Matt Ridley's Blog, page 2

The UK is sitting on a gas gold mine, while Putin has Europe’s energy market by the throat

The price of gas is through the roof thanks to Vladimir Putin, who has Europe’s energy market by the throat. Britain is on track to spend a staggering £2BILLION on imported liquefied natural gas from Russia this year as war rages in Ukraine.

Household bills will skyrocket even more than they already were — and could hit £3,000 a year. This is what happens when you rely on imported foreign energy. And what makes it more maddening is that we don’t need to do this. We have supplies here.

Under Lancashire and Yorkshire lies one of the best reservoirs of natural gas in the world, known as the Bowland Shale. At current prices, just ten per cent of this gas is worth several trillion pounds and could keep Britain supplied with gas for five decades. And we will need gas for decades whatever happens: To back up wind farms, heat homes and make vital chemicals for industry.

Last year I asked a Texan gas expert, who has drilled into the Bowland Shale, how it compares with American shale gas reserves. “It’s much better than what we have in the US,” he replied, “better than the Haynesville in Louisiana or the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, thicker and richer in gas”.

The technology to get the gas out is proven, safe and improving all the time. So why don’t we tap this treasure? Because wealthy, posh southerners went up North to protest, and the Government caved in.

The technology is usually referred to as “fracking” but that’s misleading. Hydraulic fracturing has been happening in oil and gas wells, including in Britain, for decades. What changed in the past decade was that it was combined with horizontal drilling and became cleaner and more effective. The latest technology promises to tap shale gas without fracking at all.

In 1997 Nick Steinsberger, of Mitchell Energy, almost by mistake tried cracking shale rocks a mile underground with water, instead of gel, and discovered a recipe for getting gas to flow from the very source rocks of gas, the shales.

The anti-frackers like to call this recipe “toxic chemicals” and imply it could poison aquifers (areas of rock underground that absorb and hold water), but that’s nonsense. The water is mixed with sand and a small amount of soap and bleach, of the kind you keep under your kitchen sink. It is pumped about a mile down, way below the aquifers, and into rocks that are, by definition, full of methane, ethane and petroleum, so they are already “toxic”.

The result of Steinsberger’s break-through was that, in a few short years, America became the biggest gas producer in the world, overtaking Russia. It went from importing gas to exporting it and gave itself some of the lowest gas prices in the world — now less than one-quarter of ours.

When I first visited the Marcellus Shale site in 2011 to understand what was happening, experts here were saying this shale boom was a flash in the pan, would not last and could not cope with low gas prices.

They were wrong.

A few years later I was back in Colorado watching Liberty Oil & Gas producing gas profitably and much more quietly from new wells at low prices. The site was right next to a housing estate. “Aren’t the residents worried about tremors and noise,” I asked. I was told they set up monitors and requested to be informed when the fracking would start, then called back a few days after to say: “Why did you not start when you said you would?”

“But we did,” replied the gas company, “didn’t you detect anything?”

It’s a myth that the American shale gas production happens in the middle of nowhere: Steinsberger started it in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas. Almost everything Friends of the Earth and its eco-luvvie rent-a-crowd say about shale gas is a myth. It does not cause water to catch fire, poison aquifers, spill contaminated waste water, increase radioactivity or cause “earthquakes”.

Small tremors do happen during any kind of underground work, but in Britain the shale gas firms such as Cuadrilla were told to stop if they caused a 0.5 tremor on the Richter scale, equivalent to somebody sitting down hard in a chair, and far fainter than what the coal mining or geothermal — or indeed road and rail transport industries — cause all the time.

Why the double standard? The very people who protest about shale gas are often fans of wind farms. But these pour more concrete (a carbon-intensive mat- erial), use more steel (ditto), spoil more views, require more subsidies and, above all, take up far more land.

A single shale drilling pad with 40 wells fanning out in all directions covers a few acres. For a wind farm to produce that much energy it would have to be 1,500 times larger — and it’s useless on a still day.

Britain imports shale gas from America, but — unlike oil — shipping it adds massively to the cost of gas, as well as the carbon footprint.

The Government was wrong to order a moratorium on shale gas, to order the wells plugged and to repeat its dogmatic objections to developing Britain’s shale treasure at a time when war in Europe is reinforcing the need for energy security.

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Published on March 20, 2022 22:51

How respiratory viruses evolve to become milder

My article for Spectator:

The Queen has suffered ‘mild, cold-like symptoms’ from her Covid-19 infection, according to Buckingham Palace. The wording reminds us that, except in the very vulnerable, the common cold is always and everywhere a mild disease. There are 200 kinds of virus that cause colds and they hardly ever debilitate healthy people, let alone kill them. Yet we were recently told by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that ‘it is a common misconception that “viruses mutate to cause less severe disease”’. If that is the case, how did all common colds become mild — and why would Covid not do the same?

As somebody with a background in evolutionary biology, I knew that Nervtag’s claim (which bizarrely cited myxomatosis, a flea-borne disease of rabbits, to support its argument) was misleading. Surely they were aware that, mostly due to the work of Professor Paul Ewald, the dominant belief in evolutionary theory about disease virulence is that it depends on the mode of transmission? Though sometimes lethal at first, respiratory diseases do evolve to become milder, while sexually transmitted, waterborne or insect-borne diseases (such as myxomatosis) don’t.

And ‘evolve’ is the right word, not ‘mutate’. The way medical scientists talk about evolution is sometimes alarmingly naive, as if random mutation is what drives it. No, no, a thousand times no: it’s selection. For example, I took a train this week, putting me at risk of catching Covid from a fellow passenger. But if two other people had been planning to travel on the same train, one with mild omicron and the other with severe delta, the latter would have been more likely to change their mind and stay home because of feeling unwell. That’s selection. The fiercest enemy of a virus is another virus. Omicron ousted delta at least partly because people with mild symptoms were more likely to go to work or parties (or not notice they were ill) than people with severe ones.

There has been an almost obsessive reluctance among public health experts to admit that omicron is intrinsically mild. ‘There is no reason to believe [omicron] is intrinsically less virulent,’ wrote Professor Sunetra Gupta on The Spectator’s website last week, adding: ‘The idea that all viruses evolve in this direction is entirely incorrect.’ Yet the evidence shows it is not just the protective effect of vaccines that have made omicron milder, but the virus’s behaviour too. As one study in Nature concludes: ‘Lower viral pathogenicity and higher population immunity do not have to exclude one another. Most likely both play a part.’

Now it is true that a long time ago evolutionary biologists used to argue, sloppily, that natural selection was about the ‘good of the species’ rather than the individual, so all viruses eventually became mild. The biologist René Dubos said in 1965 that ‘given enough time, a state of peaceful coexistence eventually becomes established between any host and parasite’. But that sort of happy--clappy thinking went out decades ago. Competition drives nastiness in some disease and mildness in others, depending on how they are transmitted.

There are four coronaviruses that cause common colds and all are mild. About half of all colds are caused by rhinoviruses, of which there are around 100 types. None is lethal. That cannot be a coincidence. If mutation can make a disease more dangerous, why have rhinoviruses never turned into killers? As Niall Shanks and Rebecca Pyles put it in a 2007 paper titled ‘Evolution and medicine: the long reach of “Dr Darwin”’: ‘The rhinovirus works its evolutionary mischief by keeping its host mobile — and hence typically in contact with other susceptible persons.’ It achieves this by, for example, staying in the nasal mucosa, and not invading the bloodstream.

By contrast, in the case of an insect-borne disease such as yellow fever, plague or malaria, killing the victim is fine as long as they get bitten first so the disease can spread. Dr Shanks and Dr Pyles wrote: ‘Since malaria is propagated by biting mosquitoes, the parasite pays no penalty for an immobilised host — especially one too weak to swat the insect vector.’ But killing the vector would be a mistake and sure enough, such diseases kill people but not insects. Nor do sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and syphilis become mild, though they kill very slowly and after a long period of latency: they need to wait until you change partners.

An anomaly is the 1918 flu, which was mild until August 1918, then turned nasty. Professor Ewald thinks this exception proves the rule. In the peculiar conditions of the trenches, severe cases spread faster than mild ones because they were evacuated to field hospitals and home, infecting others along the way, while mild cases stayed put. In other words, nurses and stretcher-bearers behaved like mosquitoes. Hence Professor Ewald is relaxed about the prospect of 1918’s history repeating itself: ‘By failing to investigate the selective processes that favour increased or decreased virulence of virus strains, experts still run the risk of spending too much time and too many resources in attempts to block a 1918-type pandemic.’

Yet here surely there is a worrying lesson about the past two years. In the weird world of lockdown, severe strains of Covid were favoured by selection. If you tested positive but felt fine you were told to stay at home. If you fell badly sick you went to hospital, where you gave your illness to healthcare workers and other patients. So mutants that were more infectious, such as alpha and delta, paid no penalty for being just as virulent, maybe more so. The natural evolution of Covid into just another mild cold was therefore possibly delayed by at least a year.

Of course, the idea that only respiratory viruses evolve to become milder is just a theory and needs to be challenged. The continuing virulence of direct-contact diseases such as measles and smallpox needs explaining, for example. But it is unforgivable for official advisers at Nervtag to be ignorant of the theory. Send for some Darwinians, Boris!

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Published on March 05, 2022 19:55

How global warming can be good for us

My article for Spiked:

Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm?

The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that.

The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife.

But because good news is no news, green pressure groups and environmental correspondents in the media prefer to ignore global greening. Astonishingly, it merited no mentions on the BBC’s recent Green Planet series, despite the name. Or, if it is mentioned, the media point to studies suggesting greening may soon cease. These studies are based on questionable models, not data (because data show the effect continuing at the same pace). On the very few occasions when the BBC has mentioned global greening it is always accompanied by a health warning in case any viewer might glimpse a silver lining to climate change – for example, ‘extra foliage helps slow climate change, but researchers warn this will be offset by rising temperatures’.

Another bit of good news is on deaths. We’re against them, right? A recent study shows that rising temperatures have resulted in half a million fewer deaths in Britain over the past two decades. That is because cold weather kills about ’20 times as many people as hot weather’, according to the study, which analyses ‘over 74million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries’. This is especially true in a temperate place like Britain, where summer days are rarely hot enough to kill. So global warming and the unrelated phenomenon of urban warming relative to rural areas, caused by the retention of heat by buildings plus energy use, are both preventing premature deaths on a huge scale.

Surely this will change in the future? Probably not. Britain would have to get much, much hotter for summer mortality to start exceeding winter deaths. Not even Greece manages that. And the statistics show that – as greenhouse-gas theory predicts – on the whole more warming is happening in cold places, in cold seasons and at cold times of day. So winter nighttime temperatures in the global north are rising much faster than summer daytime temperatures in the tropics.

Summer temperatures in the US are changing at half the rate of winter temperatures and daytimes are warming 20 per cent slower than nighttimes. A similar pattern is seen in most countries. Tropical nations are mostly experiencing very slow, almost undetectable daytime warming (outside cities), while Arctic nations are seeing quite rapid change, especially in winter and at night. Alarmists love to talk about polar amplification of average climate change, but they usually omit its inevitable flip side: that tropical temperatures (where most poor people live) are changing more slowly than the average.

But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little.

Indeed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) repeatedly confirms, there is no clear pattern of storms growing in either frequency or ferocity, droughts are decreasing slightly and floods are getting worse only where land-use changes (like deforestation or building houses on flood plains) create a problem. Globally, deaths from droughts, floods and storms are down by about 98 per cent over the past 100 years – not because weather is less dangerous but because shelter, transport and communication (which are mostly the products of the fossil-fuel economy) have dramatically improved people’s ability to survive such natural disasters.

The geological record shows greater climatic volatility in cold periods of the Earth’s history than in hot periods. At the peak of recent ice ages, the temperature fluctuated dramatically between years and decades, while decade-long mega-droughts ravaged Africa, drying up Lake Victoria at least twice. Those mega droughts happened 17,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago respectively, when the world was much colder than today and cooler oceans meant failed monsoons. One theory about the invention of farming argues that it was impossible until the climate settled down in the post-glacial warmth of around 10,000 years ago: ‘Recent data from ice- and ocean-core climate proxies show that the last glacial climates were extremely hostile to agriculture – dry, low in atmospheric CO2, and extremely variable on quite short time scales.’ It then became calmer as it became significantly warmer than today between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago, when human civilisation emerged.

The effect of today’s warming (and greening) on farming is, on average, positive: crops can be grown farther north and for longer seasons and rainfall is slightly heavier in dry regions. We are feeding over seven billion people today much more easily than we fed three billion in the 1960s, and from a similar acreage of farmland. Global cereal production is on course to break its record this year, for the sixth time in 10 years.

Nature, too, will do generally better in a warming world. There are more species in warmer climates, so more new birds and insects are arriving to breed in southern England than are disappearing from northern Scotland. Warmer means wetter, too: 9,000 years ago, when the climate was warmer than today, the Sahara was green. Alarmists like to imply that concern about climate change goes hand in hand with concern about nature generally. But this is belied by the evidence. Climate policies often harm wildlife: biofuels compete for land with agriculture, eroding the benefits of improved agricultural productivity and increasing pressure on wild land; wind farms kill birds and bats; and the reckless planting of alien sitka spruce trees turns diverse moorland into dark monoculture.

Meanwhile, real environmental issues are ignored or neglected because of the obsession with climate. With the help of local volunteers I have been fighting to protect the red squirrel in Northumberland for years. The government does literally nothing to help us, while it pours money into grants for studying the most far-fetched and minuscule possible climate-change impacts. Invasive alien species are the main cause of species extinction worldwide (like grey squirrels driving the red to the margins), whereas climate change has yet to be shown to have caused a single species to die out altogether anywhere.

Of course, climate change does and will bring problems as well as benefits. Rapid sea-level rise could be catastrophic. But whereas the sea level shot up between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising by about 60 metres in two millennia, or roughly three metres per century, today the change is nine times slower: three millimetres a year, or a foot per century, and with not much sign of acceleration. Countries like the Netherlands and Vietnam show that it is possible to gain land from the sea even in a world where sea levels are rising. The land area of the planet is actually increasing, not shrinking, thanks to siltation and reclamation.

In January 2020, the UK’s chief scientific adviser organised for some slides to be shown to Boris Johnson to convert him to climate alarmism. Thanks to a freedom of information request, we now know that these slides showed the likely acceleration in sea-level rise under a scenario known as RCP 8.5. This is shocking because RCP 8.5 has long been discredited as a highly implausible future. It was created by piling unrealistic assumptions on to each other in models: coal use increasing tenfold by 2100, population growth accelerating to 12 billion people, innovation drying up and an implausibly high sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide. No serious scientist thinks RCP 8.5 represents a likely outcome from ‘business as usual’. Yet those who want to grab media attention by making alarming predictions use it all the time.

Environmentalists don’t get donations or invitations to appear on the telly if they say moderate things. To stand up and pronounce that ‘climate change is real and needs to be tackled, but it’s not happening very fast and other environmental issues are more urgent’ would be about as popular as an MP in Oliver Cromwell’s parliament declaring, ‘The evidence for God is looking a bit weak, and I’m not so very sure that fornication really is a sin’. And I speak as someone who has made several speeches on climate in parliament.

No wonder we don’t hear about the good news on climate change.

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Published on February 21, 2022 21:39

The WHO is complicit in China’s Winter Olympics smokescreen

My article for the Telegraph:

The news that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, is to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing is baffling on a number of levels. Has he not got a day job to do? There is a pandemic on.

“Sources close to” him say it would be a “political statement to turn down the invitation”, which indicates ludicrous delusions of grandeur: he is a bureaucrat, not a head of state, let alone a “dignitary”.

But if Adhanom Ghebreyesus does want to play the politician, with most Western governments boycotting the games, his attendance shows an alarming complacency about the persecution of the Uyghurs, the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong and the lack of transparency in finding the source of Covid-19.

It is worth listing the ways in which the Chinese authorities have failed to help the WHO do its job over the past two years. They did not tell it, as they are duty bound to do, about the initial outbreak. The WHO says it learned about the virus on 31 December 2019 from media reports and a statement on the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s website, having been tipped off by an email from Taiwan, a country the WHO refuses to recognise exists - at China’s insistence.

On 14 January 2020, the WHO tweeted that China had seen no new cases in 10 days and that “there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”, a disastrous error that resulted from gullibly accepting what the Chinese government was saying. On 30 January, at China’s insistence, the WHO declined to declare a pandemic.

That day Dr Tedros returned from a visit to Beijing congratulating China’s government, praising “beyond words” its “commitment to transparency”. My irony meter malfunctioned on reading these comments: at the time the Chinese government was punishing people for publicising anything about the disease. It had already rebuked a Shanghai scientist for sharing the virus genome sequence with the world a week after it was sequenced. The chances of Dr Tedros using the games as an occasion to deliver some home truths to Xi Jinping seem small.

During 2020 the WHO took several months to negotiate the terms of a visit to China to investigate the origin of the virus. When that team eventually visited Wuhan in January 2021, they were treated to a strictly controlled tourist itinerary that included a museum and the wrong campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, followed by a risible press conference at which they endorsed a fanciful Chinese theory that the virus might have been imported from frozen food.

During these many months, the British government kept telling me that we should leave it to the WHO to carry out such investigations. So the WHO’s role was to prevent a proper investigation, albeit inadvertently.

China’s government is playing for time. It has published nothing useful about the pandemic’s origin for many months and the WHO shows no sign of minding. Perhaps their admiration for such lethargy is “beyond words”. The mandarins of Beijing hope the water will gradually close over the topic.

Depressingly, that hope is plausible because it is widely shared in the west. Virologists fear that proving (nay, investigating) a lab leak as the potential cause might affect their grants; medics are alarmed that it might reduce faith in experts and even vaccines; vice-chancellors that it might interfere with the lucrative supply of Chinese students, businessmen that it might chill their opportunities in China; politicians that it might complicate diplomatic efforts with the east. Very few people have a vested interest in solving the mystery even though it is vital to preventing another pandemic.

In 1979 another totalitarian regime covered up a mistake at a biowarfare plant in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg today), which had resulted in 64 people dying of anthrax. When challenged by the West, they invited a team led by an American Nobel-prize winner, Matthew Meselson, to investigate. He endorsed the Soviet explanation that the people had died of food poisoning. Then came a change of regime, with the fall of the Soviet Union, and Dr Kanatjan Alibekov defected, bringing with him details of the secret anthrax work. It might take a change of regime in this case too, but we owe it to the millions who have died to find out.

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Published on February 21, 2022 21:33

I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers

My article for the Telegraph:

Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime.

It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private. The emails were exchanged over the first weekend of February 2020 between senior virologists on both sides of the Atlantic following a meeting arranged by Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, with America’s two top biologists, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Freedom of Information requests sent last year produced farcical results in both Britain and America: ghost emails with all the contents redacted. Now, the US government has been forced to make unredacted versions available to Republicans on the House of Representatives’ oversight committee for an “in camera review”.

Thankfully, staffers transcribed some of the contents. They show that Dr Fauci, Dr Collins and Sir Patrick Vallance, our Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, were briefed, on and after February 1, by several virologists who thought at the time that the new virus showed signs of having been manipulated in the laboratory.

Not only did they never breathe a word of this suspicion to the media or the public, they rubbished it. The meeting on February 1 led to an article from the very virologists who were making the case that the virus showed signs of having been in a lab. Yet, in the words of Dr Collins, the job of that article was to “settle” the matter and “put down this very destructive conspiracy” lest the rumours do harm to “international harmony”.

Three of the five authors in that paper are shown in the emails to be leaning towards the conclusion either that a key part of the genome of the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory, or that the virus had mutated in human cells while in a lab. Yet they dismissed both possibilities in the paper they drafted.

We do not know what was in the first draft, prepared just three days after the meeting, but the final article, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

By then, two other articles had been rushed into print. One, in The Lancet, set out to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The other, in Emerging Microbes and Infections (EMI), by Liu Shan-Lu and colleagues, found “no credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering” of the virus. The Lancet article failed to disclose (for 18 months) the conflict of interest of several authors including Peter Daszak, a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology who secretly orchestrated the article.

The EMI article failed to disclose the fact that a senior virologist, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, had agreed to help edit it, saying: “Sure, but don’t want to be cited in as having commented prior to submission.” Scientific journals have not behaved with transparency.

At the time, given that I had written extensively on genomics, I was asked often about the chances that the pandemic started with a lab leak and I said this had been ruled out, pointing to the three articles in question. Only later, when I dug deeper, did I notice just how flimsy their arguments were.

For example, the Nature Medicine paper included a passage saying the virus “would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors, but such work has also not previously been described”. It is surprising to learn now that Sir Jeremy Farrar himself thought this very “passage” operation was a “likely explanation” of how the virus came to have its unique features. At the time, I trusted senior virologists who told me the lab leak could be dismissed. Frankly, I was duped.

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Published on January 19, 2022 20:39

Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

My article for Spiked:

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

Farzan, said Farrar, ‘has a hard time to explain that outside the lab’ and Garry ‘can’t think of a plausible natural scenario… can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature’. Farrar himself thought, on that Sunday, that ‘a likely explanation could be something as simple as passage [of] SARS-like CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage’. Translated: repeatedly growing a virus in human cells in a lab will alter its genome through natural selection so it adapts to human hosts.

These are the very suspicions raised in April 2020 in a careful essay by Russian-Canadian biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin, which was dismissed at the time by Garry and the others as nonsense. In a very different line from the one they expressed in private, they argued, in the influential paper that Andersen, Garry and Holmes co-authored with two other virologists, that furin-cleavage-site insertions could arise naturally and one would soon be found in a virus in a wild bat.

Two years later, no such natural furin-cleavage-site insertion has yet turned up in the many wild SARS-like viruses found since then. But what has turned up is a grant proposal put to the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018 to fund experiments that would deliberately insert novel furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-like coronaviruses to help them grow in the lab. And who was party to that proposal? Why, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed, it had already done a similar experiment with the spike protein of a MERS-like virus a few years before. It’s not quite a smoking gun, because the proposal was turned down, but it’s an open secret in science that you sometimes put things into grant proposals that you have already started doing, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was funding most of the work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology anyway.

The emails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’. Francis Collins was pithier, worrying about ‘doing great potential harm to science and international harmony’. Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting science’s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change one’s mind.

In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collins’s National Institutes of Health.

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Published on January 19, 2022 20:20

Britain's hubristic green commissars can't see the wood for the trees

My article for the Telegraph:

The one thing that cheered us Northumbrians up as we waited for power to come back on after Storm Arwen (some wit points out that naming these daughters of Boreas only seems to encourage them) was to grumble: “if this was in the Home Counties we would never hear the end of it”. But it is not funny that thousands of homes are still waiting for reconnection, some with elderly occupants.

I can vouch that five days of living in the cold and dark when the nights are more than twice as long as the days does not half remind you of the value of reliable electricity, diesel cars (how else do you charge a phone?) and gas stoves to cook on – all three of which are about to be banned by the eco-commissars.

The longer term devastation in Northumberland is to trees. Where I live the damage is patchy: some whole woods are flattened, some veteran oaks uprooted and huge pines snapped off. But mostly the wind knocked down patches of woods and when the mess is cleared, that will leave woodland clearings that saplings will slowly fill.

Further north in the county, however, there are large areas of forest flattened altogether. As a boy I remember seeing similar scenes in central Scotland after the even fiercer storm of January 1968, which destroyed 8,000 hectares of forest and 300 homes, so don’t blame climate change.

But do let’s plant back better. The tree planting policy in Britain of the past 50 years has been a man-made disaster. Alarmed at the shortage of pit props during the First World War, the government set up the Forestry Commission with a remit to buy land and plant it with “commercial” trees while issuing grants and permits to landowners to do the same (a curious conflict of interest, incidentally).

This resulted in moorland and hill disappearing under square, hard-edged carpets of alien sitka spruce, creating dark, closed forest monocultures that acidified streams, accelerated flooding, collapsed biodiversity (except midges) and took away jobs. Where once the curlew called and the shepherd gathered, now there was empty silence.

To add insult to environmental injury, it was a commercial failure, too. The Forestry Commission never made a profit. Yet, bent on empire building, it set about converting even ancient semi-natural woodlands into sitka plantations: it is a little known fact that a higher proportion of ancient woodland was lost under Forestry Commission ownership than under private ownership. The ostensible purpose of these pulp farms was to feed paper mills that never came, supplying a demand for paper that was about to shrink, in thrall to an import-substitution policy that had been rubbished by Adam Smith.

But we import a lot of timber, wrote an angry duke to me when I made this point once before. Yes and bananas too, I replied, but we don’t subsidise greenhouses. In the 1980s the Forestry Commission even began telling us to grow lodgepole pines from the Rockies. Disaster: in British winds they grew sideways and collapsed into unmanageable thickets.

But alder, birch and rowan – oh no, you were not encouraged to plant those, at least until recently. It took me years to persuade the Forestry Commission to allow abundant natural regeneration of birch to grow where I had felled a spruce wood. Spray them off and replant with spruce was the “advice” from the commissars. It’s now a mature birch wood in which I found a woodcock’s nest last year.

That at least had changed a bit. The Forestry Commission is now encouraging the planting of native species and the growing of “woodland” instead of forestry plantations. Under its excellent new chairman, Sir William Worsley, it might even approach efficiency in answering letters in less than three months.

There is hope that in responding to the Government’s ambition to plant millions of trees to soak up carbon, both private and public landowners will be putting in mixtures of well-spaced native hardwood trees (and Scots pines) that follow the contours, include clearings and are managed for wildlife.

But the scale of the ambition fills me with dread. The sphagnum mosses on moorland blanket bogs where many new trees will be planted are actually better at capturing carbon than trees, we now know; the one thing people trying to save the curlew agree on is that nearby woodland is bad news: it houses crows, foxes, stoats and buzzards that take the eggs and chicks.

Yet the “commercial” foresters are already dusting off their business plans, with talk of planting “mostly” sitka spruce. The price of timber is up, almost entirely because the EU bizarrely decided that burning trees in Drax power station, and others like it, is carbon neutral, even though it produces more carbon dioxide than coal (trees take decades to regrow and are then cut down again).

As we replant, please let’s not keep making these environmental mistakes in the uplands of northern Britain (wind farms, ditches in peat?) simply to reward lobbyists on hobby horses.

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Published on January 19, 2022 20:12