Each day, I wake up and pour myself a big ol' cup of coffee, sit down at my computer, and begin the process of reading the morning news from around the world. I'm a huge fan of Google, and my homepage is the Google News Finder, which sorts as many as 25,000 headlines from around the world and categorizes the articles and blogs.
This is the most objective, non-partisan means to get your news that I can imagine. I don't watch FOX or CNN or any news network on television, and if I want to be "entertained" by pundits, I use the satellite radio service for my source.
Lately, I have seen a growing number of articles citing the increasing numbers of Americans (and I assume that similar increases are accruing in Europe and the rest of the world) that question the validity of the "science" behind global warming. Rassmussen released a poll recently that said that twice as many people in the US "strong disagree" with the notion of man-made global warming than "strongly agree" with it. I think this trend is reflected in the public's reluctance to accept and embrace the Copenhagen Accords and all the control and red-tape that would bring to an already clogged American EPA system.
This led me to an article, originally published in the early 90s, that decried the "science" behind Rachel Carson and her 1962 book, Silent Spring. This work was the number one contributor to public opinion in this country (and more generally throughout the western world) in regards to the "evils" of DDT and other man-made pesticides. Less than ten years after its publication, DDT was banned from use within the US. By the mid-80s, 77 member nations of the UN had banned the use of DDT as a pest control agent. As influential as Silent Spring was to the environmental movement, it would seem that the "science" behind Ms. Carson's work is even more shady than that behind global warming. The article I was referring to (found HERE) rips her conclusions page-by-page (much the same way, and with the same effect, that Jambo and I critiqued Ann Coulter's Treason).
The truly shocking aspect of this sort of evidence isn't that Carson fudged her science to make her point... it is that her "point" has had such an effect on the world in general as to possibly place her in the pantheon of the worlds most deadly genocidal killers.
Since the general ban on DDT went into effect in the 80s, there have been an estimated (and this is a conservative estimate) of 180 million deaths globally due to malaria alone, mostly in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. Documented evidence from between 1948 and 1972 show that areas like South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya had reduced documented cases of malaria by as much as 80-90%... and that malaria-related deaths had dropped even more, reduced completely (that means ZERO DEATHS) in both Central Africa and Sri Lanka by 1972. Since the ban, averages are back to pre-DDT numbers, with the global average hovering around 900,000 deaths a year, stemming from 2.5 million cases of malaria, mostly in children under the age of 8.
None of these numbers address other insect-born diseases, either... typhus, yellow fever, West Nile virus, Lymes disease... even bubonic plague, can all be reduced substantially by the use of DDT, and no substantial response has ever been made of the criticisms levelled at Carson's work.
I wonder if Al Gore has an opinion on this topic?
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