But it’s nonsense.

The Average (otherwise-healthy) Joe who gets Wuhan Flu probably has near-zero chance of dying, if he’s 38 and doesn’t smoke. (I picked 38 because that’s the median age of the U.S. population.)

If a 95-year-old with emphysema gets it, well…that guy shouldn’t be making any long-term plans. (But he shouldn’t have been doing so anyway.)

The real challenge here is making sure we don’t overwhelm the healthcare system. Thus, if we could just slow down the rate-of-spread, things will be fine.

That means everyone staying home, ’cause the moment you’re within 10 feet of someone with the virus, you’re exposed, and many people with no symptoms (or very mild ones) are shedding the virus.

Ugh.

As I said in a different thread: The hot tip is to stay home, telecommute, order supplies to be delivered by Amazon drone, and watch Netflix.

No one will be surprised to hear that there is a worryingly wide range of problems associated with climate change. From extreme weather events to melting ice caps and the extinction of animal species – these have all been well-researched to fall somewhere in the range of ‘likely’ to ‘highly probable’. Perhaps not as obvious is the suddenly rise of the Corona virus and the flu, as a direct result of climate change. How does that even work?

Coronavirus And Climate Change: Winter And Traveling Makes People More Vurnerable

Second-top hit: more useful, in the context of what “useful” means in CC discussions.

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-climate-change-pollution-environment-china-covid19-crisis/a-52647140
Date 05.03.2020 [European style; no time travel involved]
Author Ruby Russell

Coronavirus and climate change: A tale of two crises
Coronavirus has cut emissions faster than years of climate negotiations. Does the outbreak reveal what life might be like if we were to act seriously on climate change? Or what it might be like if we don’t?
…
China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, has no plans to cut its emissions anytime soon. Under its Paris Agreement pledges, Beijing has promised to hit peak emissions by 2030. So for the next decade, they’re only going to go up.

Yet suddenly, this colossal, coal-powered economy has slashed emissions by 25%, according to numbers crunched by Lauri Myllyvirta at the University of Helsinki’s Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Not because of the climate crisis, but the COVID-19 public health emergency.

“For something like this to happen virtually overnight is very much unprecedented,” Myllyvirta told DW.

Wuhan, the 11 million-strong Hubei province city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak has been on lockdown since late January. With businesses and factories in the province shuttered, and hundreds of millions of people across the country rendered immobile by sweeping travel restrictions, the atmosphere above China in NASA satellite images appears virtually clean of nitrous oxide emissions.
…
In China, Myllyvirta says the pressure to resume business as usual is so great there have been reports of local governments ordering workerless factories to run their machines just to use up power, with the expectation that their superiors will be looking at electricity consumption as a sign of recovery.

After the 2008 financial crash, “which also led to a dramatic drop-off in China’s emissions and marked improvement in air quality because export industries went into freefall,” Myllyvirta says the government launched a massive, construction-heavy stimulus program that saw emissions surge.

Such stories don’t bode well for the climate in a post-crisis scenario when the country is keen to get the economy back up and running.
…
“The only time we see emissions significantly reduce is when countries — or the globe — goes into recession,” says Jon Erickson, an ecological economist at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute who studies emerging infectious disease vectors in relation to climate change.

“These moments really point to how intimately greenhouse gas emissions are tied to economic growth,” Erickson told DW.

While recessions are good for the climate, they’re terrible for people — particularly those who already benefit least from our fossil-fuel economies. Among the hardest hit by China’s coronavirus response are low-waged migrant workers already living precarious lives.
…
Yet advocates of a managed contraction of economic activity to protect the climate say shocks like the current outbreak illustrate the stark choices before us.

“We never want to do things in crisis mode,” Erickson says. Instead, we have a “five to 10 year window” to “completely transform the economy so that the worst side of the contraction can be reduced, so that we can protect those who are most vulnerable.”

If that sounds ridiculously optimistic, recent weeks at least suggest that when a crisis is deemed urgent enough, the world can act big and fast.

“If we truly treat climate as an emergency, as we are treating this pandemic as an emergency, we have to have a similar level of international coordination,” Erickson says, starting with rapid scaling-back of fossil fuel investments.
…
With a global death toll of over 3,000, COVID-19 still appears far less deadly than fossil fuels, which, according to a recent study that Myllyvirta co-authored for Greenpeace, are responsible for 4.5 million air pollution-related deaths each year, aside from climate impacts. But scientists warn that warmer, wetter conditions are increasing the probability of such outbreaks. No one knows how deadly the next one might be.

“This is an opportunity to talk about planned economic stabilization, and talk about planned degrowth,” Erickson says. “The economy will contract, it will hit limits, it will crash, it will collapse on its own. That’s going to hurt the most.”

There were some good pictures.
I don’t have any problem with managing things so emergencies don’t become panicked crises, but (see Mr. Ridley above) spending our money on research for adapting to Climate Change beats the futile attempts at mitigation all hollow.
However, a “five to 10 year window” to “completely transform the economy” still sounds like Panic to me.

Here is one article, old now, that seems to be representative of his position.
I mention it on the theory that COVID will be inevitably be linked to Climate Change, if that has not already happened.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/adapting-to-climate-change/
Published on: Sunday, 06 April, 2014
“Global warming looks like it will be cheaper to cope with than to prevent”

It was a good essay, worth reading, and the governments & scammers totally ignored it, of course – coping would not give them their accustomed Return On Investment (their time, paper, and pixels in exchange for your money).

This one is mostly a long (long, long, long) list of the events attributed to Climate Change. That was in 2010, so I’m sure it’s gotten longer, although there may be an asymptotic limit as the number of affected events approaches the totality of life.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-climate-blame-game/

Well, that might be so, but there is a reason for that.

Our main-stream media for years now has lied to us. They have lied with malice aforethought. They have lied to us when they didn’t even need to lie. And now, since Donald Trump came on the scene, it has gotten orders of magnitude worse.

As it is now, I don’t believe *anything* that comes from our MSM unless it can be verified independently. That’s just the way it is with me now.

Ridley’s bona fides do give some credence to his warning, although he doesn’t cite any specific research notes. He has to give a sop to the envirofascists, but it’s a small one (unsure if he believes in AGW aka Climate Change or not), but he absolutely correct in his chastisement of the scammers who are just in it for the money.

But we have indeed cried wolf over so many issues, that it has contributed to us being underprepared. We should have seen that globalisation would cause such a risk to grow ever larger and taken action to prevent a new virus appearing. We should have worried about things other than climate change. Here are a few of the measures we could and should have taken in recent years instead of going into hysteria about the gradual warming of the temperature mainly at night, in winter and in the north.

We could have pursued an international agreement to ban the sale of live bats in markets. Bats are especially dangerous because they are fellow mammals and share with us a tendency to live in huge aggregations. We could have funded more research and development in antiviral therapies, vaccines and diagnostics. We could have built a better infrastructure to isolate cases in healthcare systems, and at transport hubs. These might have been expensive, yes – but nothing like the money we are spending on precautionary measures against dangerous climate change which is still decades away. [this is the sop I mentioned]
…
Last week Greta Thunberg was still telling the European Parliament that climate change is the greatest threat humanity faces. This week Extinction Rebellion’s upper-class twits were baring their breasts on Waterloo bridge in protest at the billions of people who they wrongly think may die from global warming in the next decade. These people are demonstrating their insensitivity. They are spooked by a spaniel when there’s a wolf on the loose.

Lots of interesting reasons why he’s concerned, but he also doesn’t want panic; tho he does criticize Trump (like so many writers feel they must). He thinks climate change alarmism is also hurting the response to this real issue.

He had a good Feb. post about getting viruses from bats, and noting that this one is probably from a pangolin (from a bat?).
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/coronavirus-bats/

What is the maximum of non-panic, prudent carefulness? Travel bans, schools canceled (who pays for home care?), work from home for office workers. Lots more “wash your hands”.
Here’s a great twitter thread on the superiority of soap.
https://twitter.com/PalliThordarson/status/1236549305189597189

https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus-live-plastic-stainless-steel-for-up-to-3-days