The above information came my way a couple days ago in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. The chart came to my attention because it was claimed to be authoritative about the virus. The information is cross-referenced here: https://rentry.co/covid-19-is-not-like-the-flu

As I type this, NYC has found its second patient today. The fiftysomething male individual infected has had cough and respiratory distress for about a month and finally went to the ER and ‘guess what?’. He hasn’t been abroad in recent weeks, so someone infected him locally. Meanwhile, yesterday saw an ER/infectious disease doctor at NY Presbyterian named Matt McCarthy sound off on the First patient found: https://nypost.com/2020/03/02/nyc-doctor-has-to-plead-with-health-dept-to-test-for-coronavirus/

“I’m here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don’t have [the test kits] at my fingertips,” Dr. Matt McCarthy, an infectious disease physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, said in a Monday morning interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

McCarthy said the 39-year-old Manhattan woman who tested positive after returning from Iran “is only the 32nd test we’ve done in this state.”

NYC has over eight million residents, in a state with 19.54 million people. By contrast, tens of thousands have been tested for the virus in Italy, South Korea, and (of course) China.

Now, what does this all have to do with global dimming, also called the Aerosol effect or Aerosol Masking or (sometimes) the McPherson Paradox?

If you don’t know what the McPherson Paradox is, I’ve explained it here: Long story short, we need to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, but if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the particulate that falls out when we burn fossil fuels blocks sunlight from hitting the Earth’s surface. So, as Dr. Guy McPherson likes to say, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t‘. Now, in the context of the coronavirus, what this means is that a big chunk of Chinese manufacturing went offline as a result of precautions they’re taking to halt the spread of the virus. They’ve shut down an estimated 60% of their industrial output for fear of more infections. Since they’re 40% of world industrial activity, that means they’ve taken out 24% of all the fossil fuel particulate going into the atmosphere. That may be enough to bring on a 1+ degree C upward bump in global average temperatures. Doctor Guy McPherson explains it here:

This is a few days old. Some of the ideas I have presented here may have been disproven. For example, it seems that infections will drop with warmer weather. But on a planet with a global South, it’s possible the summer weather in the North won’t be enough to counteract infections in the states below the equator. We may find that China’s industrial shutdown may be followed by similar shutdowns across the G20, in which case we will pass the threshold of 30% loss of particulate, which would spur an increase of temperatures similar to what was seen in 2001 after commercial airlines stopped flying in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Time will tell.