"Where is the worst affected part of the globe in terms of coronavirus deaths?"
"Lombardy in northern Italy."
"And what is the biggest city in Lombardy?"
"Milan."
"Very good. Now, what percentage of the population of Lombardy do you think has been diagnosed with coronavirus?"
"Hmmmm. Ten per cent?" This I took to be a very reasonable guess, based upon the 'news' and hype around at the moment.
"The figure is, as of today, 0.4%. And the percentage who have died with coronavirus in their system, which are reported as coronavirus deaths, is 0.06%"
Perception is everything.
I once visited Lombardy in February. It wasn't like the picture-postcard image of Italy at all. The entire region was blanketed by a thick, static pea-souper of a fog. And it was freezing cold and damp. Horrible.
This is what happens in Lombardy in the winters. Cold air sinks down from the Alps onto the Lombardy Plain, where it just hangs, and hangs, and hangs. For days, even weeks, on end. The air is often completely calm, no wind. Any pollution from industry simply sticks around, mixed with the fog into a nasty, potentially lethal cocktail. With escape to the south blocked off by the mountains of the northern Apennines, the air has nowhere to go, so just sits upon the plain, increasing in toxicity by the day.
I also saw it when I used to sometimes watch Italian football on Channel 5 on Sunday afternoons, about twenty years ago. If the match was being played in Milan, you knew that you would be struggling to see from one end of the pitch to the other.
Yesterday I looked at a NASA satellite map of air pollution in Italy. It has decreased during lockdown, but Lombardy has the most polluted air by far. It is suggested that the high mortality rates in Lombardy are largely the result of the fact that the population already has chronically damaged lungs due to their lethal, polluted winters. In amongst the madness, it is a rare piece of common sense.
Climate alarmists seem to show relatively little concern for air pollution. After all, it's not caused by CO2. Also, it is demonstrably a real environmental problem, causing real hardships and deaths for life human and non-human. In contrast, show me people who have actually died from catastrophic global warming. Tony Heller clearly views climate alarmists as the scum of the Earth. Maybe he has a point.
