Note to Socrates Litsios and May Berenbaum: it’s a lot more irresponsible to be name-calling against other scientists instead of refuting their claims by using the scientific method. Note to Adam Sarvana: Don’t change the subject. Roger Bate’s ideology has nothing to do with the claim that “the ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.”And yes, wow, I would be a skeptic then too.

That’s funny. Litsios and Berenbaum, who are the subject of grotesque name-calling among DDT advocates, are among the last people anyone could ever catch calling names — though, God knows, they’d be right if they did, and they’d be justified, and any sane person would pay attention to which wanker it was earned their ire.

Roger Bate’s ideology, slandering scientists for profit, may not properly be weighed in any scientific debate, devoid of all scientific fact or even Shakespearean tragedy reason as it is.

Roger Bate’s unevidenced, unfair and wrong charge that a DDT ban killed children is based on several grotesque errors, by anyone else, but grotesque lies, we know as his sole mission is to slander the World Health Organization to frustrate their anti-smoking campaign in Africa and Asia.

For Bate to have been correct, the following facts must be ignored and covered up, so the truth won’t get out:

1. WHO stopped widespread use of DDT in Africa and Asia in 1965, 1966 and 1967, because mosquitoes had become resistant and immune to DDT where they could spray it, and most of the nations where they needed to mount an anti-malaria campaign, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the governments could not or would not mount a campaign with the intensity or depth to not do damage to the health of millions of Africans. Read about it here.

2. Idi Amin was never persuaded by Rachel Carson to stop spraying DDT in Uganda. For Bate’s charges to be true, it would have to be true that Idi Amin was persuaded by Rachel Carson to stop DDT use in Uganda.

3. The U.S. “ban” on DDT covered only U.S. uses. Manufacture in the U.S. was continued expressly to provide DDT for fighting disease and insects in Africa and Asia.

4. DDT has never been banned in Africa. For Bate to be right, it would have to be true that Africans are so stupid they won’t fight disease with miracle-causing chemicals. Surely you are not racist enough to give credence to Bate’s implicit, but necessary, racist claim.

5. Malaria rates in Africa continued to decline for at least a decade after DDT use in the WHO “eradication” program ceased. Had a shortage of DDT been the problem, how can we explain that? Malaria infection and death rates worldwide are lower today than they were at the height of DDT use.

6. Malaria and malaria death rates rose again, in Africa and Asia, when the pharmaceuticals used to kill the parasite in humans, ceased to work. DDT had no effect on that issue then, nor at any other time.

7. Some Africans genuinely don’t like DDT. Abusive spraying of the stuff killed off the fish they fed their families on. Thousands starved. Those deaths were relatively quick, and widespread, wiping out entire families at once instead of concentrating on children and pregnant women like malaria does. In the equation of life and death of a poor African farmer, malaria seems less frightening than the known disasters of DDT.

8. Remember that WHO stopped using DDT because mosquitoes started becoming resistant. Every mosquito on Earth now has at least a few copies of the alleles that transmit resistance and immunity to DDT. Many of the malaria-carrying species are absolutely immune to the stuff. In some areas, spraying DDT would be akin to flushing dollar bills down a toilet in its effectiveness in fighting malaria, and in the effect on funds to fight malaria.

9. Every place the experiment has been tried, bednets have reduced malaria infections and deaths by a minimum of 50%, and as much as 85%. DDT is among the least effective and most expensive methods to fight mosquitoes in Africa today.

10. Africans are not so stupid that they would kowtow to Rachel Carson, whom most Africans have never read and don’t know about, and sacrifice their children to malaria, if DDT were a cheap and easy poison to stop malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

11. Malaria is rampant in those nations that still use DDT, and in those nations that still manufacture DDT. The only nations where malaria has been effectively conquered include those nations that banned DDT. Maybe DDT is not the panacea claimed by DDT advocates. Maybe something else is needed to beat malaria.

Whose side is Bate really on?

The debate here isn’t about conserving the environment or making the air and water cleaner. It’s about global warming. For sure I’m skeptical about this, and always have been. I’m even more skeptical now that I know that global warming scientists have manipulated the data to show inexorable global warming that would end life on Earth as we know it, etc etc.

Well, since there’s no case that any data manipulation occurred to present a false picture, can you explain why you’re skeptical? Is it that you are unaware that thermometers and satellite readings also show a warming planet, in addition to tree rings? Is it that you’re unaware of the decline in ice around the world? Is it that you don’t garden, you don’t farm, and you’re unaware of warming-caused droughts and floods, and the changes in the date of spring over the past 40 years, and the changing of the plant zones across North America and the World? Is it because you’re completely unaware of the changes in animal migration, especially birds, prompted by warming? Or is it because you think Al Gore is fat?

My skepticism is fueled also by the knowledge that the environmental movement was infiltrated by ex-communists/socialists after the fall of communism in the ’90s.

That’s absurd. Socialists, and especially Marxists, do not give a damn about the environment. As you know, it’s been only since the fall of the Soviet Union that environmental disasters across the breadth and width of that former empire have become a subject of public discussion, and action to mitigate or change the damage. Communist China has been persuaded to amend its polluting ways only as the rise of capitalism has taken hold — the damage done to Chine was evident before, but nothing that Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao ever suggested would be a problem.

I suspect that, just as you were misinformed about DDT, you’re also misinformed about communists in the environmental movement. No Rockefeller has ever before been accused of being socialist or communist, nor would socialists support such Rockefeller concerns as a clean and productive environment.

I gotta admit, I’m really curious: Who gave you this load of garbage about environmentalists? Have you ever read Sand County Almanac? Did you read Silent Spring, or do you speak only from third- or fourth-hand hearsay? Are you familiar with the London Killer Fog, or the Donora, Pennsylvania, Disaster? Have you ever heard of Chernobyl, the nickel poisoning of the Soviet Union, the Aral Sea Disaster, or the Atomic City?

Much of this movement is about attacking capitalism, not saving the environment, as the global warming movement shows.

Rockefellers (especially Laurance) were not in the habit of attacking capitalism (nor are current Rockefellers out of that mold). They well understood, as most well-educated and -informed environmentalists do, that free enterprise tends to do much better at protecting essential resources than non-capitalist systems. It is not a coincidence that clean air is a concern in western, politically and economically free systems much earlier than anywhere else.

You seem to think that the case for global warming is unmade because somebody broke into private e-mails of a few scientists. Considering the logical backflips necessary to come to such a conclusion on the basis of known data, it seems to me you’ve been victimized by some bad and biased reporting. You didn’t even know that the originators of the conservation movement were all devout capitalists who understood the value of clean air, clean water, good outdoor recreation and the concepts of wilderness.

Have you ever run whitewater in any kind of craft? Where? When?

Do you wish to see the world’s whitewater cut off from recreation? Why?

How, exactly, did saving bald eagles, osprey, and brown pelicans save me? I can live without these birds, as beautiful as they are.

Saving the birds didn’t directly do anything for you. The original post complained that DDT wasn’t really so deadly as advertised. I noted that it was as deadly, but we stopped using it, so the poisoning didn’t continue. For an example, I noted that our cessation of use of DDT in the U.S. saved those three species here. Recent research suggests that may have also halted a burgeoning cancer epidemic, and birth defects epidemic.

The point is that DDT is indeed a dangerous chemical, uncontrollable in the wild once released. That we don’t continue to have lectures about how to peel fruit to keep DDT out of humans is because we don’t use DDT, not because the physicians, wildlife specialists and environmentalists were in error.

It may be we didn’t get lead out of gasoline soon enough, but I trust you’ll look that one up on your own.

Plus, the ban on DDT may not have saved millions in Africa, who were killed by malaria once DDT was banned.

DDT use was slowed in Africa in 1964, 8 years prior to the ban on spraying DDT on cotton in the U.S. How our not spraying cotton with DDT caused malaria in Africa years later is an exercise in geography and time travel that I doubt you can make a case for.

DDT was never banned in Africa, and is in fact still available for anyone who wishes to use it. You’re casting blame on innocent parties for something you’re not clear about, if you understand it yourself.

DDT is still manufactured in India and China, and used widely across Africa and Asia. Have you ever wondered why malaria still plagues those nations that use DDT, and not those nations that stopped using it? Ponder that question for a while.

As bad as it is to have bungled these references, this does not affect my claim that environmental scientists have a long history of alarmism that has been refuted by real events.

The debate here isn’t about conserving the environment or making the air and water cleaner. It’s about global warming. For sure I’m skeptical about this, and always have been. I’m even more skeptical now that I know that global warming scientists have manipulated the data to show inexorable global warming that would end life on Earth as we know it, etc etc.

My skepticism is fueled also by the knowledge that the environmental movement was infiltrated by ex-communists/socialists after the fall of communism in the ’90s. Much of this movement is about attacking capitalism, not saving the environment, as the global warming movement shows.

DDT stopped killing things because we stopped abusing it by using it willy-nilly in the environment. DDT is particularly deadly to predators at the top of the food chain in estuaries — bald eagles, osprey, brown pelicans, for example. All three of those species faced extinction — could not breed and get young to survive long enough to propagate.

Action really does work. People listened, people acted, and DDT use was stopped. You were saved by people who acted on the information given.

How, exactly, did saving bald eagles, osprey, and brown pelicans save me? I can live without these birds, as beautiful as they are.

Plus, the ban on DDT may not have saved millions in Africa, who were killed by malaria once DDT was banned.

If DDT is banned for agricultural use, because it does cause deaths by malaria (i.e., it “has been shown to cause DDT resistance in malarial mosquitos”) then what uses does it have? And how does this refute the Wikipedia article, which says that “Critics claim that restrictions on the use of DDT in vector control have resulted in substantial numbers of unnecessary deaths due to malaria?” Couldn’t these deaths have happened before the ban was recinded?