Leb' wohl, Polarstern!

It just so happened that I was reviewing an old Inside Science feature when the closing press release for the MOSAIC expedition was being issued.

On Friday, 20 September, a powerful German icebreaker named Polarstern set off from Tromsø, Norway, with the aim of getting stuck into the polar ice. This echoed a famous experiment by the Norwegian explorer Nansen in his ship Fram in the 1890s.

The plan was for the ship to drift past the North Pole, enabling scientists to collect unprecedented data on the Arctic. The Polarstern is the ‘mothership’ of a substantial international collaboration called the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (or project MOSAiC). Scientists from over seventy research institutions across 19 different countries were involved, and a total of six hundred experts were aboard at various periods throughout the expedition. They planned to construct a ‘research city’ around the vessel with different neighbourhoods, each focused on a particular scientific area including: ecosystem, bio-geo-chemistry, ocean, atmosphere and sea ice. Adam spoke to UCL’s Professor Julienne Stroeve, who was to look at the depth and density of snow in order to improve our understanding of the Arctic, and enhance our ability to predict effects of global climate change. She was concerned that surveys of ice thickness from satellites such as ESA's Cryosat-2 over-estimated the thickness of ice because of the take-up of salt by young snow affecting the radar signal. Measuring on site would assist any necessary re-calibration of the satellite data.

MOSAiC is spearheaded by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. There is more here.

Norman Smith

BBC political correspondent Norman Smith has resigned, to spend more time climbing and walking the dog, he said.  There have been newspaper reports of his decision, but strangely nothing on the BBC news pages.  The corporation did have space for the retirement of her West Midlands political editor, however. It does raise the question of how far Smith's decision was voluntary. Certainly, his style of reporting seemed increasingly out of place with the earnest Tory-Socialist polarised output of the BBC newsroom of recent years. He will be much missed.

British arms aid civil repression

There has been some agistation about the story carried in the Byline Times that the protests across the United States have been put down forcibly with the aid of weapons provided by British firms. These exports appear to be one of the success stories of Check, Change, Go! Britain. "Crowd control equipment" has also been sold to the Chilean government and, the current Private Eye points out, to the Uyghur-suppressing Chinese state, along with other military and quasi-military equipment.

Discrimination against any group matters

When the "Black Lives Matter" movement first came to international prominence, I felt like joining the "All Lives Matter" movement. I recalled being annoyed at the publicity surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day which tended to obscure the fact that not only Jews, but also homosexuals, Slavs, communists and the mentally-handicapped were swept up in the Nazis' elimination of "Untermenschen". (Indeed, it was the latter group which was the first target of German genocide.) I felt like pointing out that Latino, Korean and South Asian lives did not matter to the race rioters of 1990s America. There has also been a streak of Antisemitism in some militant "black" movements - admittedly matched by racism on the part of some better-off Jews in the States.

So it was no surprise when some person named Richard Kylea Cowie Jr. (trading as "Wiley" in the popular entertainment business) gave further evidence that being discriminated against does not cure one of racism or religious discrimination oneself. (Priti Patel in relation to Muslims is another example.) It was not a surprise that he was allowed to spout his noxious bile on Twitter, which is remarkably laisser-faire when it comes to expressions of race hatred, and of perverted history and science, (with the sole exception of the Trump family, it appears). So to give a slap on the wrist to Twitter over this particular effusion smacks of virtue signalling. Why not boycott the platform altogether?

Covid-19 developments

Israelis are out on the streets in protest against the government's handling of the epidemic. (Incidentally, congratulations to BBC News Channel in reporting on the start of this unrest. Foreign news coverage had dropped off markedly in favour of domestic reporting, but it is good to see the corporation making use of its extensive world-wide network of reporters again.) Much has been made on social media of the way that female leaders had handled the pandemic, but it seems to me that the distinction is between liberal democratic heads of government and those elected on an ultra-nationalist ticket, playing on electors' baser instincts. Trump, Putin, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi and the Gantz/Netanyahu coalition fall into this category; the more liberal - and male - prime minister of South Korea has handled the emergency well, in the face of difficulties which have not challenged the others.

Carrie Gracie, BBC's former China editor, has obtained an interview with Hong Kong microbiologist Prof Yuen Kwok-yung which confirmed that Chinese politicians suppressed information about Covid-19 ascertained by the country's scientific experts. In her Guardian article, she draws attention to a three-week period in which, according to Prof Andrew Tatem of the University of Southampton: “If the same interventions that were put in place on 23 January had been put in place on 2 January, we may have seen a 95% reduction in the number of cases.”

Given that we now know that a few well-off citizens of Wuhan must have carried the virus to France and Italy on their holiday tours in early winter (and business travel might have triggered the outbreaks in Iran) before it was even noticed in China, that 95% may be slightly on the high side. However, it shows the dangers of blinkered politicians' ignoring clear evidence from their country's scientists. The USA and UK have ostensibly more open societies. Yet President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson failed to act on the knowledge which was already in the public domain in January. Johnson delayed not for three weeks but for two full months and it could be argued that Trump and Republican state governors have not properly taken scientific evidence on board yet.

The UK applied lock-down, then face-covering and is only now quarantining incoming travellers from Covid-19 hot-spots. It was the wrong way round. If quarantine or at the very least, testing and tracing, had started from early January as it had in Taiwan (whose citizens were already conditioned to face-covering at any hint of widespread respiratory disease) then a nationwide and economically-damaging lock-down might have been averted.

Anglican investments

Following revelations by journalist Fran Rankin that Church of England dioceses have almost £18 million invested in fossil fuel companies, including BP, Shell and Total, it appears that the Church in Wales is not 100% ethical in her investments. The Church's statement of ethical investment policy reads in part:

It is the policy of the Church in Wales not normally or knowingly to invest in any company:

•  - which derives more than 20% of turnover from a primary focus on gambling, or the production or sale of alcoholic beverages or tobacco products;
•  - which derives more than 5% of turnover from pornography, predatory lending activities or the proliferation of armaments beyond areas of legitimate defence and international peace-keeping;
•  - which derives more than 10% of turnover from the extraction of thermal coal or the production of oil from tar sands.

 leaving permission to invest in companies extracting petroleum by other means.

Westminster prevents English public health officials from fulfilling their statutory duty

That is the charge brought by this week's Inside Health special Covid-19 programme on Radio 4.

In this special edition of Inside Health Dr Margaret McCartney investigates the serious questions being raised about the UK's public health response to trying to stop the spread of the virus, and how tension, over the performance of the government's Test and Trace programme, has spilled out into the open.

Margaret hears from Directors of Public Health who feel that their role and expertise in local communities working closely with local Public Health England teams has been overlooked. Instead a new national Test and Trace system has been set up using private companies outside the traditional public health infrastructure. The DPH for Wigan and lead director of public health for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Professor Kate Ardern, tells Margaret she believes government didn't understand the role and the experience of local public health teams and so instead of empowering them to oversee test, trace and isolate services, set up a new national system, from scratch, using private companies without public health experience. And the data needed locally to identify and deal with Covid cases, she tells Margaret, just hasn't come through. This is despite the fact that the law is clear; Covid is a notifiable disease and local directors of public health should receive the information.

One wonders whether the pressure from commercial organisations to acquire centrally-gathered data is determining government policy as much as ignorance of the structure of government, central and local, in this country.

Centenary of Bella Abzug, American feminist pioneer

On Jul 24 1920, Bella Abzug, the first Jewish woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was born. She was memorably played by Margo Martindale in the recent "Mrs America" TV miniseries.