Skeptoid
tlambert | November 26, 2010In part 1 of this fact check I examined Brian Dunning's assertions that DDT did not thin eggshells. Responses from Orac: "Dunning should know better", Bug Girl: "Dunning clearly got his information second-hand. And it was bad information.", and Dunning:
I think I've repeated that Milloy was not one of my sources enough times. I hadn't even heard of him.
which is a rather odd thing to say, because in comments on his podcast Dunning responded to this comment:
Yeah, the very fact that you would consider Junk Science a source worthy of citing frankly is enough to treat the entire article with…
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…