for the U.S. is faced with one of the two mRNA-based vaccine--by Pfizer--not being a safe life preserver, but a leaking one, plus these both cannot really be used by many undeveloped countries.  Read his thoughts:

Yet, such purely ethical discussions overlook a major technical detail. And that is - the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines require unbroken chains of ultra-cold transport and storage that simply aren't available in ~40% of the globe. And this void exists mostly in the same nations that have low vaccination rates. So, together with their high production costs, the two mRNA-based Covid vaccines, produced entirely in the US, are by nature ill-suited for such nations

Let's begin with one stark fact. Pfizer vaccine-based immunity to Delta-driven infection and hospitalization seems to have faded roughly twice as fast as that based on the Moderna vaccine.  Thus, if each nation aims to minimize its own Covid transmission rate, then, besides prophylactic measures, boosting its immunity via the Moderna vaccine at 8 months seems about optimal. But, contrary to the current CDC stance, it really looks like only about 4 months for Pfizer. Note that these tipping points are well-supported by the Israeli and Mayo Clinic data, plus more recent, multi-state reports collated by the CDC. (Read here, here and here.)

Intertwined with the above issues, we also mention that, as of late August 2021, at least 15 million US doses had spoiled and gone to waste, due mostly to lack of interest or even an outright disdain, promoted largely by red state governors who, unsurprisingly, have all been vaccinated. (Wasted doses reports here, here, here, here, here and here.) 

While I personally have been concerned about the inability of Moderna to gain even emergency use for their booster, the developing reality that their vaccine is effective for twice as long as Pfizer's is reassuring.  

Before I get into my science topic of this week, I mention that last Wednesday I posted Update on Fusion.  I just noticed in Quora a similar discussion:

This becomes a chicken and the egg situation - a vicious cycle. We can’t get fusion without funding, support, leadership and help. But - not getting support, means we can’t get fusion funding, which makes fusion harder to achieve, which in-turn kills support, which means we can’t get fusion funding, which…  Right now, there are lots of examples of fusion research teams in need of a very small amount of funding for fusion; but they can’t seem to get the attention of investors, private or public. These include:

Well, that was last week.  My science topic this week begins on Tuesday with a detailed coverage of what could lead to a permanent extinction event, continuing in part 2 tomorrow focusing on Planet Venus, which could well be the future of Planet Earth if something I call The Venus Syndrome occurs.  These thoughts congealed 14 years ago when the closing chapter of my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth featured this cataclysmic ending for our globe.  You can read my book, or go to the Huffington Post for some summaries:

• The Venus Syndrome (Part One)
• The Venus Syndrome (Part Two)
• The Venus Syndrome Revisited

Part of the stimulus for this particular blog is a perspective provided by Rinaldo Brutoco of the World Business Academy on The Methane Accelerator:

• We know about the falling levels of Lake Powell land Lake Mead, but don't know that the situation in  the Middle East and Africa is worse.
• He indicates that the climate change models of the UN IPCC are dominated by carbon dioxide.  The influence of methane is only now catching their attention.
• This vicious feedback loop he calls the Methane Accelerator:

Get ready to be jolted: that new attention to methane means the public will be hearing that climate change is a) much more severe than previously thought, and b) that it is accelerating at a geometric (as opposed to an arithmetic) rate.   

It turns out that massive amounts of methane are being released from ocean marine hydrates, and these are rapidly accelerating, and from the thawing permafrost due to atmospheric and ocean warming. The released methane is the “X Factor” in climate change, independently functioning as a powerful accelerant of greater atmospheric heating, faster ice melt, more severe weather disturbances, ocean acidification, and rising seas. 

• 

  In its most disturbing finding, the Academy concludes that, when the cumulative effects from the Methane Accelerator are fully considered, mankind is likely to have already passed the “tipping point” where merely reducing CO2 emissions, even to zero, will not be sufficient to curtail the catastrophic effects of climate change. 

• 

  Accelerating methane releases are accelerating the effects of climate change so we can better predict how bad it will become, and how fast. That’s helpful. And, be aware that a spontaneous “trigger” of a massive methane release could occur once again at any time resulting in another global mass extinction event. We simply must “wake up’ to this threat immediately so we can begin to address a responsible geoengineering solution that would prevent such a catastrophe.

That's exactly what I said 14 years ago, when after release of my book I gave a talk at the University of Hawaii, and had a lot of "experts" in the audience shaking their head at my naivete.  The dean of a school made some statement about how can this could possibly be so when there was so little methane in the atmosphere.  In those days, no noteworthy researcher in this field published on the potential danger of methane.

On the surface, they make sense, for our atmosphere is  0.0404% carbon dioxide to 0.00018% methane.  224 times more carbon dioxide than methane.

But, ah, depending the circumstance, molecule versus molecule, methane can be from 15 to 125 times more potent in inducing the Greenhouse Effect than carbon dioxide.  More important, in the tundra and coastline are vast amounts of methane compounds that if jostled from a current metastability and suddenly released into the atmosphere can cause something I termed The Venus Syndrome.   The particular danger is when methane suddenly explodes to the surface, where the puissance factor is even higher than 125.  The Venus Syndrome occurs when we reach this tipping point.

This phenomenon has been named by some as one reason why life on our globe has gone through five extinction periods.  The worst one was 250 million years ago when 96% of marine species and 70% on land disappeared.  The usual suspects are asteroids, super volcano eruptions and carbon dioxide.  However, included with these more conventional surmisals are methane hydrates as maybe a possible super villain.  Something called the clathrate gun hypothesis is worthy of your knowledge.

Methane hydrate is also called methane clathrate, and popularly known as fire ice because you can burn it.  Frighteningly, there is twice as much energy in marine methane hydrates as all the known fossil fuel deposits on land.  Finally, the nailing factor is that much of this ocean fire ice is located right on top of and otherwise near the Ring of Fire in the Pacific

What are the odds of the Ring of Fire, the entire ring, suddenly erupting to release these methane hydrate deposits?  Miniscule, of course, but not impossible.  As a worse case scenario, can The Venus Syndrome result in Planet Earth becoming the exact twin of Planet Venus?

I've had difficulty continuing my book on The Venus Syndrome because for the longest time I just could not come up with any kind of non-preposterous solution to overcome this extinction phenomenon. Then, as I was filming my TEDx talk, it occurred to me that among the cornucopia of benefits provided by the Blue Revolution, just maybe another one could be a solution to this quandary.  What this might be will not be shared until I complete that book. 

Tomorrow I will focus on Planet Venus, suggesting clues on why the surface of Venus is at 872 F and 1350 pounds/square inch, approximately the pressure found at 3000 feet ocean depths.  Any reality to the fascinating potential that there is a Goldilocks portion of the atmosphere there where, perhaps, life might exist?

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Typhoon Mindulle overnight strengthened to 115 MPH, and the Japan Times today showed this graphic:

Mindulle is the 16th named ocean storm in the West Pacific, and the above track sequence surely looks threatening.  However I checked various other models, and most of them shows this typhoon making almost a right turn and passing sufficiently far away along the east coast of Japan.  But as I always say, you're never sure until you are.

I might mention that Hurricane Sam is still plodding along in the Atlantic, having reached 150 MPH on Sunday, and today still a Category 4.  About all the trouble he will cause will be to ships and waves along the East Coast.

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