Sunday, October 19, 2008

Bad Science

For those who are still being taken in by the the Great Climate Change Fraud I recommend reading this essay by Lord Monkton. I am grateful to Seablogger for drawing my attention to it.

From it I have reprinted a small section that is nothing about climate change, but everything about the United Nations, Politicians who know no science and environmentalists. I don't know much about the climate but I know a lot about Public Health.

"DDT is the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria. Its inventor won the Nobel Prize for Medicine because the use of DDT had reduced malaria deaths to 50,000 per year worldwide. DDT is entirely harmless to humans, who can eat it by the tablespoonful and not come to any harm. If sprayed in the interior of dwellings, it will not cause any harm to wildlife, except to mosquitoes.

Yet DDT was banned. The effect of the ban was murderous. Annual malaria deaths swiftly rose from 50,000 to 1 million. In a third of a century, the excess deaths caused by the ban on DDT amount - according to the scientific literature - to between 30 and 50 million. The "precautionary principle" is not a principle: nor do its advocates pray it in aid for any other reason than to provide a specious credibility for policies that would otherwise be self-evidently purposeless and cruel.

During the final stages of the case that led to the ban on DDT, the Board of the Environmental Defense Fund met with its lawyer. He said to the Chairman: "Sir, I beg you not to press for a total ban on DDT. If you succeed in getting it banned altogether, tens of millions of children will die of malaria. My advice is that, for pressing scientific reasons, you should allow it to be used indoors, so that children will not be bitten at home."

The lawyer carefully put before the Board the scientific evidence he had accumulated, and just as carefully - for he was scientifically literate and competent - he spelled out exactly why and how a total ban on DDT would kill tens of millions, and undo a malaria eradication program that had almost succeeded in wiping this curse from the Earth.

And what was the reaction of the Board of the Environmental Defense Fund? They dismissed their Counsel on the spot. As he left the room, he heard the Chairman say to the Board, "That's the last time we ever again employ a lawyer who knows anything about science."

5 comments:

Burke said...

One of the co-founders of Greenpeace left that organization stating that the enviromentalists there were "anti-human."

My favorite writer, Ayn Rand, long ago wrote that the environmental movement was really an anti-life movement. She believed that leftists didn't care about the many causes they champion, that they were using them as platforms for striking out at others who love their lives.

I think environmentalists secretly smile at the news that millions are dying because of their actions.

early 60s professional living in Jersey exurbia said...

How very sad to see such a man of science hook on to this drivel, what did you call it, "the Great Climate Change Fraud " Unbelievable! There is much good evidence that the earth is warming and that we are resposnible. How can you all good evidence fraud???!! Don't tell me you are a creationist too!

Terry Hamblin said...

World temperature is very volatile. In the middle ages the Thames froze over; in Roman times they grew grapes in Edinburgh. Greenland once really was a green land. World temperature has not increased since the 1998 peak. The 'hockey-stick' graph of world temperature is fraudulent.

As a Creationist I find myself in the company of Newton and Faraday.

early 60s professional living in Jersey exurbia said...

Newton and Faraday? These were men in olden scientific times, you do know that. Many more studies supporting evolution have come down the pike since my friend. Funny the only modern science you believe in is about CLL?

Terry Hamblin said...

It is the ultimate hubris to think that the oldsters were less intelligent than we are. There have been a lot of scientific errors since and many people have been misled by what the common perceptions of the scientific majority has been. Of course, I accept the survival of the fittest (a tautology anyway) and change within a species is self-evident. However, the fossil record is a record of great extinctions not great alteration of species. Many of the supposed proofs of evolution are deficient (would you like to defend vestigial organs or ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?). As an explanation of the origin of species, evolution is one hypothesis, but it has many problems that are winked at beause the alternative explanation, special creation, couldn't possibly be true because there is no God. Is there?