LongTimeLurker

That last bit shows you are crazed zealot. Try reading up on what is actually happening in the present day: rather than staying in a timewarp from 20 years ago on issues like that in which governments still have to intervene to have any hope of creating a sustainable economy because renewables couldn't compete with fossil fuels. Not the case any more and solutions on storage and the mass adoption of electric cars are just around the corner now rather than distant pipe dreams.

Depends on the IFR. Think there definitely would be restrictions for an Ebola virus outbreak under those circumstances, but with COVID there comes a point with a reasonably effective vaccine in place when it is undeniably in normal flu season territory on mortality and people will be told very firmly to get a grip.

The good news on that front appears to be that several of the other vaccines are using a similar overall approach to Pfizer so are highly likely to also be OK on safety if the Pfizer one is. The -80°C storage angle appears to be a case of a trade off made by Pfizer related to trying to rush this onto the market first and the subsequent vaccines are likely not to have this issue apparently.

If the 90% thing holds up and this starts to get implemented by the end of this month, the end is very much in sight once medical professionals, care homes and most people in high risk groups get immunised over the following few months. Once that's taken care of and if the IFR drops another order of magnitude to around 0.02% by that point, there should be no conceivable reason for any lockdowns and anything beyond an advisory to keep up hand sanitising practices because they are generally a good move.

Would be better if the resident alarmists would stop parroting this sort of stuff when they clearly don't understand the issue in question. Dry ice and liquid nitrogen are used routinely for this sort of cooling, so there is nothing hugely challenging about this. It's a bit of a nuisance factor rather than an insurmountable obstacle.

Only really need to do frontline health professionals, most people over 60 and certain other high risk groups to put a massive dent in the mortality rate, because very few children and healthy young adults have a significant issue with it. No need to do everybody with something like this. Hopefully all the trial results come through OK in line with what is being claimed, because 90% effectiveness is very good news and much better than was generally expected with the first generation of vaccines.

Things don't stand still. Setting aside demography, eventually people are going to move beyond the dated narratives of Trump (the end of coal was a tree hugging green commie plot and coal will recover once Obama's subsidies are ended) and Greta (we can and will burn fossil fuels until the ice caps melt unless there is some global government intervention to ban them) and realise that 2016 was the year that renewables finally started to eclipse fossil fuels for capitalism related reasons that will unleash the hidden hand of the market:

Sure but can the Republicans put together a winning coalition on the electoral college by that point against the overall popular vote trend? Texas has been slowly drifting to the Democrats for reasons of demography for the last 20 years just as Arizona has. All the crazy Sherriff Joe Arpaio sort of stuff in Arizona about a decade back was about trying to scare away the increasing Latino population that the Republicans knew was eventually going to flip things blue like it did in California previously. That failed. The Dems have won the senate seat and it looks like Biden is also going to win. The gap in Texas this time is now where Georgia was last time... Once states like Arizona, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina are firmly in the Democratic camp for demographic reasons and staying there like New Mexico and Colorado previously it will become impossible to repeat what Trump did in 2016. The Republicans will finally have to move away from Nixon's "southern strategy" that was developed in the aftermath of what LBJ did on civil rights that alienated all the "Dixiecrats" and use a different approach. The USA is inexorably moving towards the white population no longer being the majority some time in the 2040s and that means tapping into white supremacist sentiments dog whistle style is no longer going to work at the federal level.

No chance whatsoever. By the time the current shenanigans end Trump and his use of Twitter will be viewed the way the Dems view a Jimmy Carter fireside chat telling the voters truths they don't want to hear. Never to be repeated. It will probably be some governor we have never heard of, who can secure an important swing state or appeal to part of the Democrats electoral coalition. The demographics of the US electorate are shifting in a way that favours the Dems, so the path to victory with a MAGA approach is a lot more difficult in 2024 than in 2016 when it only happened very narrowly against the popular vote trend.

Both the Republicans and Democrats (mainstream ones anyway) favour a strong American military-industrial complex with an imperial role globally and strong federal institutions and regulations domestically. Liberterianism is ideologically opposed to that and is basically a form of anarchism that is pro-laissez faire capitalism.

That will largely take care of itself at this point. The most easily exploited fossil fuel reserves have been largely tapped out so it is increasingly easy for renewables to compete without any state subsidies. Fracking has been a very bad investment for most of the people who got involved with it due to its extremely rapid depletion rates, so a post-COVID recovery for that sector is not going to be easy regardless of what Biden does. If oil supply had peaked back in 2008, as it would have in the absence of fracking and other unconventional sources, the technology wasn't in place yet for a relatively smooth transition away from fossil fuels and the world economy would have been in dire straits with Vlad and OPEC very much at the controls. Since then grid parity has been achieved with wind and solar and that meant coal had no chance of a renaissance even with Trump in power because market forces now favour renewables backed up by natural gas. Storage technologies are getting there to eventually remove more of the natural gas component even if they are not 100% there yet, and massive progress has also been made on electric vehicles with a range and performance that is genuinely practical enough to realistically get transportation off fossil fuels, so now if oil supply with fracking etc factored in really has peaked (as some believe but time will tell) the pieces are very much in place to slowly transition away. Although the USA gets a lot of grief from climate activists, large portions of that have happened there because their flexible venture capital market makes it relatively easy for people to explore risky new possibilities and walk away unscathed financially when they don't work. There are always people trying to sell worst case doomsday scenarios as being the likely future if we don't hand over power to them, but overall there are actually plenty of reasons for optimism over what lies ahead right now. Much more so than 15-20 years ago when Iraq was being invaded as part of a scramble to secure the last large easily exploited conventional crude oil sources.

Nothing imaginary about the Dems having a far left fringe and the Republicans also clearly have a far right faction (they appear to have a genuine Nazi sympathizer on board now in the House from North Carolina). If you have a two party system, the parties are each going to cover a very broad spectrum of views. Biden is highly likely to do a Bill Clinton and cosy up to the RINO faction of the Republicans rather than push the agenda he initially got elected on. His record over the years is far from radical and he was added to the Obama ticket for precisely that reason.

Didn't build a wall, didn't save the coal industry and didn't pull out of Syria, because none of these stated goals were realistic in practical terms once in office. Texas will turn blue over the next decade for demographic change reasons and Trump will be remembered in the history books as the death rattle of kneejerk reactionary American racism. https://phys.org/news/2019-04-white-majority.html

Think he burned a lot of bridges with how he behaved over the golf course near Aberdeen.

Trump has close relatives from Lewis he genuinely knows well enough to visit and would have no problem moving back and being accepted as a British national in legal terms. Biden probably has no clue where his Irish ancestors were even from beyond maybe the county and I seriously doubt he would qualify for a passport. The idea he is some kind of existential threat to Ulster Unionism when compared to the damage the Brexit politics of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have done that the DUP moronically aided and abetted along the way is a wee bit bizarre.

Nancy Pelosi would still have been able to kick up a fuss over any perceived threat to the GFA at the House of Representatives level on any UK-US trade deal if Biden had lost so the role of the president was in no way pivotal on Boris being able to get what he wanted. He was never going to, so it's all just empty posturing.

Good to see the BUs beat a former SPFL team in a league game. Hopefully it won't be too many years until it will be a case of seeing them beat a fellow SPFL team in a league game.

Ironic coming from you given your past behaviour on other threads.

Al Gore and co have used apocalyptic environmental catastrophism to present themselves as messiahs to save the plebs from a nighmarish future, in much the same sort of way Dubya Bush and co did with the "war on terror" that turned right wing American politics psychotic enough for a figure like Trump to be able to emerge. Nobody was taking Al Gore seriously any more so they needed a new prophet of doom and seem to have latched onto Greta for that role. Reality is the future's probably not going to be so very different from the way things have been and life tends to be a lot more pleasant if you don't get taken in by any of the doomsday cultists that are flavour of the month at any particular moment in time. Better Biden and some old-style cynical careerism and steer well clear of the Kool-Aid.

In reality, the lower end of the range IPCC predictions are really not that bad, temperature rises have generally underperformed compared to what the models have predicted, and you have no way of knowing for sure how the future is going to unfold any more than Greta does. What is clear is that we are fast running out of the most easily exploited fossil fuels so a gradual transition over to renewables is likely to be happening soon anyway for profit motive reasons. Wind and solar have already reached grid parity in many parts of the world with only the issue of energy storage left to sort out properly before a Green New Deal would need no state subsidy. Things are getting pretty desperate by the time the fossil fuel companies have to resort to fracking to prevent peak oil demand from unfolding, because it has basically been a Ponzi scheme.

Have to wonder how many of her devotees on here plan to take a yacht the next time they visit the USA. She is taking the Green rhetoric to its logical conclusion but most people only want to pay lipservice by buying their coffee from a Nicaraguan organic-farming commune or something like that while still flying somewhere exotic for their holidays. Michael Moore's film Planet of the Humans did not go down well with many on the left and was a bit unfair/misleading about solar panels in places but definitely showed what happens when the environmentalist agenda loses touch with rationality and a lot of their campaigning is hijacked by people with a base profit motive agenda: I'd be very dubious about any Green New Deal if it winds up with anything as environmentally-destructive as wood-pellet fired power stations to keep it all propped up. Doubt Biden will have much interest in doing anything too radical too quickly though. He was nothing like as anti-fracking as the progressive wing of the Democrats would have liked, because he knew what he had to do to win in Pennsylvania and he'll want to win a second term.

^^^still waiting on that elusive rational counter-argument as opposed to an ad hominem attack.

^^^playground level stuff, because he is unable to address the point being made and develop a rational counter-argument.

^^^blissfully unaware that politicians have been pushing his buttons on a visceral level the same sort of way the pastor was doing to evangelicals via Fox.

Do you see Greta as an appeal to rationality or to visceral level emotions in a similar sort of way to Pastor BillyJoeJimBob Burgerflipper, III on Fox? World leaders only really pay lip service to global warming as an issue based on the arguments that usually get trundled out based mainly on computer modelling and are not implementing the policies that the environmentalists want for the most part so enter a somewhat odd and very emotionally overwrought Swedish teenager stage left...