Today’s Baltimore Sun published this critical assessment of Rachel Carson’s trumped-up case against DDT. The authors are Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth; here’s part of their argument:
Against the backdrop of the great good that had been brought about by
DDT and other pesticides, Ms. Carson painted a bleak, carcinogenic
future.
The book popularized certain fears about DDT by exaggerating them. The
pesticide was said to be decimating bird populations not just because
it cut down on insect populations but also because it thinned
eggshells, which led to far fewer young birds. Worse, what was
afflicting birds might be afflicting humans. Ms. Carson – who would die
of breast cancer shortly after the book’s publication – alleged that
DDT caused cancer in humans and predicted an epidemic if its use wasn’t
drastically curtailed.
Dr. Richard Tren of Africa Fighting Malaria charges that Ms. Carson
"misrepresented some scientific data while ignoring data that would not
support her case." Quite true.
Alleged links between DDT and cancer rates were never strong. In 1972,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency empanelled administrative law
Judge Edmund Sweeney to hold evidentiary hearings to determine the
drug’s dangers. After seven months of hearings, he determined it is
"not a carcinogenic hazard to man." Further, using DDT according to EPA
specifications did "not have a deleterious effect on fresh water fish
… wild birds, or other wild life."
….The death toll during the 30-year DDT ban is hard to fix, but evidence
from Sri Lanka and elsewhere suggests that several hundred thousand
graves would not be pushing it.
Why are persons who sell marijuana — a product whose use, as far as I’m aware, is responsible for approximately zero deaths — imprisoned and vilified while Rachel Carson and her "green" compatriots canonized as saints?
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Because the claims made against Carson are a hoax, a deliberate lie. Read about it here.
Tim has good reason to support Ms. Carson legacy; without someone defending her, she would be known as the greatest mass murderer in world history.
Tim, your argument only works if you believe there is no connection between the publication of Silent Spring and the decision to stop DDT use in Sri Lanka. Given the high profile of Carson's book at publication time and the sweeping global political response to it, you have an uphill battle supporting a claim that the Ceylons operated in a vacuum.
Additionally, it doesn't take the equivalent of a biology rocket scientist to come up with a model where a relatively small DDT-resistent mosquito population could coexist with a human population and result in a handful of malaria cases year after year indefinitely. You do not need to kill every mosquito to get the desired result, just manage the population. California has done a similar thing with the Med-fly for decades using a combination of malathion spraying and sterile fly releases. Mixing up the poisons is usually part of a successful long term pest control regime. Ask the guy who keeps ants out of your house.
The big point here is that faced with perceived environmental threats, we never strive for balance. Instead we ban and pat ourselves on the back, ignoring the negative consequences of the ban. We operate under the assumption that the artificial (the "man made") is suspect. Ignore Mount Pinotubo injecting a few decade's worth of manmade CFCs straight into the stratosphere and blame south pole ozone depletion on butterflies in the United States using deodorant. Ban them worldwide ASAP, dramatically raise the cost of refrigeration, and force NASA to redesign insulating foam that was working flawlessly for its purpose. Chalk up a space shuttle.
Nobody's fighting over Rachel Carson's legacy for its own sake. The pushback on canonizing her is that we repeat the same general mistake in the name of mother earth over and over and over again, and have a whole slew of issues facing us today where we are asked to take the same tired path of banning things (or capping them) without regard to the cost, whether that be in dollars, lives, or quality of life. It's insane. And the most insane part is that all that the rabid environmental movement needs to do is build the trade-offs into its discussions and solutions to come clean philosophically and gain the moral upper hand again.
DDT is still widely used against Anopheles mosquitos in the tropics, where it is commonly and effectively applied to indoor walls and on bednets. Those without access to these techniques are not the victims of legal bans or treaties, but of economic and other practical factors. The worldwide DDT ban only prohibits agricultural application.
I believe the death toll from the DDT ban is much higher than several hundred thousand. It is so effective at preventing malaria (the experience in Sri Lanka shows this) that a large fraction of all the deaths from malaria since 1972 could be considered avoidable but for the availability of DDT. 10 to 30 million died as a result of the DDT ban.
You ever notice how when you're reading a good book, everything seems to fit what the author is saying?
I'm just finishing up "The Black Swan" and Carson's distastrous use of prediction via inductive reasoning and "epistemic arrogance" sums up perfectly what Taleb was illustrating throughout the book.
And of course the global media, namely that in the US and western Europe, are accomplices in the crime as well.
Ms. Carson was a deadly combination of Al Gore and Jozef Stalin, though Stalin was better looking. Her hysteria and spun science about DDT was portentious of Gorezilla's hysteria and spun science about global warming. Her legacy of causing avoidable deaths is as morally reprehensible as Stalin's. Stalin would wax Darwinian if he was alive, regarding the millions who starved due to his denial of goods or died in his labor camps as victims of a natural process of evolutionary deselection, losers in the competition for political power.
Had Carson survived thru the 80's, it is likely she would have believed that the millions who subsequently died for lack of access to DDT were equally unfortunate in their failed battle with mosquitoes, but not take any blame for it. Her spun science to support the PETA-style political agenda of putting birds ahead of humans was wildly successful. In the struggle for survival, fear is a weapon that demagogues wield more deftly than scientific facts. It is easy to convince most people to fear a technology than embrace it because people generally do not know what good science is, and feel powerless if they can't understand how something is made. The animal instinct is to run from the unknown.
Prescription for all publicly funded studies:
1. Mandatory citation of major studies that oppose the conclusion of the published study.
2. Mandatory publication of all the data used in the study. Seems obvious, but data is usually witheld for IP reasons. Yes we would lose some research that is funded partially by private $, but at least we would know what we are paying for.
3. Mandatory use of p-values and confidence intervals in studies, which are the measure of statistical significance
4. Mandatory disclaimer of conclusions based on relative risks between 0.5 and 2.0
These recommendations are derived from the definitive junksci debunking weapon, the book by Steven Milloy: "Junk Science Judo". His voluminous debunkings can be found on junkscience.com.
Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned. Carson was an animal rights radical, who saw humans as the principal threat to animal harmony. Two key quotes:
"The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became,"
"What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important."
and she achieved salvation of a few birds while gaining sweet revenge on humanity, killing tens of millions of her own species. What will Ms. Clinton do to avenge her humiliation in 1993 and 1998? and she's 10 times the politician Carson was. Be very afraid: not of technology, of fanaticism.
What's funny Vaji, is that you couldn't meet your own criteria for publicly funded studies when trying to back your own non-sense on Al Gore and Rachel Carson. There's nothing in the peer reviewed literature that supports your side on either issue….too much Rush Limbaugh. I suggest you try mixing in a little NPR or even some Air America and some Mother Jones Magazine. And then there's always Science and Nature magazines.
fyi Muirgeo is on record here as denying DDT prevents malaria.
Muirgeo, welcome to Vaji's web. I will help you get unstuck.
I will not go down the path of arguing that many liberals see junk science as their best bet to impose de facto socialism via overregulation, since tax payers have successfully resisted direct socialism via transfer payments. Many others argue this well enough. I am trying to find common ground with liberals to drastically reduce junk science because private companies abuse science as much as liberal politicians.
The current system of peer review is intensely flawed. That is why many are calling for full disclosure of publicly funded science data, including Michael Crichton, no right wing lackey. If you oppose this, then we are apparently in the ironic situation of a libertarian backing a regulation which would disincentivize shared (public + private) basic research, and a liberal backing unregulated shared research.
Looking one level deeper reveals that my moderately libertarian stripes stay intact if I can make the case that publicly funded science is a public good only if it successfully arbitrates between conflicting private studies on issues of basic health and safety, or adds completely new scentific insights.
Purely private studies are assumed to be spun…caveat emptor. Public studies should arbitrate, but they too often do not, because they are either inept or spun. Purely public studies are often inept, as talent and facilities are not top level in public employment/ownership. The best basic research is contracted to private companies under government requirements and oversight,…shared research.
Conclusions of shared studies are spun easily when the data are not disclosed. Why are the data undisclosed? Excepting weapons research which suppresses data for national security reasons, the two main reasons that shared data are undisclosed are
1) That many private companies make non-disclosure a condition of the contract, in order to protect the IP that they have invested in, not trusting the legal system to fully protect against knockoffs, and maximize profits. No libertarian problem here.
2) The stakeholders INTEND to spin the conclusions and RELY on nondisclosure to protect the bogus claims. Both private and public stakeholders are guilty of this intentional spin. Private companies, private investors, NGO's, public agencies, and politicians are all guilty of sponsoring premeditated spun research.
The only way out of this morass is to regulate public research to force disclosure of data. This regulation would not be simple, there would be many exceptions, and there would have to be tougher enforcement of IP protection to incentivize continued shared research investment.
If full disclosure was in place in 1962, Carson's book would have been discredited, more likely she would not have written it the same way. Likewise Al Gore's drivel would have been directly refuted on its own merits. The refutation is still occurring, but it requires large independent studies to be conducted, which even though they do refute the claims (of direct causal link of CO2 level to temperature rise, for instance), some of the studies he cites cannot be directly refuted without full data disclosure. This delay is politically significant in the rush to regulate.
Successfully extricated, you may go in peace now Muirgeo. May the genital odor of a thousand Rosie O'Donnells asphyxiate your enemies.
Vaji has spoken.
fyi Muirgeo is on record here as denying DDT prevents malaria.
Posted by: ben
Yep me the CDC, the guys at the NAS and a bunch of resistant mosquitos are "all on record".
Vaji,
I just read your post and I'm pretty sure I didn't see any peer reviewed scientific references to back your claims.
The idea that the liberals have issues with junk science is laughable seeing what this conservative administration has done to silence contrarian scientist and their science publications that go against its agenda. Likewise they closed down the oversight Office of Technological Assessment (? name). Finally the conservatives have a large base that believes the world is 6,000 years old, that global warming is a hoax, and they are against Stem cell research and the teaching of evolution.
Muirgeo,
Perhaps you missed my reference. Here is the specific link that has journal citations.
http://junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html
You will see in there that the World Health Organization fessed up in 1998 that DDT was singlehandedly responsible for malaria eradication in developed countries by 1967, and failure to eradicate was due only to excessive limitation of application.And it took until last year for the WHO to finally reverse their DDT ban. Still propagandists retain influence over governments of underdeveloped countries by convincing them that DDT is dangerous to man (also refuted by sources in the link above), to their genocidal detriment.
It is of course impossible to prove deductively that DDT would have prevented the millions of malarial deaths since 1972. But inductively, even the least scientific mind would have to agree that the success against malaria between 1945 and 1967 was due to DDT primarily, and that after its ban, millions died unnecessarily. To deny this and demand deductive proof is a transparent red herring (a favorite main course of junk science propagandists).
I agree that the Christian Right perverts science as much as the Gaian Left. My libertarian view is that stifling stem cell research, suppressing information on evolution, and teaching fundamentalist falsehoods is wrong if done in a public school, but I part with you on global warming.
Apologies for staying off topic, but here is my inconvenient opinion on warming:
The socialist left, led by their evangelical messiah Gorezilla, in their salivating rush to overregulate us on deceptive grounds into a collectivist utopia, often quote the straw man argument from the small minority of the ignorant right who believe that global warming is a hoax. The earth is in a warming trend, and most of the right agrees with this. The majority of the right just do not believe man's industrial activity is the main cause, because the science does not bear it out.
The inconvenient truth is that CO2 level LAGS temperature rises by 800-2,000 years on Gorezilla's 650,000 year chart of temp vs CO2, which is "conveniently" scaled to not be able to see the lag from far away. The other inconvenient truth is that average earth temp lags sunstorm (cosmic ray producing) activity very tightly (a few years lag – see new book by Svensmark: "The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change"). This book cites the science behind the theory, which is much more plausible than Gorezilla's.
to your OTA point:
I also agree that the function of the OTA (unbiased assessment of science relevant to policy) is important, but the OTA (or the GAO, which took over the function) could not do its assessment properly without mandatory data disclosure. Until that day, we are doomed to unverifiable hysterical hallucinogenic scintific interpretations from both ends of the political spectrum.
May the noses of a thousand Streisands sneeze on your enemies.
Vaji has spoken.
Muirgeo
Yep me the CDC, the guys at the NAS and a bunch of resistant mosquitos are "all on record".
Frankly I don't believe it, but do provide some links from them that show DDT does not prevent malaria.
DDT spraying in countries where malaria is currently endemic has been primarily limited not by environmental concerns but by its own inutility in rural, agrarian geography where it could not be applied with sufficient penetration and consistency to achieve the desired effect. Historically DDT was sprayed as aggressively as desired by governments that ultimately curbed its use voluntarily. The fact is, aggressive DDT use failed to eradicate mosquitoes or malaria and resulted in the destruction of other insect populations valuable to the small farm agriculture common to those countries. Not surprisingly, rural populations who suffered economically as a result of DDT spraying resisted its aggressive use. More limited spraying was a compromise reached in these countries as a result. Rachel Carson had and has nothing to do with it and attacking her ghost will do little to change anything. If you want to spray DDT more aggressively in Africa and elsewhere, you'll have to more successfully debate the people who live there. However, my guess is that the real motivation here is not an altrutistic concern for third world populations; such concern (at least for many of those posting ad hominem attacks and using words such as "genocide") is most likely cynical cover for efforts to relieve first world companies and corporations of regulations and standards which limit profits. It's not just DDT which is at issue here, it's all the other pollutants, the whole concept that the environment is worthy of restrained and responsible stewardship, and that corporations should be answerable to more than just their own consciences and bottom lines. Tarnish the herald, and tarnish the principle. Fortunately, I think most people will see through it.