Category Archives: Politics

Morons Try to Disprove 180 Years of Science in 3 Pages or Less

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It’s always funny when Cato Institute hacks try to act like they know something about climate science. Like in this article from the New York Post, Al Gore Makes Latest Global-Warming Whooper by Alan Reynolds:

Gore says, “The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States.”

It’s an interesting theory, but where are the facts?

According to “State of the Climate” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average.” And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America’s East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.

So what was it, exactly, that Gore’s nameless scientists “have long pointed out”? A 2008 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change and Water,” says climate models “project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics.” In other areas, the IPCC reports only “substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts.”

In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow — not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.

If you take that last sentence and separate it from the rest of the article, Reynolds is right. Al Gore flubbed by saying the increased rain and snow was due to a predicted increase in evaporation when in fact that has only been predicted, not observed. The predictions aren’t based on nothing, though. Higher precipitation in warmer years is an established scientific fact, although detecting and analyzing global precipitation has been especially difficult: “None of the trend estimates for 1951–2005 are significant, with many discrepancies between data sets, demonstrating the difficulty of monitoring a quantity such as precipitation, which has large variability in both space and time.”

What Gore and Reyonds both get wrong is that the prediction is for the second half of the 21st century, not for 2010 or any specific year because, like the global temperature, the randomness of yearly variation is greater than any overall trend. That’s the difference between weather and climate. Weather deals with seasonal trends. Climate deals with 10 to 30-year trends. Like Gore said in his movie, you can’t point to Katrina and say global warming caused that particular hurricane, but you can say that global warming will increase the strength of future hurricanes like it. Not that it matters, but this was the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, not one of the coldest as the deniers like to believe. What really matters is that this is the hottest decade ever recorded.

The IPCC Third Assessment report says:

Based on global model simulations and for a wide range of scenarios, global average water vapour concentration and precipitation are projected to increase during the 21st century. By the second half of the 21st century, it is likely7 that precipitation will have increased over northern mid- to high latitudes and Antarctica in winter. At low latitudes there are both regional increases and decreases over land areas. Larger year to year variations in precipitation are very likely7 over most areas where an increase in mean precipitation is projected.

Reynolds continues on:

In fact, recent research actually contra dicts Gore’s claims about “significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere.”

In late January, Scientific American reported: “A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change,” and noted that “an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming.”

The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: “Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent.”

Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been re duced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: “Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor.”

Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth’s surface) has been going down, not up.

Later, he says:

What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the ef fect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990).

Gee, it’s funny that when you click that link of Scientific American, you aren’t taken to the article in question but to a bunch of other New York Post articles that feature the name of the magazine in them. That’s helpful.

Well, no problem, I just pulled it up myself and was surprised that the article said nothing about the fact that their study had disproven earlier claims about increased precipitation due to Global Warming.

Well, maybe they are just trying to cover it up for them. Or maybe it’s the fact that the stratosphere contains only 1% of the earth’s water vapors. It’s the troposphere below the stratosphere that contains the other 99%.

So is that the best Alan Reynolds could have done? Well, I can’t say if Reynolds cherry-picked that article or if it just happens to be one of the few articles that he happened upon, but if he had, you know, bothered to actually search for the topic in Scientific American, he would have found this article:

What Does Winter Weather Reveal about Global Warming? No single weather event proves or disproves the fundamental science of climate change, but extreme weather is what scientists expect from global warming.

And this article….

Why Global Warming Can Mean Harsher Winter Weather: Scientists look at the big picture, not today’s weather, to see the impact of climate change

Oh, gee. So Scientific American actually believes in the conspiracy? I guess Reynolds and the guys from Cato can’t trust them any more. Or at least not until some other science article can be misconstrued to say something that it doesn’t.

As you can see this 2006 analysis, hot temperatures do mean more rain and snow:

Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years…. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

Okay, now let’s look at The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory, an article from the conservative internet publication, The American Thinker, and written by a former radioactive Chemist from the Inhofe 400 list, Alan Siddons:

Recently, I chanced upon an Atmospheric Science Educator Guide [PDF] published by NASA. Aimed at students in grades 5 through 8, it helps teachers explain how so-called “greenhouse gases” warm our planet Earth.

So he’s going to try to disprove the Greenhouse Theory by taking issue with the junior high school edition of NASA’s Educator Guide?

* Question: What is the relationship between light and heat?
* Answer: Things that are hot sometimes give off light. Things under a light source sometimes heat up.

Utterly false. Heated masses always emit light (infrared). Always. That’s a direct consequence of molecules in motion. And while it’s true that some substances may be transparent to infrared light, it doesn’t follow that they can’t be heated or, if heated, might not emit infrared. Yet NASA’s misleading formulation implies precisely that.

Is it really that “utterly”? When one uses the single word light, one typically assumes the person is talking about visible light. I mean, yeah, the book could have been more descriptive, but then again, it is a kid’s book. I can’t help but notice how Siddons is trying to hide the word “Infrared” in parentheses so that it doesn’t distract from the way he blasts away at this I guess somewhat official NASA publication with words like utterly and always.

So how does NASA go wrong? By consistently confusing light and heat, as you see in the illustration below, where infrared light is depicted as heat. Elsewhere, NASA expresses heat transfer in terms that pertain to radiant transfer alone:

Mixing up heat and infrared light is a common mistake, but the picture he refers to does not show heat coming from the sun but as being reflected back to the earth by greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse Gases

But a mixup like this raises a deeper question: Why does NASA go wrong? Because it has a flimsy yet lucrative theory to foist on the taxpaying public, that’s why. As the space agency explains in the Main Lesson Concept, the core idea of greenhouse theory is that downward radiation from greenhouse gases raises the earth’s surface temperature higher than solar heating can.

Siddons shouldn’t be so modest. To phrase it like that implies that global warming is being fostered on the unknowing public by NASA alone and not the National Academy of Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, Canada, plus the Acadamies of every other major industrialized country.

To make this idea seem plausible, therefore, it’s crucial to fix people’s attention on the 1% of the atmosphere that can be heated by radiant transfer instead of the 99% and more that is heated by direct contact with the earth’s surface and then by convection. NASA is stacking the deck, you see. If they made it clear that every species of atmospheric gas gets heated mainly by conductive transfer, and that all heated bodies radiate light, then even a child could connect the dots: “Oh. So the whole atmosphere radiates heat to the earth and makes it warmer. All of the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas.”

Crash, boom, there goes the theory. And there goes the abundant funding that this fear-promoting “science” attracts so well. For what CO2 and water vapor emit is miniscule compared to the buzzing multitude of heated nitrogen, oxygen, and even argon, all of it radiating infrared, too. Keep in mind that thermal radiation from this forgotten 99% has never been proposed or imagined to increase the earth’s temperature, although by the theory’s very tenets, it should.

Utterly false. All molecules do not radiate heat equally. Carbon dioxide may be a trace gas but it absorbs strongly in the infrared and near-infrared. The greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect is not carbon dioxide but water vapor, as every model makes abundantly clear. The other three main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone, but clouds also have an effect.

The greenhouse effect is not some new hypothesis invented in the last couple of years. It was first discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first reliably experimented on in 1858 by John Tyndall, one year before Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection in On the Origin of the Species. Tyndall also contributed to the study of diamagnetism, invented a better fireman’s respirator, helped confirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster, and helped provide further evidence against critics of germ theory by developing the process of sterilization called “Tyndallization.”

The greenhouse effect was first reported quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 using the Stefan-Boltzmann law he formed the Arrhenius’ greenhouse law, which says: if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression. He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes would cause global warming.

Arrhenius estimated that halving of carbon dioxide would decrease temperatures by 4 – 5 °C and a doubling would cause a temperature rise of 5 – 6 °C. In his 1906 publication, Arrhenius adjusted the value downwards to 1.6 °C (including water vapor feedback: 2.1 °C). As of 2007, estimates from the IPCC say this value is likely to be between 2 and 4.5 °C.

Arrhenius believed that global warming would have a positive effect on the world, but he also expected carbon dioxide levels to rise at a rate given by emissions in his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a much faster rate: Arrhenius expected a doubling of carbon dioxide to take about 3000 years, but it is now estimated in most scenarios to take about a century.

Proof of the Greenhouse Effect can be seen on Venus, where a dense atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. This carbon-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures over 460 °C (860 °F), hotter than Mercury’s maximum surface temperature of 420 °C, even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury’s distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury’s sunlight.

So once again, a simple bit of fact checking adds further evidence to the Dunning-Kruger study showing that incompetent people tend to have inflated self-assessments.

“Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” -Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” -Bertrand Russell, 19th century philosopher

The Bank Bailout: Left, Right, or In Between?

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To me, the whole Tea Party phenomenon looks like a gigantic therapy session for Right-wingers who can’t accept the sad truth that Republicans are in fact in favor of the entire bank bailout situation and so are doing their best to convince themselves and everyone else that it’s all part of a secret Socialist plot to take over everything.

Here’s how I measure the bank bailout in regards to the political spectrum:

Economic policy on the Left is usually dominated by Keynesian economics. In comparison the economics of today to the past, Nixon, who claimed to not be a fan of big government himself repeated the well-known phrase, “We are all Keynesians now.” Milton Friedman, while saying that “we now are all Kenysians and none of us are Keynesians” took some of the same ideas and went more to the right with them. Bernanke has cited Milton Friedman in his decision to lower interest rates to zero. Bernanke has been identified by the Wall Street Journal and a close colleague as a “libertarian-Republican” in the mold of Alan Greenspan. Henry Paulson is also a Republican. Timothy Geithner was formerly a Republican who worked for Kissinger Associates (as in Henry Kissinger) and is now an Independent. Greenspan said we should nationalize the banks, a move shared by the far Left, but not the Right and not Obama. The only candidates against the TARP were Dennis Kucinich, the only Democrat who wanted to impeach Cheney (making him highly unpopular among Democrats), and Ron Paul, who did comparatively horrible in the presidential campaign despite being extremely popular working a grassroots very campaign similar to Obama’s. Traditionally, it’s the Left that say the rich should be taxed and the money given to the poor while it’s the Right that say taxes need to be flatter and the minimum wage lower so that the rich will have more money to hire the poor. The bailout is essentially taking money from the poor and lending it to the rich. So in what way is Obama being a Leftist/Socialist by going along with a bunch of libertarian/Republicans in bailing out the rich?

http://www.businessinsider.com/greenspan-2009-2

“We do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote. People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.” – Tom Tancredo, who can always be counted on to up-crazy any situation, crazying up the Teabagger Prom in Nashville a couple weekends ago.

OK, Tom. You want a literacy test? Here’s a literacy test. Use the phrase “committed socialist ideologue” in a sentence describing someone who exhibits at least one of those three qualities. Whoops, you failed. I hereby instruct the state of Colorado to revoke Tom Tancredo’s voting rights, and if he doesn’t like that, he can buy a fucking dictionary or take a Kaplan class or something.

http://www.youaredumb.net/

“The Six Republican Ideas Already in the Health Care Bill”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/five_compronises_in_health_car.html

Haiti’s “Pact With the Devil” Myth: How Pat Robertson turned a country’s origin myth into a cheap invocation of Satanism

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2010/01/13/haiti_satan_pact/index.html

Here’s a poll that shows more people believe Republicans have no interest in compromise:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/behind-the-numbers/2010/02/americans_spread_the_blame_whe.html

“After I spent the weekend at the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tenn., it has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It’s more John Birch than John Adams…..

I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.

Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn’t just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233331

“But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html?hp

“Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant “independent.” (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn’t disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn’t exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left Hawaii Pacific College after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan*; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous. So she came home.”” –Christopher Hitchens, whose first article about Sarah Palin defended her against the “liberal screech” that erupted at her nomination

http://www.slate.com/id/2237638/

“Andrew is my friend,” said Farah. “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that…”

Breitbart raised his eyebrows. “I’m dumb to do what?”

“Criticize your friend to this socialist newspaper.”

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart, pointing to Schilling. “I was talking to you. And I was saying that I disagreed on the birther stuff.”

“OK, well, did you know that Dave Weigel from The Washington Independent was”–

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart. “She was asking me if I thought it was wise to bring it up, and I said, no. We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”

“It is a winning issue!”

“It’s not a winning issue.”

“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”

“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”

“Nothing exposes the president’s–”

“Then prove it!”

“The press isn’t asking the question–”

“Prove it!”

“Prove what?”

“Prove your case.”

“I should prove, what, a birth certificate that may or may not exist?” Farah had gotten irritated. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even understand the fundamental tenets of what journalism is about, Andrew. It’s not about proving things. It’s about asking questions and seeking truth.”

Breitbart tensed up after that insult. “Right.”

“I know you’re not a journalist, so that’s fine. But don’t diminish people who’ve been doing this for 35 years.”

“So you’re going to go on record saying that I’m not a journalist?”

“Are you? I’ve never heard you claim to be. Are you?”

“I’ll let it be answered by you.”

“Well, I knew Drudge didn’t consider himself a journalist, so I assumed that you were. … I don’t know, I’m not trying to insult you.”

“You did.”

At that point, Judson Phillips — who had spotted a very small crowd around us — walked into the fray and tried to simmer everyone down with a joke.

“I can give you absolutely conclusive and definitive proof that Obama’s birth certificate does not exist. How else do you explain why Joe Biden is vice president?”

http://www.newsweek.com//frameset.aspx/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwashingtonindependent.com%2F75949%2Fbirther-speaker-takes-heat-at-tea-party-convention

The DDT Global Ban Myth

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The Green Death

“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.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.”

— Doctor Zero

>http://www.doczero.org/2010/02/the-green-death/

On February 10th, 1970, almost a year before he founded the EPA, President Nixon announced, “we have taken action to phase out the use of DDT and other hard pesticides.” It therefore seems highly likely that the DDT ban was decided by Nixon long in advance of the EPA hearings, which is probably why Ruckelshaus, who Nixon put at the head of the agency he founded “over-ruled his own agency”. Nixon seemed to expect nothing less than absolute loyalty from those he put in high positions. In what became called “The Saturday Night Massacre,” Ruckelshaus and his boss, Elliot Richardson, famously quit their jobs at the Justice Department rather than obey an order from Nixon to fire the prosecutor investigating Watergate.

The conservative myth is that the ban was worldwide. While the ban did affect the price and popularity of DDT donated to poorer countries like Africa, Ruckelshaus’ decision was based on whether the ban was good for America, which it was and still is. We had alternatives that were just as good and the decision is cited by scientists as a major factor in stopping the bald eagle from going extinct. But the ban was a terrible decision for Africa because it caused a very poor country to adopt more expensive chemicals, causing a large number of unnecessary human deaths. This definitely should have been considered by Nixon and Ruckelshaus before they decided to institute the ban, but even today Ruckelshaus doesn’t see the link between his decision and how the DDT ban affected poorer countries.

While foregoing the ban would have saved countless lives, it also goes against one of the prime tenants of medicine: “Don’t make the patient any worse.” DDT is hardly a harmless miracle cure demonized by overzealous environmentalists. A 2006 study says found many children exposed to DDT as fetuses (found in trace amounts in the umbilical cord) had decreased attention and cognitive skills. Studies done in poorer regions that use DDT have found unhealthy levels of it in breast milk. Another study of Chinese textile workers found DDT and early pregnancy loss. A case-control study in Japan supported by several other studies concluded that in utero DDT exposure may affect thyroid hormone levels and be a factor in cretinism.

As for “Silent Spring,” Carson never advocated banning DDT, not in America and certainly not worldwide. She only advocated limiting it because its overuse would cause insects to evolve defense mechanisms against it, and she was right about that. She certainly didn’t manipulate data as that article claims. Her science was vindicated by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and Discover Magazine calls it one of the one of the 25 greatest science books of all time. The conservative claim repeated in “the Green Death” that scientific studies have proved that DDT had no effect on the thinning of eagle and falcon shells is actually technically true: it is a metabolite of DDT, called DDE, that actually causes the thinning of the shells.

There is certainly no comparison to be made between the DDT banning controversy and global warming. The DDT ban was a political decision made by a Republican and was never meant to be globalized by the liberals who supported it. Global warming is an observed scientific fact accepted by every major scientific organization in the world.

Some quotes:

“Critics claim that restrictions on the use of DDT in vector control have resulted in substantial numbers of unnecessary deaths due to malaria. Estimates for the number of these deaths range from hundreds of thousands, according to Nicholas Kristof,[107] to much higher figures. Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said in 2007 that “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.”[108] These arguments have been called “outrageous” by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios, and May Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, says that “to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible.”[81] Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a “myth” promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM) in service of his anti-regulatory, free market ideology.[109][110]

Criticisms of a “ban” on DDT often specifically reference the 1972 US ban (with the erroneous implication that this constituted a worldwide ban and prohibited use of DDT in vector control). Reference is often made to Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring even though she never pushed for a ban on DDT. John Quiggin and Tim Lambert have written that “the most striking feature of the claim against Carson is the ease with which it can be refuted.”[111] Carson actually devoted a page of her book to considering the relationship between DDT and malaria, warning of the evolution of DDT resistance in mosquitoes and concluding:

It is more sensible in some cases to take a small amount of damage in preference to having none for a time but paying for it in the long run by losing the very means of fighting [is the advice given in Holland by Dr Briejer in his capacity as director of the Plant Protection Service]. Practical advice should be “Spray as little as you possibly can” rather than “Spray to the limit of your capacity.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt

“In one of her last public appearances, Carson had testified before President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee. The committee issued its report on May 15, 1963, largely backing Carson’s scientific claims.[56] Following the report’s release, she also testified before a Senate subcommittee to make policy recommendations. Though Carson received hundreds of other speaking invitations, she was unable to accept the great majority of them. Her health was steadily declining as her cancer outpaced the radiation therapy, with only brief periods of remission. She spoke as much as she was physically able, however, including a notable appearance on The Today Show and speeches at several dinners held in her honor. In late 1963, she received a flurry of awards and honors: the Audubon Medal (from the National Audubon Society), the Cullum Medal (from the American Geographical Society), and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

“Ruckelshaus made the right decision — for the United States. At the time, DDT was mainly sprayed on crops, mostly cotton, a use far riskier than indoor house spraying. There was no malaria in the United States — in part thanks to DDT — so there were no public health benefits from its use. ”But if I were a decision maker in Sri Lanka, where the benefits from use outweigh the risks, I would decide differently,” Ruckleshaus told me recently. ”It’s not up to us to balance risks and benefits for other people. There’s arrogance in the idea that everybody’s going to do what we do. We’re not making these decisions for the rest of the world, are we?”

In fact, we are — the central reason that African nations who need DDT do not use it today. Washington is the major donor to W.H.O. and Roll Back Malaria, and most of the rest of the financing for those groups comes from Europe, where DDT is also banned. There is no law that says if America cannot use DDT then neither can Mozambique, but that’s how it works. The ban in America and other wealthy countries has, first of all, turned poor nations’ agricultural sectors against DDT for economic reasons. A shipment of Zimbabwean tobacco, for example, was blocked from entering the United States market because it contained traces of DDT, turning Zimbabwe’s powerful tobacco farmers into an effective anti-DDT lobby. From a health point of view, of course, American outrage would have been more appropriate if traces of tobacco had been found in their DDT than the other way around.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/what-the-world-needs-now-is-ddt.html?pagewanted=4

“Most people would consider the June 1972 ban of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency the beginning of the end for widespread use of the insecticide, the most effective anti-malaria pesticide still in existence. For his role in promulgating the ban in the face of a contrary finding by the EPA hearing, then Administrator William Ruckelshaus has become almost a hate figure amongst the anti-malaria community. Now it appears though that the hate figure should actually be then President Richard Nixon.

In February 10th 1970, President Nixon announced, “we have taken action to phase out the use of DDT and other hard pesticides.” In December 1970, the administration created the EPA to implement executive environmental policy. As a 1975 study out of Northern Illinois University notes, “This is important . . . before the EPA hearings were convened and even before the EPA was created, Ruckelshaus’ boss, President Nixon, had stated that DDT was being phased out. This leaves the hearings themselves superfluous, satisfying only a court requirement. As long as the head of EPA was responsible for the final order, it was impossible for the result to be other than as occurred.” Thus, the exhaustive studies and hearings conducted to “decide” the fate of the chemical in the two years following President Nixon’s statement were nothing but a political farce designed to add ex post science to a political decision. The decision had already been made rendering the hearings, studies and litigation pointless.

…..

Why did Nixon push for a ban? We may never know. A few older Washington DC policy experts have suggested that some of his election campaign supporters were chemical companies that produced alternatives to DDT and so stood to gain handsomely by the DDT phase out. Others say that it is more likely that senior officials in his administration pressured Nixon into the decision given the potential votes he stood to lose in his native and very green state of California. But the why of his decision pales beside what this decision has wrought: two million deaths a year from malaria alone.”

http://www.aei.org/article/20314

“It’s not DDT per se that is thought to do the damage to eggshells, but a DDT metabolite known as DDE. Thus the most persuasive feeding study refers to it: “DDE-induced Eggshell Thinning in the American kestrel: A Comparison of the Field Situation and Laboratory Results.” This groundbreaking study was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Jeffrey Lincer in 1975.

Kestrels, commonly called sparrow hawks, are small falcons. Lincer noted that the “inverse correlation between DDE in North American raptor eggs and eggshell thickness is clear but does not prove a causal relationship since other chemicals or factors could be involved.” So to find out what effect DDE might have, Lincer fed captive kestrels a DDE-laced diet and then compared their eggs with those taken from the nests of wild kestrels. Lincer found that dietary levels of three, six, and 10 parts per million (ppm) of DDE resulted in eggshells that were 14 percent, 17.4 percent, and 21.7 percent thinner respectively. “Despite the recent controversy, there can be little doubt now as to the causal relationship between the global contaminant DDE and the observed eggshell thinning and the consequent population declines in several birds of prey,” concluded Lincer. As best as I can tell, he’s right.

Still, there is a piece missing in the full scientific picture. Despite considerable research, no one has ever identified the physiological mechanism(s) by which DDE causes eggshell thinning, according to Anderson.”

http://reason.com/archives/2004/01/07/ddt-eggshells-and-me

Kelley Ross and the “Post-Copernican Left”

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Kelley Ross’s “Proceedings of the Friesian School” website probably has the most and the best historical content on the internet. Unfortunately, it’s also created by a hardline Neo-Con who thinks he’s a Libertarian. In Ross’ mind, everything that is bad comes from the left, even anti-science!

Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself. The “post-modern” move may even be called the “post-Copernican” move, where the “de-centering” of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word “obscurantism”), returns the “marginalized” literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.

http://www.friesian.com/

How many people on the Left really believe this? Lefties believing in a “post-Copernican” world where science is a “Euro-centric” invention of oppression is not an idea that has received any amount of traction by any stretch of the imagination. This has got to be the ultimate straw-man argument, especially since Ross doesn’t even believe the science of global warming.

Question: what is science? Who decides that evolution is real science and global warming is pseudo-science? Does every individual, whether they hold a degree in science or not, get to choose what the word means?

Ross attempts to act as if his Ph.D. in Philosophy gives him the authority to decide what is and what is not science yet he makes no attempt to explain how global warming has become accepted throughout the entire scientific community rather than just a crazy idea coming from a few liberal tree-hugging environmentalists. His global warming web page tries to blame most of it on Al Gore. In fact, there is no credited scientific organization on the entire planet that challenges the science, not even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which not too long ago gave Michael Crichton their yearly award in “Journalism”!

To give an idea how Ross categorizes the question of global warming in terms of the great minds debating the question, one only need look at the name of the html page his global warming essay appears on:

http://www.friesian.com/crichton.htm

Ross doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that he starts with the politics and works backwards from there. His anger towards the Left is evident in the way he accuses *them*, not the scientific community(!), of “inventing something else” if it wasn’t global warming.

The financial pressure to maintain the status quo hardly needs an explanation, but does Ross really believe that people on the Left hate their country or the rich or whatever so much they just somehow convinced everyone except a few “true science-followers” into this Green conspiracy? The money trail from oil companies to anti-climate change astroturf organizations is clear enough for anyone with a computer to see yet there is not one financial link that can be found connecting clean energy to climate scientists. A conspiracy like this would have to be over 100 times larger than the “9/11 Truther” conspiracy with large sums of bribe money needed, and yet not a single financial connection between the liberal politics and the climate science can be found.

Ross’ “crichton.html” webpage on climate change is especially lame. The guy has the best website on the planet. Seriously, the maps of the pyramids he has posted are awesome and his work on the historical obscurity of the Eastern Roman Empire being caused by a pro-Italian bias is pure genius. But like setting loose the child with crayons upon the Mona Lisa, a perfectly good website is ruined by right-wing idiocy.

http://bahumuth.bitfreedom.com/proceedings-friesian-school

http://www.friesian.com/decdenc1.htm

Ross just does not seem to understand that some 15 loose, incomprehensible, and extremely unscientific pages worth of content on “Unstoppable Global Warming” (one-third of which concentrates on a science fiction author) does not compare to the thousands upon thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research from actual scientists in countries throughout the world working on many independent lines of evidence. You might as well try to disprove evolution by writing about the volcano theories of L. Ron Hubbard on a cocktail napkin, which, come to think of it, isn’t far from how supply-side economics was invented.

Can you really be on the side that says scientists, not fossil fuel industries, are deluding the entire world and at the same time say it’s the Left who is covering up science with ideology? Isn’t it just a little disconcerting that the top guys fighting Climate Change science today is an English Lord with a Classics degree and a Creationist Senator who belongs to a Fundamentalist Christian organization linked to the C-Street sex scandals? If he really thinks science can be bought so easily, then he should at least admit to being somewhat “anti-science” himself, at least as far as the current official stance is in relation to the truth. The Right can’t even buy their own climate scientists. Was it a mistake of history that the entire world body of climate science ended up on the Left despite the Left’s “post-Copernician” hatred towards their profession? Is there another example in history in which the science got it wrong and traditional beliefs got it right? The funny thing about Neo-Cons is that, unlike their fathers, they finally admitted that the Left was correct about evolution, but they still don’t know why.

The theory that massive amounts of carbon inserted into the atmosphere causes global warming is over 100 years old. Congress was warned about this from James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies over 20 years ago. They have been proven by the hottest decade on record, the melting icecaps, the forest fires in California, the desertification of Australia, etc., etc., etc., all of which either follows or surpasses the worse-case scenerios predicted by the much-despised IPCC. Stephen Hawking, who some consider to be the smartest physicist in the world, ranks climate change along side the proliferation of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats to the future of the world. And once again, every accredited science organization on the planet says the “alarmists” are right. If you are going to present yourself as unbiased, you need to at least admit to some kind of even-handed criteria to which you would take the other side. What exactly do climate scientists need to present to accept their occupation as belonging to the realm of science instead of being a world-wide conspiracy theory?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/

Ross’ online shrine to Ayn Rand lists a compendium of “communist bullet points” appearing alongside red-colored rats, associating things like “child protective services,” “urban planning,” the “minimum wage” and “community service” with Communism, not a few inches away from the bust of Che Guevera himself. Next in the line are the green rats which he describes as being like watermelons: green on the outside, but red on the inside.

Finally, the black rats:  “relativism”, “nihilism”, and “ignorance”, which he associates with the post-Modern Marxists who seem to have completely taken over the vast majority of state universities without anyone realizing it:

Considering the millions murdered, tortured, enslaved, and impoverished by Marxists in the 20th Century, one would have to consider continued true believers [of “critical theory”] among the most uncritical people, let alone the most naive or dishonest, in intellectual history — a description that is sadly all too applicable to much academic culture in the United States, where Marxist doctrine and Leninist behavior are alive and well.

Even his views on philosophy are tainted by the anti-Leftist chip on his shoulder. Like, for one, he argues that: “Trendy intellectuals, however, would never want to admit that Nazi anti-Semitism owed any genuine, rather than merely a confused and misrepresented, debt to Nietzsche.” Maybe that’s because Nietzsche made numerous statements criticizing Anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanism, racism, and nationalism. Nietzsche even broke off all communication with his editor, his sister, and his good friend, the acclaimed German composer Richard Wagner, over their own Anti-Semitism. In Beyond Good and Evil, he criticized patriotism and advocated Europe unite peacefully. After his mental breakdown, he even wrote about fantasies in which he shot all the Anti-Semites. Nietzsche stopped writing after his mental breakdown but after his death, Nietzsche’s sister and her Nazi husband rewrote some of his unpublished writings and released it as a Nazi propaganda piece under the name The Will to Power, a concept Nietzsche wrote extensively about, but never in a nationalistic sense.

http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm

http://www.friesian.com/#manifesto

http://www.friesian.com/NIETZSCH.HTM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche#Nietzsche.27s_criticisms_of_anti-Semitism_and_nationalism

One might even be led to believe that Ross is making these accusations against Nietzsche as some kind of subconscious scapegoat for his own favorite philosopher. Ross admits that the philosopher of Kantian logic the website is named after, Jakob Friedrich Fries, was himself a German nationalist who wrote what Ross calls an “anti-Jewish tract.” Ross, however, fails to elaborate that a large part of that tract included the suggestion that Jews should be marked with a distinct sign so that they could be identified. Yet despite this, Ross actually tries to makes Fries out to be unfairly judged by historians, seemingly out of a Hegellian (yes, yet another competing German philosopher who Ross doesn’t like) bias:

In criticizing Fries, Shlomo Avineri (in Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1972, pp. 119-122), has correctly pointed out that German nationalism was already displaying some of its worst tendencies, including the book burning at the Wartburg Festival, and anti-Semitism — with Fries himself contributing an anti-Semitic tract. The horrifying overtones of this led Avineri to dismiss Fries and the Burschenschaften, not as “liberal, idealistic,” but as proto-Nazis; and he attributed the affinity between them all to the subjectivism and irrationality of Fries’ thought. This repetition of Hegel’s own charge, however, is nonsense.

http://www.friesian.com/fries.htm

Yes, how ridiculous that Fries should be called a proto-Nazi just because he was a right-wing nationalist who believed the Jews needed to wear signs to identify themselves just like the Nazis did.

One of Fries’ own students, Karl Sand, assassinated a German dramatist who spoke out against the Anti-Semitism of student nationalists. When the daughter of the dramatist caught Sand in the act, the assassin actually stabbed himself in remorse, but later recovered only to be executed for murder. A note from Fries warning Sand not to get involved with secret societies led the authorities to accuse Fries of complicity and he lost his philosophy teaching position only to teach math and physics elsewhere. Ross tries to claim that Fries’ Anti-Semtitism was no different than any of other liberal philosophers of the time, but to defend him while castigating Nietzsche is completely hypocritical.

By the way, the name of that tract that Fries wrote? “On the Danger of Well-Bring and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews”. It starts off saying:

For about forty years now the Prussian scholars, in particular, have defended the Jews in face of the antipathy shown them by the common people. Some where motivated by friendship… positive forms of religion… still others, because they had become dependent on the rich, individual Jews….

The idea that the Jews were excessively oppressed in civic matters derives from this [erroneous belief that the Jews were treated with blind hatred]. If they were only to receive more civic rights, it is held, they would thus improve themselves. Ruehs has clearly shown that the opposite is true by using examples from history. Both in Germany and abroad the Jews have dwelt in free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned–but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same. They shy away from industrious occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.

Not exactly the kind of guy I would want to name my philosophy website after.