Time Immortal

Ed Darrell writes in yet again in response to my latest response to him. This discussion is certainly becoming rather…well, never mind. Let’s get to the letter.

I think this is a good time to revisit Ed’s tautology. As can be seen, numerous scientific studies, organizations, and publications dispute the findings of Rachel Carson and other anti-DDT campaigners.

Then give us the citations. That claim is simply untrue. You will not find support for that claim in science journals. In hoax science sites like “Junk Science?” Oh, sure. But that’s hoax, not real science.

Check out my site where I show that Junk Science has bad data. Don’t take my word for it - but don’t insult your own intelligence and me by claiming there are scientific studies where there are none. Carson was right. My challenge to you is to show the studies — and I issued that challenge before. Restating the point is not meeting the challenge.

Perhaps Ed has a moral objection to clicking on hyperlinks that have, as a destination, sites with which he disagrees. That’s a pity, and somewhat dishonest, if it is in fact the case. One desires to be charitable and think of an alternative explanation for how Ed somehow missed that I have already provided him with the information he again requests above, but none come to mind. So let me re-iterate something which I have already said once before.

It’s a pity that Ed is so quick to dismiss J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy as purveyors of fiction, when in fact [their] detailed list of facts about DDT and its banning contains nearly a hundred sourced statements from a wide range of scientists and scientific organizations.

(Ed, just to be clear — click on the link above and you will find the citations you requested. You’re also welcome to go back over the previous articles in this discussion and follow any external links I’ve made in those as well.)

I should note that this is an opinion blog, not a science blog, and the writings herein are not formal works — if I want to reference something, I will occasionally make an explicit citation of its source, but more often than not I will just link to the source and be done with it. The Reader may disagree with this methodology, and that is why I encourage any Reader to do as I have done, and as Ed has done: start your own blog and are be free to enforce your own policies upon it.

Now, let’s be clear about something. Do I hold all the contents of websites like Junk Science as sacrosanct and infallible? No, of course not — science is never 100% certain, nor is it ever 100% correct. Folks like Milloy and Edwards are as apt as any other human being to make mistakes and in general be incorrect, either by accident or by malicious design. But the same could be said about other folks too, including folks like Rachel Carson, or about Ed Darrell for that matter. And whatever else Ed may think about the veracity or accuracy of the site I have linked to, the fact of the matter is that the list I have linked to above draws all its contents from published works — scientific papers, research studies, op-eds, and whatever else have you.

Ed cites my rejection of his tautology and attempts to say it is not so. He forgets that when he says that absolutely no scientists disagree with the DDT ban, all I need to prove him wrong is one person in one article. But in this case, there is much, much more than that bare minimum to draw upon.

I should also note to the Reader that in my initial response to Ed, I pointed out that of the four or five articles I linked to in the post that set him off initially, only one was to the Junk Science website (which, as I have noted, devotes itself primarily to exposing the “junk science” behind climate change alarmism — and let us be crystal clear on just how rank is the dishonesty is in that particular arena of discourse). Reason Magazine was another link destination, as was the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

That’s a very tiny sampling of the width and breadth of opposition to the DDT ban and the science — not all of it honest or accurate — used to justify the ban. Milloy and Edwards’ list provides many more citations — some old, some newer — that I see no need to replicate here when the list can easily be accessed online, and has now been linked to, by myself, twice. I trust that the good Reader can, if he or she has not already done so, follow the lead and hint I am giving?

The plain fact of the matter is that yes, a number of scientists and scientific organizations do question the wisdom and reasoning behind the ban on DDT, and for good reason since, upon further examination, none of the harmful effects attributed to DDT can be demonstrated empirically. There is no correlation between eggshell thinning — in eagles and in other bird species — and DDT concentration. There is no correlation between DDT concentration and cancer rates/toxicity rates in humans and other animals. Much like modern environmentalism, opposition to DDT seems to be grounded less in rational analysis of available data — instead, it seems grounded in fearmongering and half-truths.

Ed Darrell writes in again to correct what he regards as some errors in my previous response to him. Actually, to be completely correct, he wrote in twice, once to correct me and once to correct both me and himself. I’m just going to bundle the two bits of mail into one posting, because it’s easier that way, and because the two messages are related.

Ed’s first message read thusly:

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was not a scientific study or a comprehensive research paper. It was a novel, and then a fictional one.

Carson’s book was solidly based on the 20 years of experience with DDT and more experience with other, similar chemicals. She provided 53 pages of citations to studies, papers in biology, chemistry and medical journals, and correspondence with the worlds’ greatest experts in the fields she wrote about.

There is not a single study done and published anywhere in any peer-reviewed journals that contradicts any finding Ms. Carson states. The in 1963 reported to President Kennedy that Carson was correct in all her conclusions, but that she was too optimistic about how soon and how hard the governmentt should act to reduce DDT use and control other hazardous chemicals.

How can you claim otherwise? There is not a single science organization that would disagree. I see you cite industry lobbying organizations — but the facts are as I stated them.

Consequently, your premise is in error, and everything that flows from such a poisoned tree will be poisoned as well. An appropriate analogy when we talk about DDT.

We could eliminate malaria next year in Africa without DDT. WE can’t eliminate malaria in Africa without the other actions I cited, which Ms. Carson noted in her book in 1962.

Santayana was right: Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. How sad that the children of Africa must bear the burden of those mistakes.

The children of Africa are already bearing the burden of a terrible Western mistake — the full-scale banning of DDT. Malaria presently causes 2.7 million human deaths annually [Africa News, January 27, 1999] — at one point in time, the use of DDT in antimalarial campaigns was credited with preventing, through its careful application, as many as 500 million human deaths [National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy, 1970].

I’d like to post Ed’s other letter first before launching into a full-length reply, but let me make one observation here. The use of tautological statements is always a risk, and I draw the good Reader’s attention to the number of times that Ed uses, above, statements of the form “there is not a single X that would disagree”

Such a statement can only be truthful if, for every instance of X, X does not in fact disagree. If even a single X can be shown to disagree, the statement is false.

As will be demonstrated presently, the statement is indeed false.

But first, Ed corrects himself slightly, after accusing me of having no basis for my statements.

On looking again, I see you pull out the junk science from Junk Science. Truth in labeling laws are not required, but don’t you think you should check some of the claims made by a group that advertises its stuff as junk?

Very little of what Milloy and Edwards allege at that site is accurate, and much of it is the fiction you wrongly accuse Rachel Carson of writing.

I’d urge you to check your sources. I have dissected several of Milloy’s claims at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, and I invite you to peruse those posts, at www.timpanogos.wordpress.com. Let the facts shine from under the bushel, please.

I am willing, O Reader, to grant that the tagging system I use on the site here does not always make spotting valid hyperlinks in my blog posts easy, in that a tag link and an actual hyperlink to a new article look identical (both use the ‘a’ tag, and so draw upon the same CSS style). That said, Junk Science (a site dedicated not to the promulgation and propagation of junk science, but to the exposure of various “scientific” studies and claims as junk (not surprisingly, most of their material concerns the pseudo-science of the climate change alarmists).

It’s a pity that Ed is so quick to dismiss J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy as purveyors of fiction, when in fact the detailed list of facts about DDT and its banning contains nearly a hundred sourced statements from a wide range of scientists and scientific organizations.

My own links included articles from Milloy, John Stossel at Real Clear Politics, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine, and Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). Each article in turn noted the findings of other groups — including the American Environmental Protection Agency — that discredit, in whole or in part, both the claims Rachel Carson made in Silent Spring and the wholesale banning of DDT use.

To be fair, Ed’s website makes the fair observation that other factors also contribute to a truly effective antimalarial campaign — mosquito nets on beds, for example. But I think the point to be made is that a comprehensive antimalarial campaign does not involve any one solution, but rather utilizes a “multi-vectored approach” to the problem. Mosquito populations have to be reduced for a generation or two — hence the need for DDT. In the meantime, mosquitos that escape the chemical have to be prevented from reaching humans — lower concentrations of DDT applied in houses and mosquito netting are both needed here.

Even when there were observed incidences of DDT resistance in mosquitos — a trend blamed more on heavier usage of DDT by cotton growers than on the strictly regulated doses administered in antimalarial campaigns, mosquitos nevertheless showed a strong avoidance behaviour in regard to areas where DDT had been applied. One need not kill a mosquito to keep it away from a human.

Ed, in his previous letter, mentioned bald eagles, which are commonly thought to have been driven to the brink of extinction by DDT poisoning (Ed calls them our “canary in the coal mine”). The facts — and it is a curious thing that Ed, so passionate as he is about “the facts”, missed these details — would appear to dictate otherwise:

• Bald eagles were threatened with extinction as early as 1921, well before DDT usage became commonplace
• In 1960, the Audubon Society counted a 25% increase in bald eagle observations as compared to the previous census done 19 years prior (i.e. before the widespread use of DDT)
• Eggshell thickness and environmental DDT concentration, as was discovered by Krantz in the Pesticides Monitoring Journal in 1970, simply do not correlate. There is no reason to suspect that DDT causes eggshell thinning.
• The leading causes of bald eagle mortality were, and remain, shooting, electrocution from power lines, poisoning from mercury and lead contamination of food sources, and collisions — DDT was not found to be a factor in eagle mortality

Moreover, DDT has not been shown to have any harmful effect on humans, either. In both humans and lab animals, heavy exposure to DDT could not be correlated with increased rates of toxicity or cancer, as has been reported in numerous scientific papers, and even in carcinogenicity bioassays done by the American National Toxicity Program.

I think this is a good time to revisit Ed’s tautology. As can be seen, numerous scientific studies, organizations, and publications dispute the findings of Rachel Carson and other anti-DDT campaigners. More and more, it is being demonstrated that the banning of DDT was not justified in its day by the science done concerning its health and ecological impact. By the standards of today, there is precious little in the way of genuine scientific justification for the continuation of the DDT ban.

And even as malaria begins to make periodic reappearances in North America, it continues to kill nearly 3 million people a year, globally, most of them in Africa. To be completely fair, I agree with Ed on one thing — DDT alone is not the answer. But any answer that does not involve the use of DDT will be insufficient, contrary to an assertion Ed makes on his blog. The use of mosquito nets is important, but people can be exposed to mosquitos in other places than their bedrooms; years of camping in the backcountry of Alberta has taught me that much. Passive measures would be insufficient in stopping malaria world-wide. A combination of active and passive measures will be necessary.

So can we please cut the B.S. and get DDT back on the shelves, already?