Milloy
tlambert | November 22, 2010Brian Dunning's Skeptoid does an excellent job of debunking pseudoscience, so his podcast on DDT is profoundly disappointing. Dunning claims that DDT use did not have a large impact on bird populations, that elitist environmental groups were killing brown children by blocking DDT use and that DDT is effective even if mosquitoes are resistant. None of these claims are true, as I will detail in this post. But first, why did a sensible fellow like Dunning get it all so badly wrong? Well, his primary source for information about DDT was Steve Milloy's junkscience.com. One commenter…
tlambert | November 9, 2007Ed Darrell has been working his way through Steve Milloy's 100 things about DDT. See if you can spot what Milloy did in number 10. Here's Milloy:
[Rachel Carson wrote] "Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared…
tlambert | August 8, 2007Kent Hovind has an offer of $250,000 for anyone who can give a scientific proof of evolution. Now Steve Milloy is following in Hovind's footsteps with the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: $100,000 if you can provide a scientific proof of harmful man-made warming.
Believe it or not, Milloy's version is even dodgier than Hovind's. At least Hovind says that a committee of trained scientists will evaluate any evidence offered. (Though there are doubts on this) Milloy isn't even pretending that the judging will be objective -- his own junkscience.com will decide whether they have to pay out…
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?
tlambert | January 22, 2007From The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America
19. Steven Milloy
Charges: It's a pretty fucked up world in which a falsified memoir of drug addiction can spark widespread outrage, but a lawyer and registered lobbyist posing as a science expert can take money from Exxon Mobil and Phillip Morris to spread blatant lies without repercussion. Milloy, writing under the ironically accurate title of "junk science expert" for foxnews.com and at his own website, junkscience.com, is in the business of dismissing any and all alarming scientific studies about, well, anything--global warming,…
tlambert | May 6, 2006A while ago I wrote about Steve Milloys Free Enterprise Action Fund and its dismal performance:
"From inception on March 1 of last year through Dec. 31, Free Enterprise Action returned 2.32 percent; the S&P 500 returned 4.72 percent. That's ugly."
Actually it's worse than ugly. Daniel Gross reports
FEAF's managers also don't appear to be very interested in making money. Assembling a portfolio of 392 teeny positions (111 shares of Federal Express, 60 shares of Tiffany, etc.) is an incredibly inefficient and costly way of trying to mimic the S&P 500. Asset managers get paid based on…
tlambert | April 5, 2006
Steve Milloy has made a special appeal to his supporters:
I helped launch the Free Enterprise Action Fund (www.FreeEnterpriseActionFund.com), a pioneering mutual fund designed to accomplish two goals for investors:
Earn a market-based financial return from investing in the common stocks of Fortune 500 companies; and
Provide a pro-free enterprise, anti-junk science ideological benefit through advocacy that promotes shareholder value and defends the American system of free enterprise from the onslaught of activist-sponsored attacks.
Counter-pressuring corporate managements on global…
tlambert | January 27, 2006It's long been public knowledge that Steve Milloy's junkscience site was funded by tobacco companies to attack the science linking cigarette smoke with lung cancer. Last year Mother Jones reported:
Industry defenders shelled [Arctic Climate Assessment] study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. "Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice," blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative…
tlambert | November 16, 2005Rolling Stone has published a major feature on global warming. Steve Milloy was mentioned as one the chief anti-science guys in the debate, so he has a column in Fox news trotting out all the usual tired old discredited arguments:
"the sort of crystal ball climate modeling that the IPCC report relies on has never been validated against historical temperatures" Not true.
"Watson, of course, overlooked at least 17,000 scientists who signed a petition cautioning against global warming alarmism" See here.
"[Dr. Cicerone] managed leave the impression of a substantial 20th-century human-…
tlambert | October 14, 2005Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
writes
Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi
genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll
(difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million,
Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But
the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed
about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst
crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was
the banning of DDT. ...
In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972…
tlambert | September 26, 2005William Connolley catches junkscience.com claiming that Global Climate Models can't recreate the temperature record of the 20th century. However, they can and its no secret unless you get your science from junkscience rather than actual scientists.
tlambert | September 5, 2004 In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found:
Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for development of type 2 diabetes in women, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars.
Todd Zywicki, who endorsed Milloy's piece as a "devastating critique" has mounted a defence of Milloy. Unfortunately it is clear that Zywicki has not read the…
tlambert | September 3, 2004 Daniel Davies has some criticism of a Steve Milloy Fox News column that purported to debunk a study that found that sugary drinks were linked with weight gain and diabetes. Milloy has a column on Fox News where he regularly disinforms his readers. Today I'm going to look at a Steve Milloy effort titled Gun Control Science Misfires, where he attacks two studies that he clearly has not even read. Milloy writes:
Dr. Kellerman claimed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine study that having a firearm in the home is counter-productive. He reported "…
tlambert | April 18, 2004 John Quiggin has an interesting post putting the disinformation peddled by folks like Steve Milloy and Iain Murray in a broader context:
But at some point, it must be necessary to abandon the case-by-case approach and adopt a summary judgement about people like Milloy and sites like TCS. Nothing they say can be trusted. Even if you can check their factual claims (by no means always the case) it's a safe bet that they've failed to mention relevant information that would undermine their case. So unless you have expert knowledge of the topic in…
tlambert | April 13, 2004 When I wrote earlier about Steve Milloy, I commented on his attack on a study that found that the introduction safe-storage laws was followed by a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children. Milloy claimed:
The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.
Milloy repeats this…
tlambert | February 22, 2004 A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it "baloney". One interesting thing I've noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the conclusion that he is full of it. In this post modisch details how dreadful Milloy's arguments are. While in this post Myria, who seems generally sympathetic to Milloy, concludes:
Frankly FOX should be embarrassed to have this poorly thought out criticism on their site.
tlambert | February 19, 2004 There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.
Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. "
John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with…
tlambert | February 13, 2004 Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I've also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk "junk science".
Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy's site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he "debunks" you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is "junk science" is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might…