A brief history of hysterical environmental false alarms. Some of which have killed millions. Rachel Carson’s holocaust was bigger than Hitler’s.
20 thoughts on “AGW Is Just The Latest”
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A brief history of hysterical environmental false alarms. Some of which have killed millions. Rachel Carson’s holocaust was bigger than Hitler’s.
Comments are closed.
This sounds really interesting, but I went to the website (not even hyperlinked. which is pretty lame) and downloaded what I think are their write-ups. It looks like they’ve only actually analyzed (or audited) 3 of the 26. We’ll have to check back when they’re done.
Kudos to them for prominently asking for peer review, but I think they run the risk of being dismissed as “racists” since they started with AGW.
While I agree with the thesis, the authors get some of the facts wrong. I refer to one example:
“Rachel Carson raised alarm over the insecticide DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring, claiming that it caused cancer. There was no good evidence for this assertion, and there still isn’t. The EPA nevertheless banned DDT in 1972, and Europe and Africa, under pressure from international agencies, followed. The main consequence of the ban is that millions of people have died needlessly from mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria.”
The authors, apparently, have never read Silent Spring. If they had they would have stated correctly that Rachel Carson’s book alerted the public of the threat to birds from the use of persistent pesticides such as DDT. Cancer in humans was not a topic in the book. Though Carson did suggest that persistent pesticides could cause harm to many organisms besides birds, including humans.
DDT was banned in the USA for the harmful effects on birds not people. DDT is still approved, manufactured and used for the control of mosquito born illnesses outside the USA.
This is the latest WHO publication on the use of DDT for controlling mosquitos:
http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/who_htm_gmp_2011/en/index.html
It looks like the authors decided they wanted to make a political point, and then went looking for evidence to support their already held cherished beliefs, so they’re no different to those they’ve targeted.
I wound up thinking the same thing as Andrew W. I skimmed a couple of the docs, and kept waiting for plots of timeseries or histograms or you know, data. My very high altitude impression is they just did the delphi method with some hand picked experts.
DDT has only recently been reintroduced for controlling malaria, perhaps five years or so. For decades only one or two countries continued to make it in small quantities, and no African country could use it without losing access to financial assistance. So a few tens of millions of dead children later, it’s being used in more areas in limited amounts, so Rachel Carlson still beats Hitler.
To me the best analogues of the AGW religion are Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union (yes, “the science is settled” was one of their catchphrases) in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and the satanic ritual abuse “epidemic” in the United States during the 1980s and 90s. The “experts” were sure the phenomenon was real, with tens of thousands of children harmed each year theough bizarre satanic abuse rituals … and they were the experts because they were the ones who had studied the issue. (Similarly, the professional astrologers are the ones who really know their field.) Oh, and if you doubted their claims, you were Part Of The Problem, evil, and very likely a child abuser yourself.
One 2003 study cited:
Confidence: if you put a group of experts in a room and have them make forecasts, their confidence goes up rapidly, but this has no relationship to accuracy.
Expertise: College students do as well as seasoned experts
Results: expert opinions are useless for forecasting related to complex and uncertain situations
Another example of the knowledge problem{Hayek (1937, 1945)} and virtue of federalism?
I’m with Jardinero1 — DDT was not banned because of human cancer, it was because it was causing eggshell thinning in certain bird species, most notably our national bird, the bald eagle. So yes, we could have avoided countless malaria deaths (as well as the wave of bedbugs returning to “civilized” cities) if we’d continued using DDT, but we might have wiped out our national bird in the process. I’m not saying we made the right choice there, but it wasn’t some hype/scare… the link between eggshell thinning and DDT was and is well-established.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here… the truth when it comes to AGW is almost certainly somewhere between the deniers (like our kind host here) and the alarmists. Changes to atmosphere components (fossil fuel carbon dioxide and all the methane from the industrial agricultural sources), albedo (from deforestation and other land-use issues), etc., is all on a pretty impressive scale. It would be rather bold to say with any confidence that we’re *not* having some measurable effect on global climate as a result of the degree of influence we’ve exerted over the planet.
Where I agree with the deniers, however, is that the alarmists are oversimplifying a complex system and guilty of confirmation bias. It seems more likely that the changes we’re causing to global climate could result in both positive and negative feedbacks, and it’s pretty tough to know which would win out. In other words, we’re almost certainly affecting climate to some degree, but anyone who states with confidence the quantity of that effect (whether alarmist or denier) is blowing smoke up your ass.
I am not a “denier.”
Here’s a couple of facts to insert into this debate:
1) bedbugs are immune to DDT – have been since the 1950s. Per the same article, many species of flies are also immune. Having said that, DDT was NEVER banned in Africa, and remains the standard for anti-malaria.
2) On the global warming “hoax” – somebody forgot to tell the Artic ice pack, which will be below average again this year. In fact, the last five summers are the five minimum ice extent summers on record.
That doesn’t mean that the globe is warming — it just means that the Arctic is. And the issue isn’t whether or not it’s warming (it wouldn’t be surprising if it were — we’re still coming out of a little ice age), it is what the cause of it is.
That doesn’t mean that the globe is warming …(snip)…
This should be repeated.
I’ll put it with your other predictions over the last couple of decades.
I’ll put it with your other predictions over the last couple of decades.
It’s not a “prediction,” you moron.
So we killed millions of people for certain bird species? Just getting the facts straight here.
Karl Hallowell – no, we didn’t kill anybody for birds. We stopped aerial spraying of a persistent agent over wide areas. Now when we use DDT (in Africa, where it never was NOT used) we spray it on the walls of buildings. Fly lands on building, gets coated with the stuff, and dies, all without getting into bird’s eggs.
Worth mentioning, I think, that DDT is by no means the only pesticide at issue here; it’s not even the worst in thinning bird eggs. IIRC, that dubious honour belongs to dieldrin, which also has direct toxic effects on humans.
Also worth noting that one of the major reasons why pesticides in such huge quantities are needed in the first place is the practice of continuous monoculture, and the abandonment by agribusiness of such traditional practices as crop rotation.
I don’t think mosquitoes care about crop rotation. ^_^
And of course most African countries didn’t ban DDT. They probably haven’t banned mustard gas or lead paint, because their governments are pretty much non-functioning. The problem was they could rarely get DDT and the few countries that did were threatened with cutoffs of development money, international aid, and other perks. To a white liberal, the idea that a spotted owl might get sick far outweighs the slow, agonizing deaths of millions of colored children. African mothers get pretty irate and specific on where those lily white, pampered greenies can go.
Anyway, one of the nicest things about DDT is that it’s pretty trivial to make it at home with spa chemicals (all the ingredients were synthesized back in the 1800’s), although I once stupidly decided I should get a wiff of chlorine gas to make sure I knew what it smelled like, just to be safe. Now I know why the Germans used it in WW-I.
Glad you’re still with us George. The air force had a lot of DDT when I was a kid. Amazing stuff. One spray and the flies at the other end of a room would fall right out of the air. They relabeled and gave it out to their airman.
It was no big deal, Ken, just the instant feeling that I’d snorted flaming gasoline, followed by violent puking, followed by a couple of hours of feeling like I’d drank bleach and shoved Carribean habaneros up my nose.
But DDT is trivial to make from stuff you can buy at Walmart (sulfuric acid from plumbing, pHup, Clorox, etc). The only legal snag is that one step in the process forms choral hydrate for a short while, and choral hydrate is illegal because people use if to make Mickey Finns.
If the US still had endemic malaria, you can bet making home-brew DDT would be common knowledge. If the Zombie virus finds an insect vector, I’ll make a post-apocalyptic fortune trading bags of it for random caliber ammunition, pop tarts, and canned beans.