Don't Go Outside--There's 'Danger' Everywhere

'Zombie Viruses' in Glaciers, Antifa Mob in Court for Assaulting Reporters, and 'Baffled Scientists': Welcome to the best Germany of all Time

Oh my, I’m so glad the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ is firmly behind us—for now we can re-focus on The Really Big News™. Below you’ll find a casual selection of what passes for ‘journalism’ these days in the best Germany of all Time.

As always, translations, emphases, and bottom lines mine. Enjoy, if you will.

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Fear of Zombie Viruses: 10,000 Unknown Pathogens Discovered in Glaciers: Why Scientists are Concerned

By Christian Glas, Bild Zeitung, 3 Jan. 2023 [source]

Life blooms in the eternal ice! But maybe also death…

Glaciers and the eternal [sic] polar ice caps are teeming with microbes and pathogens. But will the risk of pandemics or serious illnesses increase if the ice melts, for example, due to climate change?

To answer this question, a Chinese research team took a closer look at the upper ice layer of 38 glaciers. The amazing result: they found more than 10,000 previously unknown viruses on the surface, in meltwater, and in dust. The experts [no irony here] published the results of their investigation in the specialist magazine Science Bulletin.

Study leader Yongqin Liu from Lanzhou University in China says of her study: ‘It provides the first systematic characterization of the diversity, function, and potential health threat posed by polar and montane supraglacial viruses.’

Zombie Viruses from the Ice

It has long been known that there is life in ice. If the ‘eternal ice’ [oh, look, we now got ‘scare quotes’] melts, it could cause disease outbreaks as viruses could become a serious problem. Researchers warn: zombie viruses from melting permafrost pose a deadly threat. But how many viruses, bacteria, and microorganisms make themselves comfortable in the cold and how great the danger from the ice is has so far remained a mystery.

Are Bacteria now Becoming more Dangerous?

The new study now provides information about this issue. The good news: more than 83% of the viruses discovered only affect bacteria. People and animals are spared from them. Liu: ‘Danger to the public health does not come from them.’

However, this is no all-clear: the glacier viruses do not kill infected bacteria immediately. This creates enough time for the genetic material of the glacier viruses to penetrate that of the bacteria. This can cause them to develop resistance to antibiotics. The researchers have already been able to detect 31 resistances and 1,400 genes that can increase the pathogenic effects of bacteria.

In which regions did the researchers find the new viruses? The research team traveled to the coldest regions around the world:

• Tibetan plateau (8894 viruses)

• Alps (71 viruses)

• Arctic (1709 viruses)

• Antarctica (141)

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Intermission

As the above-linked study clearly holds—and as is clear from the origins of the collected viruses as cited above—, the results point squarely to ‘the Tibetan Plateau’s Mountain glaciers, which support ∼20% of the human populations on Earth’.

Note, further, that I have full access to the otherwise (paywalled) paper, hence I shall quote from its conclusion to provide some more context here:

Supraglacial viruses detected in the current study posed a low risk to public health in terms of pathogenic viruses and ARGs carrying MGEs. However, it is important to note that the sampling of most glaciers was conducted only once, and our current dataset represents a snapshot of the Tibetan Plateau supraglacial virome. Consequently, this work may not have captured potentially hazardous viruses deposited on the surface of Tibetan Plateau glaciers. Additionally, although Zhong et al. found that viruses archived in glacier ice cores, which are hundreds to thousands of years old, also pose a low risk, we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility of dangerous viruses within the Tibetan Plateau glacier due to its large volume.

Also, note that the Tibetan glaciers have been used by members of some of the oldest human civilisations—e.g., the Harappan civ. of the Indus Valley, which existed some 7-8,000 years ago and whose people didn’t die of a ‘pandemic’—and ever since. I suspect the overall risk from ‘zombie viruses’ is, factually, quite low, if existent at-all.

From the limitations section:

This virus genome catalog for glacier surfaces (SgGV) was mainly developed based on our Tibetan Plateau glacier-centric viromic and metagenomic datasets, and the Alps and polar glacier vOTUs were obtained by mining publicly available supraglacial microbial metagenomic datasets…Moreover, we recognize the possible occurrence of glacial RNA viruses because their potential hosts (e.g., microeukaryotes, such as snow algae) have been found in glaciers. Nonetheless, no RNA virome has been reported for glacial environments to date…

This study also expands our knowledge of the diversity, function, and adaptability of supraglacial viruses, and provides a basis for future research on the world’s glaciers.

In other words: grifters of ‘the Science™’, unite! Let’s move on.

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Anti-Mandate Rally 2020: Trial for Assault on ZDF Team Begins on Monday [8 Jan. 2024]

RBB 24, 3 Jan. 2024, 12:25 [source]

Almost four years after the attack on a ZDF team in Berlin on the sidelines of a protest against the Corona mandates at the time, the trial is set to commence. Three men and a woman are due to appear in the Tiergarten district court from next Monday, 8 January 2024, on charges of aggravated assault, as a court spokeswoman said on Wednesday upon request.

Two men from Berlin and a woman and her brother from Baden-Württemberg stand accused. According to the prosecution, they kicked and hit the ZDF team on May 1, 2020, at times with metal rods. So far, trial dates are scheduled until 13 March.

TV Team was Assaulted at Anti-Mandate Rally in 2020

The television team filmed protesters against the government's Corona mandates in 2020; it was on assignment for the ZDF satirical format ‘Heute-Show’. The journalists and security guards were then attacked in a side street near Alexanderplatz [i.e., in the centre of Berlin].

According to police, up to 25 people wearing masks and black clothes were involved. After the attack, the police arrested six suspects, some of whom are said to belong to the left-wing scene. They were released a short time later. DNA samples taken from the accused after attack.

The investigations by the State Security Office (Landesriminalamt), which is responsible for politically motivated offences, were sometimes complicated. Investigators made several calls looking for witnesses and asking for photos and video recordings. DNA traces were also found at the crime scene. After their analysis, the public prosecutor's office is convinced that the four accused attacked the team.

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Additional Context: How to Gaslight About Antifa

The same legacy media outlet reported the following in mid-April 2022:

Broken Bones in Assault on ZDF Team

A ZDF TV team was attacked by unknown persons on 1 May 2020. Previously, a reporter for the satirical program ‘Heute-Show’ captured voices of mandate-critical conspiracy ideologists at a demonstration on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in [Berlin] Mitte.

The subject was later attacked by a group of masked people in a remote corner near Alexanderplatz. Five people suffered broken bones and other injuries.

Also, the above report, dated 3 Jan. 2024 at 12:25 was amended less than an hour later. At 1 p.m. today, RBB 24 amended the concluding paragraph, adding this sentence:

It is suspected that the attackers from the left-wing extremist spectrum originally wanted to attack right-wing extremists and people from the Querdenker [i.e., anti-mandate] scene.

Oh, look, the prosecution had to admit the obvious: there were anti-mandate protesters in the streets, but for whatever reason, left-wing extremists clad all in black and wearing masks attacked journalists. With iron rods, leaving five individuals with fractured bones.

Sure, there’s the typical spin in terms of ‘anti-mandate protesters’ are right-wing extremists and nutjobs, but despite putting copious amounts of lipstick on that particular pig, even legacy media cannot deny the simple fact that this assault was carried out by—Antifa (which is the one word legacy media cannot bring itself to write).

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Glaciers are Melting More Slowly: Mysterious Findings in the Himalayas Has Climate Researchers Baffled

Focus Online, 3 Jan. 2024 [source]

The glaciers in the Himalayas are melting continuously—but slower than expected [is this ‘good’ or ‘bad’?]. Now an international team of researchers has identified a possible reason for this, which, however, only raises more questions.

The shrinking Himalayan glacier supplies a total of two billion people with water [and ‘zombie viruses’ as noted above]—hence, their melting threatens a quarter of humanity. A new study by an international research team, which was published in December in the renowned scientific journal Nature, now shows an unexpected trend: the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting more slowly than expected.

In their study, researchers evaluated data from the last 30 years from a weather station below the summit of Mount Everest at an altitude of 5,000 meters. The results: in the region below the peaks in the Himalayas, it is not getting warmer, but is actually getting slightly colder. How come? The research team already has one suspect in mind: the so-called ‘katabatic winds’.

A Natural Ventilator

These are winds that arise when a large, cool plateau—such as an ice shelf in Antarctica or a glacier—meets warm air. The glaciers cool the warm air, and the mixed air masses then create strong winds that barrel down the mountain walls and cools everything below the peaks. This is not a particularly ‘intuitive’ process, as the researchers themselves note in their study because the air in the Himalayas continues to warm up due to climate change, the winds are getting stronger—which in turn cools the glaciers.

However, it is still unclear what impact the natural fan will have on the Himalayan Mountains. The researchers believe it is at least likely that the effect slows down the melting of the so-called permafrost soils. That would be good news for the people of the Himalayas and the surrounding ecosystem: the looser the permafrost soil, the higher the likelihood of rockfalls, landslides, and floods [note the absence of ‘zombie viruses’ from the listing of concerns here].

The Alps are Too Small

Beyond that, however, many questions remain unanswered. In the long term, the winds could even accelerate glacier melting. The highest regions in the Himalayas are still suffering from climate change, and the winds may be increasing the suffering [now ‘regions’ can ‘suffer’ from ‘Climate Change™’]. The potential problem: the stronger the winds, the more moist air they push back down instead of letting it through to the summit. As a result, less snow falls at the summit and the glaciers lose mass.

It is also unclear what the newly discovered effect means for the animals and plants in the Himalayas. It also remains to be clarified how large the region is that is affected by the ‘katabatic winds’. The research team assumes that the effect also exists in other large mountains, such as the Pamir Mountain Range in Central Asia. It is home to some of the few glaciers in the world that are not shrinking. Our local Alps can hardly hope to be saved by the wind: they are probably too small.

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From the Paper by Salerno et al. (2023)

Here’s the link to the paper, entitled, ‘Local cooling and drying induced by Himalayan glaciers under global warming’, Nature Geoscience volume 16, pp. 1120–1127 (2023), whose abstract reads as follows:

Understanding the response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming is vital because of their role as a water source for the Asian subcontinent. However, great uncertainties still exist on the climate drivers of past and present glacier changes across scales. Here, we analyse continuous hourly climate station data from a glacierized elevation (Pyramid station, Mount Everest) since 1994 together with other ground observations and climate reanalysis. We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming. Reanalysis data suggest a broader occurrence of this effect in the glacierized areas of the Himalaya. We hypothesize that the counterintuitive cooling is caused by enhanced sensible heat exchange and the associated increase in glacier katabatic wind, which draws cool air downward from higher elevations. The stronger katabatic winds have also lowered the elevation of local wind convergence, thereby diminishing precipitation in glacial areas and negatively affecting glacier mass balance. This local cooling may have partially preserved glaciers from melting and could help protect the periglacial environment.

Sounds ‘fun’, eh? Let’s read a bit more:

Cooling trends of diurnal air temperature

In contrast to most regional and global records, we find that the mean annual air temperature has been stationary at Pyramid during the last three decades (Supplementary Table 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2, black line). This unexpected observation seems in contrast with the attribution of the accelerated glacier mass loss to increasing air temperature. To reconcile this apparent discrepancy, we take advantage of the unique climatic dataset at Pyramid and analyse its diurnal temperature and nocturnal temperature separately, partitioning the year into two periods: the cold season from November to April and the warm season from May to October.

Note the disingenuous wording here: no change in temperatures since 1994 is referred to as an ‘apparent discrepancy’. Moving on:

We find negative T_max trends at all the other existing stations close to the Himalayan glaciers…the consistency of the cooling trends across all available high-elevation stations lends confidence that this is a process typical of Himalayan glacierized regions beyond the Everest region…

Whereas an elevation-dependent warming (that is, stronger warming rate at higher elevations) has been suggested at the global level, we find that glaciers are associated with a significant reduction of the local warming [ouch for the ‘global’ models]. In non-glacial conditions, we also observe a direct elevation-dependent warming, in particular above 4,000 m a.s.l. (Fig. 1b). Cooling trends, however, are evident at all glacierized locations (black points in Fig. 1b) (P < 0.001 for the analysis of variance test on the means). At lower elevations, trends are positive, although less strong than those found at higher, non-glacierized elevations. The magnitude of the low-elevation trends in ERA5-Land corresponds well with the trend that we observe at 27 ground stations in Nepal below 2,000 m a.s.l. (Supplementary Fig. 8).

Triple-ouch for the ‘global’ models, I’d say: the paper flies in the face of ‘global’ suggestions, not only near the Himalaya peaks but also between 4,000-2,000 m a.s.l. and below.

The unexpected finding of cooling at high elevation close to glacier masses requires revisiting our understanding of glacier–atmosphere interactions…

Implications for climate change impacts in the Himalayas

Our study has provided evidence for a hitherto missed process in glacier–climate interactions at high elevations. We have described a glacier effect on local climate in the Himalaya, associated with global warming, which has lowered the daytime temperature close to the glacier masses [read this sentence again, please]. Potentially, glacier effects on local temperature could occur in other mountain chains, where glaciers can develop katabatic winds according to local climate regime, glacier size, slope and debris cover.

The proposed conceptual model reconciles the apparent discrepancy between the observed local cooling and the accelerated glacier mass loss in Himalaya [as measured since 1994; there’s no earlier evidence]. While atmospheric warming is increasing glacier ablation, the lowering of the near-surface air temperature over the glacier surface and consequent enhancement of katabatic winds has shifted the extent of daytime cooling toward the lower reaches of the glaciers and into the proglacial domain. Whereas the local cooling could have partially protected these low glacier reaches from warming, it has further lowered the elevation of the local wind convergence and consequently precipitation has diminished at high elevation, implying a further negative effect on glacier mass balance. This precipitation decrease was proposed by ref. ²⁹, after observing the glacier changes in the Mount Everest region over the last decades, although its relative impact is currently unknown…

The process we highlighted is potentially of global relevance and may occur on any glacier worldwide where conditions are similar. We limited our analysis to the Himalaya, also considering the scarcity of data in high-elevation areas across the globe but future research should look into its existence in other regions of the world and into the morphological (for example, debris cover, local topography, total glacier area and glacier energy balance) and climatic factors that control it. Some of those elements have a simplified representation in ERA5-Land because of ERA5-Land coarse spatial resolution (or are absent, for example, debris cover). It is promising, however, that the reanalyses are able to represent the first-order controls and main processes leading to cooling and the generation of katabatic winds. Future research should focus on establishing the factors determining the occurrence, magnitude and downward effects of katabatic processes, the cooling they induce and their ability to change glacier mass balance across climates and regions.

So, now we know ‘more’, eh. Global warming induces local cooling and drying, which has been ‘overlooked’ so far. Note the absence of data outside the Himalayas older than 1994, and the ‘apparent discrepancy’ between ‘global’ models and the evidence presented here.

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Bottom Lines

I’m not going to check all the stuff legacy media puts out, there’s no point to it. What I try to convey today, though, are the stunning levels of gaslighting with respect to quite important topics.

We note, in passing, the abysmally low quality of the media pieces, esp. in light of the underlying realities of what is reported.

Germany is destined to collapse before too long, if only because the discrepancies between ‘reality™’ and objective reality are all-too apparent these days.

Neither the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ nor ‘Climate Change™’ are discussed even remotely accurately, which begs but one question: do the people in charge drink their own Kool-Aid, too, or are they just gaslighting the people?

Whatever the eventual answer—my money is on the former, for what it’s worth—this will not end well.

Sigh.