tlambert | May 30, 2007In 1995, several think tanks mounted vitrolic attacks on the
title="Food and Drug Administration">
href="http://www.fda.gov/">FDA using expensive radio,
television and print ads. In an article in the Los Angeles
Times Myron Levin
href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/yqd47d00">wrote:
Although the attacks do not mention tobacco, the industry is a major
beneficiary. By arguing that the FDA has neglected its basic mission,
the critics have made a case against the agency embarking on new
initiatives, such as tobacco control...
Some of the FDA attackers -- including the Washington…
tlambert | May 29, 2007Remember how Christopher Monckton claimed that Gavin Menzies' fantasies about the Chinese navy sailing around the Arctic in 1421 proved it was warmer then?
EG Beck (of CO2 graph nonsense fame) makes the same argument and has a map to prove it:
Hey, who can argue if he has a map? By the way, all the dotted lines are journeys the fleet took. Really.
Via Stefan Rahmstorf, who has more on another dodgy Beck graph.
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 27, 2007Martin Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" used fake graphs to try to make a case that global warming is a hoax. Compare their version of temperature change (on left) which they claimed came from NASA with what you actually get from NASA.
Now the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has decided to show Durkin's "Swindle". Durkin's version of the NASA graph and NASA's version are just two alternative opinions and people should see Durkin's version as well.
Don Arthur has written the definitive round up of the controversy.
Dave Tiley's take is also worth reading.
Tim Blair, meanwhile, is…
tlambert | May 26, 2007It turns out that global warming denialist Sinclair Davidson is also a Lancet denialist:
The Carson piece tells us it's impossible to spray 3/4 of the houses in malarial areas. Yet, the Lancet tells us a research team went to every house in Baghdad (at 15 min per house, in the middle of the day, in a war-zone).
And as well as not understanding confidence intervals, Davidson doesn't understand random sampling. In order to estimate the number of deaths in Baghdad you don't have to visit every house, just a random sample of them.
Update: After eight more comments where he accused me of being…
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 23, 2007Via Gristmill, reasic's magisterial debunking of Michael Crichton's silly "Aliens Cause Global Warming" talk.
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 21, 2007MarkH has written a guide to the global warming denialists. The Competive Enterprise Institute wins the "bottom of the barrel" rating.
tlambert | May 20, 2007I wrote earlier about William Broad's many misrepresentations in his story that criticised Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Now Kevin Libin has produced an article for the National Post that makes Broad look like a paragon of virtue. Look at this:
James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and one of Mr. Gore's advisors, agreed the movie has "imperfections" and "technical flaws." About An Inconvenient Truth's connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming - something refuted by storm experts - Mr. Hansen said, "we need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is."…
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 18, 2007Roger Pielke Jr has stopped blogging. James Annan comments:
It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in…
tlambert | May 18, 2007NASA's GISS has on-line graphing system that lets you see a graph of temperatures for a particular weather station (For example, here is Sydney airport).) Steve McIntyre decided to run a script that asked the GISS system to produce graphs of each and every station in the data set (thousands of weather stations). Since his script was requesting these as fast as it could, it made it difficult for anyone else to use the system, so the GISS webmaster blocked his access. When he asked why, the webmaster explained
Although you did not provide any further details about your problem, I will assume…
tlambert | May 17, 2007The New Scientist has published a handy guide, rounding up 26 of the most common myths and misperceptions in climate science.
tlambert | May 17, 2007Via Angry Toxicologist, John Gravois on The Secret:
Oprah, I don't think you've done quite enough to make up for turning the Law of Attraction into the biggest thing since TomKat. Since you gave it your endorsement, The Secret has become one of the fastest-selling books and probably the most successful infomercial in history. The gaggle of gurus who peddle The Secret's message all over the world are still out there, arguing that it is the answer to every atrocity and tragedy. One went so far as to blame the suffering in Darfur on stinkin' thinkin'.
That's a lot to answer for. But don't worry…
tlambert | May 17, 2007John Quiggin:
Phillip Adams and Peter Dixon have prepared a reply (over the fold) to the opinion piece by Robson and Davidson in the Australian which offered a range of incoherent criticisms of proposals to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Disgracefully, but not at all surprisingly, the Oz has declined to print it, marking yet another step in its decline.
Admittedly, the debate is so one-sided that printing the reply would have made it obvious how ill-advised it was to publish the Davidson-Robson piece in the first place. Dixon is Australia's pre-eminent economic modeller, and Adams is…
tlambert | May 13, 2007Rupert Murdoch might be concerned about the harm that threatens from global warming, but the Australian is still in denial, printing an opinion piece by Alex Robson and Sinclair Davidson, who continue to deny the existence of scientific evidence for man-made warming:
The petition also states "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that warming of the world's climate is 'unequivocal' and that it is almost certainly due to human activity".
We are invited to think that such a statement would be backed up by IPCC research that used easily accessible data, replicable…
tlambert | May 11, 2007Desmogblog have organised a petition asking Fox to fire Steve Milloy. Sign it here.
If Desmogblog's reasons aren't enough, consider this: Milloy wrote articles for Fox about how cigarette smoke was not harmful, while taking undisclosed payments from a tobacco company. Cato showed him the door after this, maybe it's time Fox followed suit?