Hot Air

posted at 12:58 am on February 16, 2010 by Doctor Zero

EXCERPT:

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

LINK

Quote:Carson claimed thin egg shells were bringing the robin and bald eagle to the edge of extinction… even as the bald eagle population doubled, and robins filled the trees. Today, those eagles and robins shiver in a blanket of snow caused by global warming.

I lol'ed.

Rachael Carson deserves some space in the predictions thread.

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Here's another one from 2002:

The Legacy of Rachel Carson

Quote:Rachel Carson said that many of the pesticides then in use by farmers would be proven to cause cancer in humans. None of them have. The Environmental Protection Agency keeps talking about “likely human carcinogens.” They’ve now even included one of the organic pesticides, pyrethrum, in this category. But the label simply means the compound causes tumors in laboratory rats at ultra-high doses. The dose makes the poison. The National Research Council and the National Cancer Institute agree that Ms. Carson was wrong and the pesticide residues are safe.

Her well-meant bad advice has now blighted millions of lives, most of them malaria victims in the tropics whose homes are not protected from the deadly mosquitoes by whitewashing the inside walls with cheap and effective DDT. They suffer and die without much attention from American media. The July 29, 2000 issue of the British medical journal Lancet carried two articles confirming the cost-effective malaria control of DDT, and the lack of any toxic human effects. The impact of DDT on birds has never been resolved; after DDT was banned, no eco-activist wanted any tests done that might exonerate it.

I have made the original links article into a word document,
and attahced it.

Very interesting.

Would AGW be called the "Warm Death"?