scriptbabe451 's List: Right War On Science

• n 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, on and in limbs and twigs and stalks, under rocks, inside trees and animals and other insects -- and, yes, inside man. ...

     

  the garrote of Nature rampant began to tighten ... food and fur animals weren't the only ones that died to the hum of insects that year. Man, too, sickened and he died
• hen the US banned the agricultural use of DDT in 1972, nothing of the sort happened. And banning the agricultural use of DDT saved lives by slowing the development of resistance.
• These little details aren't going to bother John Berlau of the Monsanto-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, who wrote his own book along similar lines to The Desolate Year.

• How does Monsanto imagine humankind survived for so many centuries before Monsanto came into being to protect us? How do they imagine animal life survived for millions of years without Monsanto?

    

  How do they sleep?

     

  Posted by: QrazyQat

• Like all such stuff the evaluations were done looking for immediate sort-term severe injury. http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146%2Fannurev.pharmtox.45.120403.095930

    

  And will find out they didn't need them. Of course we see the same sort of attack made on, well, evolution, or climate change --- look for a "founder" and attack the first person to get the science into public discussion, on the benighted theory that everything in science is based on the first reports.

    

  Stupid damned lobbyists.

• When the honeybees were trucked in --- on a contract, on a schedule, for a specific week --- agribiz could just schedule their spraying around that and expect the bees to be able to pollinate on schedule.

    

  Now, that assumed that no immediate and severe poisoning was the only worry. But, turns out, honeybee colony collapse disorder is a big, big problem.
• Spot on. I often wonder why the sceptics spend such an inordinate amount of time on Mann and the "hockey stick". They actually believe knocking it down would invalidate all the other research that repeats its findings.

• In the light of this, their ironic claims that prominent sceptics have been "villified" by the scientific community is laughable on its face to those of us who keep in touch with these things, but could potentially have traction with an uninformed public.

    

  As for Rachel Carson, the sceptics in my neck of the woods take it as an article of faith that she enabled the death of millions. All because they don't bother to look past the usual wingnut websites.
• From Silent Spring:
• Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"
• One has to wonder whether the likes Berlau or Milloy have ever actually read the book, let alone studied the actual effect that the use of DDT has had world wide. There is a copious amount of data in the public domain on the subject, much of which contradicts their arguments. Is it laziness or ideology?

• n chapter three ("Elixirs of Death") of "Silent Spring" Rachel Carson does more than imply that synthetic insecticides (of which DDT is one) were developed via poison gas research:

    

  "This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man."

    

  The quote above appears several pages prior to the origins of DDT quote you cite. Thus Carson had already planted the notion in readers' minds that DDT had sinister origins.

    

  Berlau is right; you are wrong, again.

• Of course, as Beck well knows, Carson was writing about the pesticide industry in that quote. Some more bits from Silent Spring that he "forgot" to quote:

    

   

  The vast majority [of modern insecticides] fall into one of two large groups of chemicals. One, represented by DDT, is known as the 'chlorinated hydrocarbons'. The other group consists of the organic phosphorus insecticides, and is represented by the reasonably familiar malathion and parathion.

   

    

  Carson then has a half dozen pages on the first group, the chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as this bit:

    

   

  As soon as dieldrin was substituted for DDT in malaria-control work (because the malaria mosquitoes had become resistant to DDT), cases of poisoning among the spraymen began to occur.

   

    

  Then she writes about the second major group, the organophosphates:

    

   

  The origin of these insecticides has a certain ironic significance. Although some of the chemicals themselves -- organic esters of phosphoric acid - had been known for many years, their insecticidal properties remained to be discovered by a German chemist Gerhard Schrader, in the late 1930s. Almost immediately he German government recognized the value of these smae chemicals as new and devastating weapons in man's war against his own kind, and the work in them was declared secret. Some became the deadly nerve gases. Others, of closely allied structures became insecticides.

   

    

  Carson made it perfectly clear that DDT was not an organophosphate as well as describing its use in the war to protect our soldiers. Berlau has no excuse for his misrepresentation.

     

  Posted by: Tim Lambert | May 20, 2007 7:43 AM

• Well, the NYT didn't get it from Silent Spring as the quotes make clear. Nor did they attribute it to Carson. But thanks for including the quote from Carson:

    

   

  "We must have insect control. I do not favor turning nature over to insects. I favor the sparing, selective and intelligent use of chemicals. It is the indiscriminate, blanket spraying that I oppose."

   

    

  I'll bet that quote doesn't appear in Berlau's book.

• However, it was not until 1942 that DDT, a synthetic compound, was introduced in the wake of experiments that included those with poison gas.

    

  So, let's see, according to the article they tested poison gasses and DDT. Perhaps the wording is a bit sloppy, but read in context it's clear they're talking about chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT as being separate from organophosphates. After testing, DDT, not organophosphates, was introduced.

• This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man."

    

  All of this is quite accurate, but it is refers to the insecticide industry, not to DDT. The earliest insecticides were organophosphate cholinesterase inhibitors similar to those used as nerve gas agents. These work (and indeed, are still in current use) but are dangerously toxic. The search for safer insecticides led to the development of compounds such as DDT and other modern insecticides.

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• February 23, 2007 12:02 PM, by Tim La

• erlau is also the drivel writer who started the "environmentalists caused New Orleans to flood by litigating against levees" meme. Within a week after Hurricane Katrina hit, Berlau had posted "Greens vs. Levees" at National Review.

    

  http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/berlau200509080824.asp
• Once the claim had been made, it then got picked up by the right-wing noise machine, including Fox News.

• Well, Paul G, that wasn't so hard was it?

    

  Now that I have a name I can check what Taylor actually has to say on the topic:

    

  http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDFkNjliNTIxYjJjNmQxNjdhYjdjNTA0ZTU2ZGFjNzQ=

    

  "So what about those drownings?  He suspects the drowning polar bear story originated in the Beaufort Sea, when a plane spotted what appeared to be a few dead bears floating in the water after a violent storm. In the 30 years he has spent monitoring Canada's polar bears, he himself has seen only one bear that drowned. 'They're very good swimmers.' " 

    

  So your supposed source for the claim that polar bear drownings are common has seen exactly one such case in 30 years.

• When did Willie Soon become a climate scientist, let alone a polar bear expert? Last I heard he was an astrophysicist and general hack.

     

  Posted by: John Quiggin

• RealClimate the definitive authority?"

    

  No, realclimate just points out the definitive authority, i.e. scientific papers that have been thoroughly peer-reviewed, a concept that denialists have a great deal of difficulty with.

• For Paul G. and nanny, I'd like to point out a few other things.

    

  1.) The greater the distance the bears are required to swim, the greater the likelihood of being caught in a storm.

    

  2.) The longer the swim, the more likely it becomes that a storm of the same magnitude will be threat to the bear.

    

  3.) Wave height in open water is a function of three variables: wind speed, wind duration, and fetch, which is the length of water over which the wind is blowing. Increased open water means that the same wind will create larger waves.

    

  The three above facts all point to a greatly increased hazard to polar bears that are forced to swim to new hunting grounds. In other words, drowned bears.

     

  Posted by: G. cuvier | March 1, 2007 7:41 PM

    

   

    

      

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• Bradley said: <i><blockquote>"During the DDT Years,the Audubon Christmas Bird Counts
   published the numbers seen per observer in 1941 (pre-DDT) and
   1960 (after peak use of DDT). The actual numbers seen increased
   from 90 birds seen per observer in 1941 to 971 birds seen per observer in 1960." etc.
   and ...</blockquote></i>

   

  That is false on so many levels. First it's misleading. "Birds per observer" is not a reflection of how many birds are out there, but is just one metric from which the total bird count is taken. Audubon recorded declining eagle populations through almost every year of that period, and especially after 1947, there were almost never any juveniles.

   

  Audubon has more than two dozen articles on the decline of eagle populations between 1941 and 1965, and not a single article nor mention of increase in eagle populations. The page numbers cited for an increase in eagles do not exist in the Audubon publications cited.

   

  That's a whole cloth lie someone has perpetrated.

   

  OGeary, not a single claim of Carson's in her book has ever been rebutted or refuted by peer-reviewed scientific research. I remind you that the President's Science Advisory Council, featuring at least two Nobel winners, reviewed Carson's book for accuracy. Their report, published on May 15, 1963, was that Carson was accurate in every citation, but perhaps too easy on DDT.

   

  There is no "junk science" in <i>Silent Spring</i>. Don't claim there is, unless you can cite the claim from the book, by page number, and show us the research that rebuts the claim. Research from Gordon Edwards, unpublished by peer research journals, doesn't count -- can't count.

   

   

  Tuesday 21st December 2010 - 02:56am

• Who knows why Seitz said "the oxygen in the air we breathe ... plays a role in radiation-induced cancer". Oreskes and Conway, in their parenthetic comment are making clear that what he said makes no sense. This is clear to any scientist, but not clear to Singer, who ascribes the error to O&C rather than to Seitz. This says more about Singer's (lack of) reading comprehension or analytic ability than about anything else.

• My favorite passage from the Singer article:

    

   Science journalist Michael Fumento presented, in 1993, a well-researched and eminently readable account in Investors Business Daily. 

    

  Ye shall know them by their citations.

• Jeez, it's simple: All Seitz was saying is that if there were no oxygen in the air there wouldn't be any cases of lung cancer. Case closed!

    

  Or, perhaps more likely: Seitz was engaging in a standard tobacco industry Gish Gallop of running down a laundry list of potential environmental co-factors, plausible or not, to distract from tobacco.

    

  Anyway, by now Singer is so old this stuff is probably being ghost-written for him, just as he once did for Seitz.

     

  Posted by: Steve Bloom | December 19,
• n fact, as you seem to suspect, in context it's quite obvious what Oreskes/Conway are trying to do: to try to find any sense whatsoever in Seitz's statement. The para in question runs from p27 to p28, should you spot a copy of Merchants and want to check.
• jakerman, thanks for the link to the AT article. A couple things in the comments struck me. First, how was Marco allowed to stay on so long? I got banned after 3 posts. Second, notice that someone brings up some questions from Bernard J, but I didn't see any actual comment from Bernard J. Perhaps he disappeared?

• Comments from Singer's article:

    

  Posted by: montegoblack
   Dec 19, 01:41 PM How much did we spend to ban R13 refrigerant from air conditioners and replace with R34 to fix the ozone hole ? We now know ozone comes from the Sun and when the Earth is tipped in the winter the ozone can not reach the northern hemisphere. No ozone from the Sun, ergo ozone hole.

    

  Posted by: Wes M.
   Dec 19, 11:53 PM You know, it is actually interesting that one comment mentioned the ozone hole that we were all warned about having catastrophic consequences by the Greenies: I'm not an Ivy league educated scientist, which apparently means nothing anymore after seeing how people reacted to the AGW theory, but if the greenhouse gases that are supposedly so hazardous are gathering in the atmosphere and warming the planet, why wouldn't they exit through that giant hole they swore up and down existed? You can't have both. Either there is a hole, or the gases are trapped. Time for them to make up their mind.

    

  Poe or no-Poe?
• "The ultimate aim of these attacks, at least in my case, has been to discredit my work and publications on global warming." Seems to have worked, since he's publishing his response in a totally marginal, thard-right, online-only forum (americanthinker.com) rather than a real publication or a least a somewhat more prominent online site.

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• According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s."

   

    

  Gee, who should you believe, Du Pont's own think tank, or NASA Satellites?

• Data gathered by a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth show Greenland continued to lose ice mass at a significant rate through April 2006, and that the rate of loss is accelerating, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

     

  The study indicates that from April 2004 to April 2006, Greenland was shedding ice at about two and one-half times the rate of the previous two-year period, according to CU-Boulder researchers Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr. The researchers used measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, to calculate that Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to April 2006 -- more than the volume of water in Lake Erie.

     

  The new study, published in the Sept. 21 issue of Nature, follows on the heels of a study published in Science in August by a University of Texas at Austin team using GRACE that showed Greenland lost 57 cubic miles of ice annually from 2002 to 2005. The new CU-Boulder study indicates the speed-up in ice mass loss charted by the researchers has been occurring primarily in southern Greenland, said Velicogna. ...

     

  Studies by several research groups indicate temperatures in southern Greenland have risen by about 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the past two decades, she said.

• Back to Du Pont.

    

   

  the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36.

   

    

  Nope.

    

   

  The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience
• Gee, that's more than a bit deceitful. They concluded that intense tropical cyclone activity is likely to increase. It's the intense cyclones that do almost all the damage...

• The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling

   

    

  Yes they do. Aerosols.

    

  And then Du Pont trots out the DDT ban myth:
• Sri Lanka didn't end the use of DDT in 1968. They switched from DDT to Malathion in 1975, not because of environmentalism, but because the mosquitoes had developed resistance and DDT was no longer effective.
• With his characteristic carelessness, Andrew Bolt swallowed Du Pont's story, but gets taken to pieces by his commenters.

• Tell you what, everyone.

    

  Let's all start up our cars, and especially SUVs - everyone in America, no hell let's make it everyone in the world - and rev up the engines for fifteen minutes full throttle Next Tuesday at the same time.

    

  We'll all die within the hour, and there won't be anything to worry about now will there?

    

  Idiots.

    

  RWR www.rightwingrocker.com
• t the same time' means very little. CO2 has a long residence time and takes decades to do its damage. Finally - 15 min engine revving is probably equivalent to morning rush hour traffic. Not good, but it would take a long time to kill someone. I'm sorry, but your bizarrely distorted depictions of your opponents views make your own cause appear foolish.
• Better question: Why cite Lomborg who cites a ten year old study? When did looking things up yourself become too much work?

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• How, then, did the idea that Carson was responsible for millions of deaths gain currency? Any good myth requires a few grains of truth, and the DDT malaria story has a couple. First, the 2001 Stockholm convention on persistent organic pollutants prohibits the use of DDT except for disease control, and calls for all DDT use to be phased out. The phase-out commitment is often loosely referred to as a “ban.”

   

  Second, by virtue of its massive misuse in the 1960s and 1970s, DDT gained a bad reputation that was hard to shake. As a result, says WHO’s Allan Schapira, donors have sometimes insisted on the use of an insecticide other than DDT, even in “countries where the government wished to use DDT, and there was evidence that it was the best option for malaria-vector control.”
• But these grains of truth are scarcely enough to generate a myth as widespread as that of “Rachel Carson, baby killer.” So what accounts for the campaign against Carson? The story begins in the 1940s. Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won the 1948 Nobel prize for medicine for his discovery of the efficacy of DDT against several arthropods. It was used in the war by Allied forces with striking success to protect troops and civilians from the insects that transmit malaria, typhus and other diseases.
• The programme was never extended to sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria was most acute. But the failure of the programme was not the result of underuse: quite the opposite. In the first flush of enthusiasm for DDT in the 1950s, the range of applications was rapidly extended from disease control to agricultural and other uses. DDT was widely used in both developed and less developed countries to protect crops against pests. Indiscriminate use in agriculture led to the evolution of DDT-resistant mosquitoes.

• Meanwhile, the DDT-based eradication campaign against malaria ran into the trouble Carson had warned about. The high-water mark of the campaign came in 1964. Sri Lanka had reduced its number of malaria cases from millions after the end of the war to just 29. The country declared victory over malaria and suspended spraying. WHO called the eradication programme “an international achievement without parallel in the provision of public health service.”

   

  But then malaria returned to Sri Lanka. In 1968-69, there were half a million cases.
• The tobacco industry, faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places, sought to cast doubt on the science behind the mooted ban. But a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science.” Its primary vehicle was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris.
• TASSC, led by an activist named Steve Milloy, attacked the environmental movement on everything from food safety to the risks of asbestos. One of the issues Milloy took up with vigour was DDT, where he teamed up with the entomologist J Gordon Edwards. With the aid of Milloy’s advocacy, Edwards’s attacks on Rachel Carson moved from the political fringes to become part of the orthodoxy of mainstream US Republicanism
• Tobacco companies created a European version of TASSC, the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), led by Roger Bate, another tobacco lobbyist. In the late 1990s, Bate established “Africa Fighting Malaria,” a so-called “astroturf” organisation based in Washington DC. His aim was to drive a wedge between public health and the environment by suggesting that by banning DDT to protect birds, environmentalists were causing many people to die from malaria. Between them, Milloy’s TASSC and Bate’s Africa Fighting Malaria convinced many that DDT was a panacea for malaria, denied to the third world by the machinations of rich environmentalists.
• The pro-DDT brigade pounced on the phase-out proposal, describing it as a “ban,” and news stories made it appear that the ban was imminent. Yet during the negotiations, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the main supporters of a targeted phase-out date, abandoned its proposal, focusing instead on more stringent attempts to control the illegal use of DDT in agriculture. The outcome was an eminently sensible one.
• But the debate had given Milloy, Bate and others the start they needed. Successfully conflating the use of the term “ban” to describe the eventual phase-out proposal with the 1972 ban on agricultural use in the US, Milloy produced his “malaria clock,” which blamed the “ban” for all malaria deaths since 1972
• Bate and Africa Fighting Malaria continued to claim that the widespread use of DDT was being prevented solely because of the opposition of western environmentalists.

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• et in one of history’s more murderously myopic ongoing actions, most advanced countries and international agencies discourage its use. Why? Blame Rachel Carson’s seismically influential–and now largely discredited–book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962. In it she blames DDT for imperiling birds and people, portraying it as a blight of almost biblical proportions. It ain’t so. As Dr. Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science & Health once put it, there “has never been a documented case of human illness or death in the U.S. as a result of the standard and accepted use of pesticides.” The British medical journal The Lancet similarly notes that after 40 years of research no significant health threat from DDT has been found.
• Exactly contrary to Forbes’ claim, the book was found to be scientifically solid by a specially-appointed group of science advisors to President Kennedy, in 1963; it was found solid by later research by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Discover Magazine recently noted that there are more than 1,000 follow-up references since 1962 that verify Carson’s work.*
• Carson’s book accurately noted the damage to birds — not a single incident she recounts has ever been seriously questioned. The stories have been distorted and wild claims made against the distortions — but there is not a single study anywhere which contradicts Carson’s claims about damage to birds. Carson worried about human health effects, but stopped far short of saying DDT kills humans. S
• Elizabeth Whelan’s career is built on slamming scientists and science. But apart from the dubious provenance of the source, look at what Forbes quotes her as saying. Never a death in the U.S. as a result of using DDT in the limited way it’s now used in the U.S.
• One wishes critics of Rachel Carson would show a bit of Christian charity, calling for bed nets, but avoiding unjustified and misinformed calumny against Carson and environmentalists, who have labored intensively for 40 years to fight malaria.
• A few words about totalitarianism below the fold.

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• Now operating out of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Bate’s signature coup to date has been to spread the myth that environmentalists, by preventing the use of the pesticide DDT (Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane) to kill mosquitoes in developing countries, have heartlessly caused millions of malaria deaths worldwide. It needs to be said at the outset that this argument is untrue. While some groups have pressed hard to find alternatives, there is little evidence that a concerted effort to abolish anti-malaria DDT spraying ever occurred.
• The fact that this knowledge has not stopped Roger Bate is not surprising. The wider the untrue story spreads, the worse environmentalists look, and that’s always been his bottom line. For all his personal likeability, he is a man on a mission, and because he doesn’t let anything slow down the pace and scope of his argument, he is very good at what he does.
• has the disarming ability to make whatever he’s saying sound like well-intentioned common sense. During our conversation, Bate explained his research and policy work on malaria, pesticide regulations, and more recently counterfeit prescription drugs without a single “um” or pause to remember what his point was. Few think tank staffers can so engagingly follow a stream of consciousness wherever it leads them.
• Reagan’s stories, which were rarely true, were so engaging that they won over the public thanks to their neatness and clear moralizing. While Bate’s stories are less didactic, they are no less calculated
• The most important thing to know about Bate is that he is squarely in the camp of those who promote “sound science,” a term first popularized by the tobacco industry in its efforts to obscure the dangers of smoking. The phrase has become a code for undermining public confidence in the scientific community, mouthed frequently by global warming skeptics like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and their counterparts at free market think tanks. Today, sound science serves as a rallying cry for a professional network of deregulation activists and sympathetic politicians who argue that many environmental and public health laws should be repealed.       
• The now-defunct Tobacco Institute responded with a press release calling the findings “another step in a long process characterized by a preference for political correctness over sound science.”
• The Forum was a European parallel, though never a fully formal one, to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), an American front group funded by Philip Morris to question the dangers of smoking
• While TASSC has long been known to be a Philip Morris creation, and its front man Steve Milloy has been pilloried in the scientific press, Bate and ESEF have largely escaped the same level of scrutiny, perhaps because there is no solid evidence that the Forum ever directly received tobacco funding.
• Bate’s successes with ESEF, including the publishing of a book questioning the validity of research on smoking and other apparent health risks, should be of great interest to anyone who cares about carbon dioxide regulation or any other science-based policy question of the 21st century.
• His ability to cast a verbal spell is undeniable. He has promoted his free-market ideas by creating the appearance of doubt where there is confidence, debate where there is broad agreement, and uncertainty where there is near-consensus.
• continue to make their presence felt in regulatory discussions from here to the European Union and the developing world.
• His most visible contribution to his chosen cause has been to use the unlikely twin forces of malaria and DDT – both absent from the United States for decades, but facts of life in much of the developing world – to pit potential allies in regulatory efforts, especially environmentalists and public health advocates, against each other in an effort to draw their fire away from regulated industries, including tobacco
• he proposal laid out a comprehensive plan, including the formation of a front group to push the idea that Western experts and activists were focusing on the wrong issue. The central argument of the Malaria Strategy, he wrote, would be that “environmental regulations often harm public health in the West and Western policies often harm health in Less Developed Countries.” In other words, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other regulatory bodies shouldn’t even have time to think about regulating American and British tobacco, because the scourge of malaria demanded more immediate attention.
• emerged Bate’s thesis, which he continues to promote as a proxy for his deeper anti-regulatory agenda: That out-of-touch bureaucrats and misguided environmentalists are ignoring malaria sufferers
• To put this funding proposal in context, it should be noted that 60 Minutes aired the full version of Mike Wallace’s interview with Jeffrey Wigand, the Brown & Williamson research scientist turned whistleblower, in February 1996. That interview established in concrete detail how tobacco companies had systematically misled the public about the addictiveness and cancer-causing effects of their product. Not only did Bate know exactly to whom he was offering his services two years later, he was willing to ask them to fund a complicated and arguably farfetched sideshow project even as all 50 states concluded a $246 billion settlement against the industry that same year, a blow from which the American tobacco market has never fully recovered.
• lthough Philip Morris turned down his pitch, he found other backers for his front group and formally incorporated Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM) in South Africa in 2000. Now operating there and in Washington, D.C., AFM presses African health ministries to spray homes with DDT as a first resort and accuses officials who seek alternatives of caving to irresponsible environmentalist scare tactics
• Under the “What We Do” link at its Web site, the groups lists editorials, research papers, congressional testimony, and correspondence with “scientific, medical and mainstream media outlets” – no hands-on efforts with education, bed nets, window screens, swamp draining or medication. Despite this, it has inserted itself into debates at the WHO, gr
• That purpose – the reason this counterintuitive crusade is of broader interest – has nothing to do with malaria or DDT, as his now-public Philip Morris funding proposal makes clear. His real project has always been to attack the idea that scientists can ever agree on anything, to establish a network of credible scientific voices that will defend corporate interests, and to question the priorities of lawmakers who might seek to regulate his industries of choice – which include, from all available records, anyone who will pay him.
• Occasionally AFM – which, it must be remembered, was truly designed to cast doubt on the scientific method, not address malaria – has inserted itself even further into the DDT discussion. In one unusual instance, AFM was even called upon by the WHO to speak to the media on its behalf. As described in a Sept. 15, 2006, USA Today article headlined More use of controversial DDT urged in fight against malaria, Richard Tren, the current director of AFM, “attended the WHO’s press conference and was called on by WHO officials to answer technical questions,” where he proclaimed, “There is no credible evidence that DDT is harmful to human health.”
• The “no credible evidence” line is familiar to observers of the long struggle to establish tobacco’s harmful health effects. It is also, as far as DDT goes, increasingly untenable. According to Jan Betlem, a persistent organic pollutants expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Geneva, the human health risks may long have remained obscure or difficult to pin down, but a picture is emerging that is prompting new calls for caution.
• hose 30 years are now up, and according to Betlem, the most recent DDT Expert Group meeting in Geneva included a presentation, based on a detailed examination of approximately 500 relevant studies, laying out “several negative side effects related to DDT use,” including those for which there is “significantly related data.” These include spontaneous abortion, male congenital abnormalities, impaired neurodevelopment, breast cancer, diabetes and poor semen quality. While Tren’s statement was highly debatable in 2006, it is unarguably false today, although as Betlem wrote, it remains hard to establish at just what exposure level DDT presents human health risks. Final results of the review, commissioned by the WHO, are expected next year.
• n recognition of these risks, the U.N. announced on May 6 that a new 40-nation project will soon get underway aimed at eliminating DDT worldwide. A UNEP statement on the effort says that countries throughout Africa, Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean “are set to test non-chemical methods ranging from eliminating potential mosquito breeding sites and securing homes with mesh screens to deploying mosquito-repellent trees and fish that eat mosquito larvae,” following the largely successful examples of pilot programs in Mexico and Central America. The programs are designed to eliminate DDT use for malaria control by approximately 2020, the statement says, as long as the alternatives prove useful and cost-effective.
• How did this happen? Bate argues that there has been irrational pressure from environmentalist groups to ban DDT for years.
• However,
• here are legitimate concerns about mosquitoes having developed resistance to the chemical in the past, especially when it is applied illegally to agricultural crops, the few environmental groups that even follow tropical malaria have long stood behind the exception in the Stockholm Convention allowing DDT spraying for public health reasons.
• Bate hedged when asked about his testimony before Congress on the issue. “There was indirect environmental pressure” to curtail its use, he said. “There was the idea that the time for indoor residential spraying had passed. I’m not saying USAID was lobbied by the Pesticide Action Network or Greenpeace.”
• Despite this guarded note
• Bate has frequently blamed environmentalists for untold suffering on account of this supposed whisper campaign. Bate began an article last year in the United Kingdom’s Prospect magazine by declaring, “The environmentalist assault on the chemical DDT has come at an extremely high cost in human life. It is impossible to know how many people have died needlessly from malaria, yellow fever, leishmaniasis, dengue fever and other insect-borne diseases in the absence of DDT, but it must be millions
• similar statements crop up again and again alongside skepticism regarding other potential health risks. As far back as 1996, during a show on Britain’s Radio 4 about product liability lawsuits, he argued, “And I think that in most of the issues that have been discussed recently – things like breast implants, electromagnetic radiation from overhead power lines, passive smoking, toxic waste dumps – in most of those cases you see reasonable elevations of risk, small elevations of risk, which are often not statistically significant, and very little establishment of the physiological plausibility of those things causing harm.”
• a 2007 editorial of his in the Wall Street Journal claimed that developing countries “have been scared by environmentalists into thinking DDT causes cancer and birth defects,” and that overly fastidious Europeans worrying about phantom health risks have unfairly blocked agricultural imports from nations where DDT use indoors – where farmers store their crops before export – is widespread.
• Bate’s real targets – health and environmental scientists whose work could lead to calls for stricter regulations – have remained largely unaware of his presence or his activities because he has perfected the use of dummy targets and misdirection
• Bate has thrived by turning the argument into whether environmental groups clamoring for “the removal of the last nanogram of whatever pollutant from water supplies, or food products,” as he put it in his Philip Morris funding pitch, care about the fate of poor Africans.
• A statement sent to NRNS before the May 6 U.N. announcement by Medha Chandra of Pesticide Action Network, which is nearly alone among its colleagues in already being aware of Bate's career and has long been one of the foremost critics of over-reliance on DDT, included no information on Bate or the genesis of AFM, instead emphasizing that the group "support[s] the [Stockholm] Convention in allowing the use of DDT for malaria control in limited circumstances" and also agrees with "the focus on alternatives to DDT and the Convention’s firm commitment to helping Parties transition away from DDT to safer, more effective and long-term solutions to malaria."
• There is certainly nothing about the connection between DDT and tobacco denialism.
• largely kept his name out of the spotlight, Bate’s argument has gotten plenty of attention. As the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting has shown, the idea that environmentalists are to blame for millions of malaria deaths has appeared frequently in the American press
• How does someone make a living spreading this story? H
• AFM, if not Bate himself, even has some loose ties to Bush’s father. The group’s 2008 yearly report noted that it continues to employ George Pieler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation founded by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, as a “consultant lobbyist.” Armey’s creation co-published a 1996 report with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute questioning the science behind regulating second-hand smoking, although there is no evidence Pieler was involved.
• The relationship of such a figure with AFM should be no surprise, since Bate is, from the evidence, interested more in free markets than public health expertise. Despite having no training in medicine, he and his colleagues have been unsparing in attacking the medical qualifications and good faith of their targets
• n a 2004 editorial written for the conservative National Review, Bate compared the WHO to “mafia dons” and labeled its “top man in Ethiopia . . . a consummate flat-earthe
• [B]ecause it was too eager to please another notoriously incompetent bunch” – USAID – “which for years has stood by its own unscientific reasons why neither ACT nor DDT are effective and should not be used. No properly informed expert would disagree with using those tools,” he announced, “but [because] USAID disagreed, and held so many of the purse strings . . . the system collapsed under scientific ignorance and achieved nothing.”
• Why did the U.N. not do this, according to Bate?
• Lest anyone doubt whether this rhetoric of vilification is effective, American malaria experts are happy to report that after a large-scale retooling in 2005, they now have AFM’s approval.
• With the DDT effort essentially played out, he and AFM are looking in an unexpected direction for their next career move: generic drug policy. “If we can stop or lower the number of substandard drugs being produced, or eliminate in many places counterfeit drugs from being produced, that’s the big project I’m working on today,” he said. “So, if you like, counterfeit drugs is to me today what DDT was for me a decade ago.”
• The switch in terminology from “generic” drugs to “counterfeit” drugs is typical, neatly suggesting that the problem is not affordability but quality.
• The corollary to this newfound interest is his prediction that the Obama administration will import more generic drugs as part of health care reform, which he says would be misguided. “If they were true copies of the well-produced drugs,” he told me, “then you’re just dealing with an economic argument: Should you support the brand originator, those who developed the drugs in the first place? I would argue probably yes, but that’s an economic argument” – hardly the terrain on which he’s preferred to engage in the past. So, instead: “The assumption they make that all these drugs are equal is going to have to be fought, because it’s not true.
• This is, in its way, Bate’s declaration of hostilities against the White House’s health care plan. Obama and Biden have made importing cheaper drugs from abroad, as well as breaking pharmaceutical company monopolies on certain types of medication, a centerpiece of their reform effort.
• n his casual way, Bate said he’s not undertaking this new project on behalf of drug companies, who stand to lose untold revenue if generic versions of their products are commercially successful. He just wants to get to the bottom of the science.
• As with DDT, Bate has enough of a point here to keep working away at the issue until his real targets – Democrats, universal health care advocates, generic drug manufacturers, whoever – start catching flack in the media at large for killing poor people abroad and trying to import that failure here.
• it’s only a matter of time before we hear calls to put the generic drug coverage discussion on hold until we can soberly examine how many Africans were killed in the quest for cheap health care. As with the other issues Bate has worked on over the years, the alarm will be sounded in the name of science, not profits; research, not ideology; charity, not greed.
• If you survey the legacy of the Gingrich Revolution and the Bush administration, it’s clear that the “sound science” deregulatory effort has had great success. It was no accident that Senator Inhofe, one of the most prominent “sound science” advocates Congress has ever seen, chaired the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee from 2003 until the Democratic takeover in 2006
• Indeed, his July 28, 2003, speech to the committee on the evidence for global warming was straight out of the sound science playbook: “Today, even saying there is scientific disagreement over global warming is itself controversial. But anyone who pays even cursory attention to the issue understands that scientists vigorously disagree over whether human activities are responsible for global warming, or whether those activities will precipitate natural disasters. . . . [N]ot only is there a debate, but the debate is shifting away from those who subscribe to global warming alarmism.” Tellingly, Inhofe pleaded for sound science not once but twice in his tone-setting speech.
• To find where this vocabulary comes fro
• you need look no further than tobacco company memos and the stacks of ESEF and TASSC editorials of the previous decade. The bricks and mortar of the sound science edifice came not from Senate press shops but from economists, conservative activists and other partisans committed to producing an alternate scientific view of reality. This is the real interest of Roger Bate’s career:
• Bate has always been one of its silent operators, and over the years he and his ideological compatriots have achieved, on a larger scale, much of what he set out to accomplish with the Malaria Strategy. Debate about not only global warming but even tobacco ground to a halt for much of the past two decades. Congress has declined to pass any carbon dioxide legislation, and the Environmental Protection Agency has demurred on whether to apply the Clean Air Act to carbon emissions. Perhaps most damning, even with the clear, uncontested evidence on tobacco’s health risks, the Food & Drug Administration continues to vacillate on whether to regulate it under existing health laws.

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• Milloy got it from Gordon Edwards. Edwards had tried to publish some of his rants against Rachel Carson, but stopped when editors wouldn't.

    

  I challenged Dunning to check up on Milloy's sources, and to the best of my knowledge he has failed to do it.

    

  Others should, however. It's shocking. On counts of eagles and other birds, for example, Edwards/Milloy claim that counts of eagles and falcons and hawks actually rose during the heavy DDT use era.

    

  They cite Audubon Magazine.

    

  It's a slog, but you can check every bird count from 1935 through 1975, and you will not find a claim from Audubon that the populations of those birds rose at that time. It's possible to see how a deceitful person could abuse the bird counts to reach such a conclusion -- if there are more observers, there are more sitings -- but if you cross check the Edwards/Milloy claims with those numbers, they still don't produce an increase in populations.

    

  And then there is the issue that, in a period when Edwards claimed to find one article claiming an increase in eagles, there are no such articles, but perhaps two dozen decrying the loss of the birds, and more articles decrying the devastating effects of DDT, and it's difficult to conclude that whoever put that piece together, Milloy or Edwards, was just lying to see if anyone would bother to call a bluff.

• Brian Dunning:

  [I never] quoted or cited Steven Milloy, in any way

  OK, but the post you're commenting on doesn't claim that you did. Tim Lambert isn't making the transparently false statement that you quoted Milloy in your podcast or even said Milloy's name. What Tim said is that Milloy was your "primary source for information about DDT" and he gave some examples where you appeared to rely on Milloy. Do you have a response or do you just intend to attack straw men?   

  I get that you don't have unlimited time to follow up on each podcast, but you know this issue is a little more important than whether frogs can live in solid stone or the Yonaguni Monument was man-made. Getting DDT right has very big consequences for human welfare and the environment.

• When I was younger (so much younger that today), being of a sceptical bent, I encountered Steve Milloy's Junkscience site and thought "at last - intellectual liberation!"!

    

  It was not long until I realised the guy was a complete fraud and drummer for the fossil fuel industry (and anyone else that pays him, like tobacco companies).

    

  Doubt set in immediately I read in one of his articles that once could not define an average measurement (like temperature) over a sphere (like the earth). Since I had a smidgin of mathematics and maths physics, I knew that was complete garbage.

    

  Anyone who take's Milloy's screed as "research" is an idiot.
• @Mark (#9) and @Chris S. (#35) I too had to stop listening to Dunning's podcasts and have advised my student generally against listening to them as well, except as examples for Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Same thing as each of you mentioned, when I heard episodes that wandered into my areas of work, they tended to be full of straw men and pretty awful. Plus he comes off as a total jerk when his errors are pointed out (see #36 above - which isn't full flower but gives you an idea).
• He also, based on his broadcast, didn't actually read Silent Spring, or was not paying any attention when he did.
• emonstration of cherry picking and confirmation bias.
• I agree that the issues are not perfectly clear, they almost never are, but this podcast does absolutely nothing to improve the situation and what politics has to do with any of this is totally beyond me ... have condors been voting Democratic ? Total nonsense.
• As a former vector control professional, I have to disagree with Mr. Dunning. Overall, the evidence shows that DDT has serious problems and should only be used under the specific conditions laid out by WHOPES and the Stockholm Convention.

• Possibly the Dunning program needs help with fact checking, and could get it for the asking.

    

  I gather Dunning has become popular with people who like that kind of thing--if so they have to look out harder for efforts to use them as a vehicle for bad information.

    

  The last paragraph of the transcript talks about using DDT "in Africa" and I'd bet that's the trick. As 'Bug Guy' says above, adding "under the specific conditions ..." would have been a smart conclusion.

    

  Africa is a hot area for agribusiness investment http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/ak241e/ak241e00.htm A push to relax pesticide rules should be anticipated.

    

  Many people pushing DDT don't care about biology; they're using it as a lever for their politics, e.g. http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsid.2061/news_detail.asp

     

  Posted by: Hank Roberts | N
• No one is saying they don't like your politics - they're saying you did sloppy research. Some folks have suggested it may be due to (completely human) confirmation bias reinforced by political ideology; but the issue is the poor research, regardless of its underlying cause.
• Please list the "HUGE number of studies" that contradict the scientific consensus.

• This is all about the rehabilitation of DDT's reputation, which is part of Libertarianism's broad anti-science campaign in support of its anti-regulation dogma. Dunning is a spear carrier in that crusade.

    

  Dunning is no more a skeptic than is Penn Jillette. In fact he'd be a nice fit over at CATO, where he could sit with Jillette at Patrick Michaels' knee and absorb "knowledge" suitable for libertarian sensibilities.

• A hefty percentage of the so-called "skeptical" community are Randroids. This is nothing new.

    

  Cf. Penn Jilette, Stewart Brand, Michael Shermer ...

    

  Capitalist press releases, they are never, ever skeptical of.

     

  Posted by: Marion Delgado | November 23,

• How could anyone come to such a conclusion? This is very selective looking at research.

    

  For example: Rachel Carson provided more than 50 pages of citations to science papers in refereed journals, to support her claims in Silent Spring.
• So far as I have been able to determine in the past 30 years, not a single claim she made is contradicted by research. Not one. (Milloy claims Carson misquoted DeWitt -- but Milloy's a cold-blooded prevaricator on that score.
• My distaste for Milloy's tactics are heightened by my experience staffing the Senate Labor Committee during a round of the great tobacco wars, when the warnings on cigarette packages were increased in number, and rotated. Milloy's work in favor of DDT, a largely ineffective chemical popular in a completely ineffective malaria-fighting strategy, uses exactly the tactics of misleading press releases and deceptive claims used by the tobacco companies back then.

• Among many other bullshit tropes from the self-proclaimed skeptics, they all hate the animal-rights anti-cruelty people. They claim an essentially Old Testament right to do whatever they want to to animals, for whatever reason (combined with a propertarian view of nature). But in fact, the scientific, evolution-based conclusion is that many animals are quite similar to us, feel similar pain, and therefore, if your ethics involve not being cruel, you should at least give some weight to non-cruelty. That's no more scientific an attitude than some animal-rights people's claims that animal research is almost never effective.

    

  In the real world, without some anti-cruelty advocacy, the market and competitive research pressures will set the norms, and there will be no incentive to justify research goals and methods.

     

  Posted by: Marion Delgado

• If that had been Mr. Dunning's intention, why would he rely on the propaganda from the critics of WHO and the Stockholm Convention, the propaganda that claims WHO is a bunch of bumbling mass murderers, and that the Stockholm Convention is a racist screed that guarantees lots of dead babies in Africa?

    

  If the intent is to fight malaria, why shoot at the malaria fighters?
• nd Milloy IS paid to spread disinformation. That's, literally, his job. He's quite often compared to the protagonist of "Thank You for Smoking." He's spread disinformation on tobacco, pesticides, food, pollution, and global warming, among others. He's also not a scientist, not scientifically versed, and most of his campaigns are explicitly anti-scienc
• he claim that brown pelicans were the source of the Newcastle Disease outbreak puts the matter beyond doubt. All other sources that I could find say that the source was imported parrots. Milloy is the only one who blames the pelicans. And your claim that millions of pelicans were culled is unique to you, but is clearly based on a misunderstanding of Milloy.

• eah, Ed. I know. ;)

    

  After all, why would the Stockholm Convention make a special exemption for DDT IRS applications and why would WHOPES spell out exactly the most effective application methods?
• Dunning is right about there being lots of contradictory studies in the literature on DDT. This is especially true of the early eggshel
• cientists have spent entire careers studying this, and they understand the issue far better than someone with a week a to put together a podcast ever could. And what do these people say? They say the DDT/DDE/DDD causes eggshell thinning in certain bird species. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (and arm of the U.S. CDC) put together a great "toxicological profile" on DDT/DDE/DDE which was published in 2000. Appendex D, section 6 (page D-24 of
• But one would be wrong
• nd what these experts conclude from the sea of studies (that to the untreated appear contradictory) is that DDT/DDE/DDD causes eggshell thinning.

• It seems like this post is all factional banter, tit-for-tat attempted cleverness and one-upmanship. Is anyone here an entomologist or malariologist, or epidemiologist, or public health practitioner who has worked in the field, or are you just armchair commentators? DDT should be used for IRS spraying, because it's effective in stopping malaria. Are you all against its use for this purpose?

     

  Posted by: Veralee P. Ompus | November 23, 2010 6:33 PM

    

   

      

   

    71  

  Verily, some pompous twat does not feel constrained to read anyone else's posts or comments before leaping to its modest conclusions.

     

  Posted by: amused | November 23, 2010 7:06 PM

• I don't see any mystery as to why Libertarians would tend to be anti-AGW, any more than Progressives tend to be pro-AGW.

    

  Libertarians have seen intrusive (though well-meaning) governments making a codshead of everything from education and health care to national defence, and are hence suspicious of any decrees from on high which tell them "The debate is over; this is what we must do."

    

  Collectivists believe implicitly in the benign power of central authority to bring benefit to the masses; it is this process that Progressives believe in, where Libertarians are more concerned with result.

    

  To suggest that a Libertarian view "clouds" a person's thinking any more than a Collectivist view, would be to misunderstand the situation.

     

  Posted by: Rick Bradford |

• BTW Rick, The weight you give your political lens of science should also be viewed along side your practice of making up quotes.

    

  Perhaps the two are linked?

• Re: 70 "Is anyone here an entomologist or malariologist, or epidemiologist, or public health practitioner who has worked in the field"

    

  I am.

    

  "DDT should be used for IRS spraying, because it's effective in stopping malaria."

    

  Not as effective as it once was, definitely not as effective as other methods.

    

  Perhaps, rather than pontificating about "banter, tit-for-tat attempted cleverness and one-upmanship" you should maybe do a bit more research yourself. It's evident that you are not "an entomologist or malariologist, or epidemiologist, or public health practitioner who has worked in the field"

     

  Posted by: Chris S.

• Funny how people who INSIST they are skeptics are completely gullible when it comes to something that confirms their position.

    

  Read the IPCC reports. Even if you are CONVINCED they are biased, they explain their process, their results and what caveats and assumptions they relied upon.

    

  Bias isn't a problem.

    

  BIASED REPORTING is.

• s anyone here an entomologist or malariologist, or epidemiologist, or public health practitioner who has worked in the field.

    

  I am, as I mentioned before.

    

  DDT does have its uses in a vector control program, as described by the WHO Pesticide Evaluation Scheme. For situations where there are no reasonable alternatives and where the mosquito population is not resistant to DDT, it is recommended. However, there does need to be adequate infrastructure in place to prevent diversion, properly apply the material and to handle cleaning it afterward. Handling of rinsates is also critical.

    

  For a reference, here is the WHO guide to the recommended materials for IRS applications: http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/whocdswhopes20013/en/index.html

     

  Posted by: the bug guy
• I would dismiss him out of hand because his research here was so shoddy that for me to listen to him and believe him on any topic, I would have to double check anything he would say. This makes him valueless as a digest of possible facts on any topic. This does not mean I can't listen to the cases he states, it means I have to give them zero weight based on my perception of his methods.

• Isn't double checking one of the keys to general skepticism? That's why citing of sources is critical. I've used the references and further reading section of many Skeptoid articles to get more in depth research, and to find out the claims being made.

    

  But giving him zero weight? A wise man (I know using that term is a fallacy) once said, "Brian Dunning's Skeptoid does an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience," so don't dismiss that man's research methods so easily. Lots of very smart well meaning people are very wrong, profoundly wrong, from time to time.

• I'm not naive, I'm actually a practicing scientist, and at this late date, anyone who cites a Milloy-related site, gets zero weight. The history of misinformation and corporate messaging from Milloy is both well known and extensive. Certainly there may be things that are actually correct amongst those sites, but I will go elsewhere.

    

  Dunning may very well have done admirably in the past, but the DDT episode signals to me that I do not have time or effort to expend on determining whether he's putting me on.

     

  Posted by: Pinko Punko | November 2

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