DDT
tlambert | July 15, 2007Alan Dove writes about his grandfather's involvement in the history of DDT (my emphasis):
DDT owes its notoriety to American applied research during World War II. At the start of the war, chemists had known how to synthesize the compound for decades, and a few knew of its insecticidal properties, but nobody had tested it rigorously or turned it into a practical product. It seems unlikely that anybody would have, if it hadn't fallen into the hands of an obscure group of entomologists at the US Department of Agriculture in 1942.
The USDA scientists had recently been drafted into a critical…
tlambert | July 2, 2007Gus Dizerega reports
Rachel Carson has never been forgiven by the chemical industry or the right wing for her efforts to educate the public on the downside of trying to solve pest problems with DDT. When I was invited to attend a meeting of the right wing Mt. Pelerin Society a few years back I was surprised to hear not intelligent conversation about markets and ecologies, but rather utterings as to Carson being guilty of "genocide" because banning DDT in the US led to millions of deaths in Africa and elsewhere from malaria. The lunch table where I encountered this imbecility was dominated…
tlambert | June 29, 2007Bug Girl has a post on setting the record straight on Rachel Carson, quoting US Fish and Wildlife Service, who, unlike Carson critics, know what Carson actually wrote about DDT and malaria, and another on a two-part article in the American Entomologist on Carson.
Ed Darrell has been checking the accuracy of Steve Milloy's "100 things you should know about DDT". So far, Milloy's score is 0 out of 3.
tlambert | June 29, 2007Kirsten Weir has an excellent article in Salon on DDT and Rachel Carson. Weir took the time to talk to actual scientists and found:
Socrates Litsios, a historian and former scientist for the World Health Organization (the agency that has headed global malaria control efforts since the 1960s), says the assertion that "Silent Spring" and the DDT ban led to millions of deaths is "outrageous." May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied mosquitoes and malaria, says that "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more…
tlambert | June 14, 2007The record for the highest claimed death toll for the fictional DDT ban remains at 3 BILLION AND COUNTING, but Pajamas Media is up there with a claim that the number is "hundreds of millions, if not more". This is completely impossible, since its several times the total death toll from malaria. It's in a Pajamas Media podcast by four bloggers who call themselves the "Sanity Squad". I wanted to quote them in my response, so I made my own podcast:
(It's about five minutes, and you can download it if the embedded player above does not work.)
The 3 BILLION AND COUNTING folks eventually…
tlambert | June 13, 2007Bug girl has a pearl of a post on why folks like Steve Milloy and John Tierney are wrong to dismiss DDT resistance as a problem.
As well as knocking down their claims, she provides a handy introduction to the mechanisms for DDT resistance. Go read.
tlambert | June 12, 2007I think the employment contract at the CEI must include a clause requiring their hacks to write an article accusing Rachel Carson of killing millions of people. So far we've seen John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray.
The latest effort is from the CEI's Eli Lehrer (who we last encountered cherry-picking with John Lott). Lehrer seems to have based his piece on stuff from the rest of the CEI crew because their factoids (which were wrong or misleading in the first place) have gotten somewhat garbled, just like in the telephone game.
Lehrer opens with…
tlambert | June 9, 2007Keith Schneider (who used to work with Tierney at the NYT) comments
Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin's review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson''s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy.…
tlambert | June 8, 2007Bug girl has discovered the Carson-killed-millions claims by the likes of Steve Milloy, Angela Logomasini and John Tierney and decided to:
focus on the stuff that as an entomologist, I'm uniquely qualified to comment on. I know about bugs. I know about pesticides. I've taught parasitology for over 5 years.
For the benefit of Angela Logomasini, who thinks that malaria is caused by a virus, this is relevant because malaria is actually caused by a parasite.
Bug girl does a thorough job of debunking the four main claims of the DDT fetishists:
Banning DDT in the past caused the deaths of millions…
tlambert | June 5, 2007While the New York Times has some great reporting on science (eg Carl Zimmer and Andrew Revkin it also has some poor quality reporting (eg William Broad and Tina Rosenberg. John Tierney's latest column fits into the second category, with the usual ill-supported claims that Carson killed many many people.
Tierney quotes from a review of Silent Spring by Ira Baldwin:
[Baldwin] complained that "Silent Spring" was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a "prosecuting attorney's impassioned plea for action."
But it is Tierney's column that lacks balance and is a prosecuting…
tlambert | June 2, 2007The CEI has gone all out in its attacks on Rachel Carson. As well as their Rachel eats babies site, there have been pieces by CEI operatives John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray, all singing the same song about how Carson killed lots of people.
Raw Story has been following the money:
A Republican Senator who successfully prevented the US Senate from honoring the centennial of the birth of environmentalist and Silent Spring author Rachel Carson received campaign donations from a member of the board of directors of a group that sponsors pro-DDT…
tlambert | May 30, 2007
I've been doing a little research into how the Rachel-killed-millions hoax was spread. In The War Against the Greens (1st edition, published in 1994), the argument appears, but it is confined to the lunatic fringe:
"How many people have died as a result of environmental policies like the banning of DDT?" the Larouchite [Rogelio Maduro] asks rhetorically. "I'd say millions, because it was the most effective weapon against malaria. Right now methyl bromide is supposedly being banned for ozone depletion, but I think this is really an attack on refrigeration, because that's what CFCs and methyl…
tlambert | May 28, 2007The wedge document is the Discovery Institute's secret plan to defeat scientific materialism and promote Creationism. Below is Africa Fighting Malaria's wedge document. One part of the wedge is to use a simple message: "banning DDT spread malaria and killed people" to drive a wedge between environmentalists and public health people. The second is a wedge between first world and third world countries by arguing that first world concerns about pollution from DDT were killing people in third world countries.
The document is a pitch to Philip Morris to fund their activities because the World…
tlambert | May 27, 2007
Today is the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson's birth. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century:
Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid - indeed, the whole chemical industry - duly supported by the Agriculture…
tlambert | May 26, 2007You know what's coming when a post starts with:
"At times it seems that there are more sites honoring Rachel Carson that Josef Stalin at his peak."
J. R. Dunn has written the usual Rachel-killed-millions post, but has added some fabrications that seem to be original with him:
In 1958 Carson received a letter from her close friend Olga Huckins, which told a strange and alarming story. A short time previously, Huckins' bird sanctuary north of Cape Cod had been sprayed for insects, leading to a mass die-off of birds. The pesticide implicated was DDT. ...
Along with a thirty-week run on The New…
tlambert | May 23, 2007From the people who gave you "CO2: We call it life", we now have a website: "Rachel Carson: we call her a baby killer". They have pictures of children they allege Carson killed on every single page of the site.
And while they have several pages and thousands of words on DDT and on malaria, nowhere do they mention that mosquitoes can evolve resistance to DDT. And they conceal what Carson wrote about DDT and malaria:
No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to…
tlambert | May 21, 2007Glenn Reynolds approvingly quotes Rich Karlgaard's ill-informed comments on Rachel Carson:
FORBES' RICH KARLGAARD ASKS how many people died because of Rachel Carson?
Buried in paragraph 27, and paraphrasing the Congressman, The Washington Post concedes that "numerous" deaths might have been prevented by DDT.
Let's stop here. Any curious reader would ask, Just how "numerous" is numerous? Wouldn't you ask that question? The Post never asks that question. Why?
Because the answer devastates Rachel Carson and her followers. According to these CDC figures, malaria kills more than 800,000 children…
tlambert | May 19, 2007
In 1962 Monsanto published a parody of Silent Spring called The Desolate Year where they imagined death and destruction from "the garrote of Nature" if the United States went without pesticides for a year.
Quietly, then, the desolate year began. Not many people seemed aware of danger. After all, in the winter, hardly a housefly was about. What could a few bugs do, here and there? How could the good life depend upon something so seemingly trivial as bug spray? Where were the bugs anyway? The bugs were everywhere. Unseen. Unheard. Unbelievably universal. Beneath the ground, beneath the waters…
tlambert | May 5, 2007John Berlau has responded to my post on his accusations that environmentalists were racists. Berlau starts by describing me as:
a computer science professor who fancies himself an expert on everything from DDT to climate change.
Berlau, I should note, is a journalist with (to my knowledge) no scientific training who fancies himself as an expert on everything from DDT to hurricanes. Berlau also thinks he knows more about biology than Rachel Carson, who was an actual biologist:
Lambert is one of the "DDT deniers" I reference in my book Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health…
tlambert | April 15, 2007Dennis Avery has taken a break from getting global warming science wrong to write a Rachel-Carson-was-worse-than-Hitler piece:
If Rachel Carson were still alive, April 12 would have been her 100th birthday. All over the Western World well-meaning, but misguided, souls marked that day with choruses of praise for the woman who almost singly-handed created the modern environmental movement. Her book, Silent Spring, warned us that man-made pesticides would kill our kids with cancer and eliminate our wild birds.
What? I didn't notice anyone marking April 12 with choruses of praise for Carson.…