National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is cut by $857 million.
NIH is cut by $5.8 billion.
DOE is completely defunded, with some nuclear-related tasks shifted to DOD.
NASA is cut by $4,500,000,000 (25%)
NSF is cut by $4,723,000,000. (62%)
Science? What science?
Cutting the federal budget is difficult. Yes, we have a crisis in spending. We also have many crises in education and in research, and many crises in our economy that are, each of them, rooted in a need for new research.
Is Rand Paul a complete fool? Is he in league with Chinese Exceptionalists? Are his ears made of tin? Or is he a warrior against American knowledge and the American future?
This is a debate which needs facts, and people who can evaluate facts and arguments, and people with a vision for a future America — a good vision for a future America.
One gets the feeling that Rand Paul would have gone after the funding for Ben Franklin’s experiments — not because it would help the federal deficits, since Franklin funded his own work — but because he just doesn’t like science. ‘Why should we let Dr. Franklin take lightning from the gods?’ Rand might ask. ‘Dr. Franklin should stay out of theology.’
And so the modern-day, real Rand Paul, blunders on, waging a War on Science.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The self-proclaimed august American Enterprise Institute issued a “backgrounder” today on foreign trade. Backgrounder #2509, written by James Roberts.
The first paragraph is complete fiction:
Decades ago, the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was banned worldwide for what were generally seen as noble and unassailable environmental and public health reasons. Today, ample evidence shows that the ban on DDT spraying has been a tragic mistake. In developing countries, it is linked to millions of preventable deaths from malaria. Worse, some protectionist European business sectors and activist groups continue to exploit the fears of DDT in ways that increase the suffering of the poor around the world.
Here are the errors of fact:
DDT has never been banned worldwide, so there could never be a decades-old worldwide ban.A nearly-world-wide ban was agreed upon by treaty in late 2001, less than one decade ago. However, any nation may ignore the ban, legally, by simply writing a letter to the World Health Organization (WHO) saying the nation will be using DDT. DDT manufacturing continues in a few nations today, including North Korea and India. India is far and away the largest user of DDT now, using more than all other nations combined. No worldwide ban on DDT ever existed, and DDT use has been continuous since 1946.
Earlier bans on DDT were assailed in court as unreasonable infringements on commerce. The U.S. banned DDT use on agricultural crops in 1972, but only after two federal district courts had ruled the substance essentially uncontrollable in the wild, and after a lengthy administrative law hearing at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) covering most of 1971 and more than 9,000 pages of testimony. EPA’s rule left DDT available in the U.S. for emergency use, or for health use. EPA’s rule left manufacturing alone so the U.S. could export DDT to any other nation who wanted to use it. Still, DDT manufacturers fought hard in court to overturn the ruling. Manufacturers argued that the science was thin to back the ban, and that the ban was too much regulation for small gain. Appeals courts ruled that the science backing the ban was ample.
39 years after the U.S. ban on crop spraying with DDT, benefits are enormous — history and science show the recovery of dozens of beneficial species, ranging from mosquito-eating Mexican free-tail bats in Texas, through fish in Oklahoma, to osprey, peregrine falcons, brown pelicans and bald eagles in the rest of the U.S. Unknown at the time EPA acted, DDT has been shown to be an endocrine disruptor of the sort that scrambles the sex organs of fish and amphibians in the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers in the U.S. Also unknown in 1972, EPA now is listed by the American Cancer Society as a “probable human carcinogen,” though it is thought to be a weak carcinogen to adults directly exposed.
Malaria deaths have been cut by 75% since DDT was indicted as a harmful substance. Perhaps more surprising, without DDT, health workers around the world have sharply reduced malaria incidence and especially malaria deaths. Nearly four million people died from malaria, worldwide, at the height of DDT use in 1959 through 1961. Today that death toll has been cut to under 900,000, through wise use of curative pharmaceuticals, careful use of prophylactic nets and home improvements, and the development of new, better-targeted pesticides. Malaria fighters especially are redoubling efforts to make the disease at least rare, now encouraged by the dramatic strides made without relying on DDT. Ironically, India has a growing malaria problem, despite its being the greatest user of DDT today. (Even more ironic: Roberts claims about half the death rate WHO does — a 90% reduction in malaria deaths.)
No preventable death to malaria has been tied to a lack of DDT. No nation has ever had difficulty getting DDT if it wanted it. The fight against malaria was hampered when the malaria parasites developed resistance to traditional pharmaceuticals used to treat the disease in humans, but the promulgation of artemisinin-based combination therapies made up the gap. Nations have difficulty developing a health care system that can quickly and accurately diagnose malaria, and which form of malaria, and then deliver the necessary therapeutic regimen of pharmaceuticals to cure humans. DDT cannot make up for that difficulty, partly because DDT use itself now requires rather extensive testing to make sure it works. As Jonathan Weiner noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch, nearly every mosquito on Earth today carries at least one of two alleles which make them resistant or wholly immune to DDT. DDT cannot be used without first testing to be sure the mosquitoes are killed by it.
No otherwise noble European or “western” business groups nor environmental groups work against the minor use of DDT for indoor residual spraying (IRS). For example, the Environmental Defense Fund was one of the groups that lobbied the Bush administration to allow USAID money to buy DDT for IRS in Africa, a use the Bush administration inexplicably had not allowed. Opposition to this minor DDT use in Uganda was organized by Uganda businessmen who sued to stop it, not by European groups — generally. BAT, British-American Tobacco, did organize opposition to use of DDT, on specious grounds — highly ironic since the people who run the pro-DDT publicity machine are, several of them, former tobacco propagandists whose organizations go seed money from tobacco companies. Generally, DDT use for IRS in Africa is supported by everyone involved, including environmentalists and the U.S. government.
Four sentences and six grievous errors of fact from the American Enterprise Institute. And this is just the first paragraph of their “background” paper.
James Roberts may have tried to pluck an example from a history he does not understand. There may be a problems with trade and pharmaceuticals and pesticides — but none of the problems he cites for DDT is accurate and true. He may have fallen for the hoaxes perpetrated by others.
Watch: A hundred others will cite the hoax conclusions Roberts lists, claiming American Enterprise Institute as the source. Likely they will assume AEI had its facts straight, and wasn’t the victim of a hoax.
And that’s how hoaxes get started, big time. This is how no-think tanks wage the War on Science.
Will AEI issue a correction?
Does anyone take such publications as authoritative? May God forbid.
With such a sloppy start, can the rest of the paper be any better?
(Oy, now I scan down the document, and I see Roberts cited Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as saying DDT use would lead to extinction of birds, “offering no proof.” Since Carson made no such direct claim, and since the book was loaded with citations to the studies that proved her points, that is it was loaded with “proof,” we must conclude that Roberts did not bother to actually open the book, let alone read it. That doesn’t speak well for the chances of getting a correction.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Yet we can find precedents to this science-base scare in many health scares of recent decades, and also in environmental scares since the DDT cancer scare triggered by Silent Spring, politicised by the EDF and legalized by the newly formed EPA. (See Scared to Death which finds a repeating pattern to these science-based scares.)
This woman might be corrected; global warming denialists will staunchly insist she knows what she’s doing and doesn’t need YOUR advice.
He fails to even think that Rachel Carson was right. Lewin demonstrates incompetence at history, law and science, and the first point of the Scout Law, all in one sentence.
So much error. So little time to correct.
Carson didn’t claim DDT caused cancer. She noted that we create thousands of chemicals that may cause cancer, that cancers were rising in frequency, and that there was no testing of the new substances prior to their marketing. Was there a DDT/cancer scare? Lewin doesn’t offer any evidence. (We had to correct Matt Ridley on this a couple of weeks ago — see his post here.)
EDF (Environmental Defense Fund, now known as Environmental Defense) was on DDT without Carson — suing to stop DDT spraying (for no good reason) on Long Island in 1968. EDF relied on science that was courtroom ready. (I had misremembered the year of EDF’s suit in an earlier version of this post; my apologies to the two or three who may have read it.) EDF’s suits established, on the basis of science, that DDT is an uncontrollable poison in the wild. Lewin ignores science and law in his off-hand indictment of Carson’s book and ED.
EPA didn’t act against DDT until 1972. EPA banned DDT use on agricultural crops in the U.S. because DDT kills non-target species and, basically, entire ecosystems. EPA was specific: The ban had nothing to do with cancer. Once again, Lewin ignores history, science and law.
So, in Lewin’s guest post, we see the pattern that continues at Watts’s place — unfair and wrong indictments of science, ignorance of history, little understanding of law.
All while trying to mock scientists: ‘Of course scientists are almost always wrong,’ Watts’s blog argues, once again.
Watts won’t let me correct his errors there, even though he’s still coddling those who misdescribe Rachel Carson as a mass murderer, while denying he does it himself. Consequently his readers won’t be alerted to this post because Watts or his minions will edit out the automatic ping his blog gets that this post is here. Propaganda promoting falsehood can’t stand the sunlight of fact and truth.
Just because there’s a scare doesn’t mean there’s not a reason to be scared. DDT is a deadly toxin, so long-lived that it almost cannot ever be eradicated from the environment. It kills everything small, quickly, unless so much of it is used that the small things evolve quickly to be resistant and immune to it.
So, if we are to assume, as Lewin wrote, that the anti-warming bunch is to warming what the campaign against Rachel Carson by the DDT manufacturers was to DDT’s harms, we get a hint of what’s really up at Watts Up: Any anti-warming claim is a hoax. Why put it so cryptically, if that’s what they meant to say?
When Lewin looks at the history of DDT and Rachel Carson, he’s looking at the false history, and he draws the wrong conclusions. Should we trust a guy so sloppy with the facts to be right on anything else?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Still from “We Are Science Probes.” Full clip of movie below.
In animation, a parable about the dangers of being intentionally ignorant of science. In the not-distant-enough future, a probe from another planet arrives on Earth after the demise of human civilization. Unfortunately, the probes land in Kansas, the land of creationism and woo. The plot thickens.
[My apologies — the version I found did not come with a “pause” button. It will play automatically when you open this post. Fortunately, it’s almost perfectly safe-for-work. If you don’t like the music, turn it off. There is no spoken dialogue in the cartoon. If you wish to pause the playing of the cartoon, right click to get to the Adobe Flash Player controls. To pause the playing click the checkmark next to “play.”]
[Update August 18 — Okay, I give up — 100% of comments I’ve been getting ran against the video without the “start” or “pause” buttons. You’ll have to go see it at another site — here, for example.]
Sure would love this group to turn their creative faculties to hard history — say, the Progressive Movement and Gilded Age. (Probably less chance of commercialization there, and perhaps less chance of awe-striking art, too.)
At a blog called Frugal Café Blog Zone, “Where it’s chic to be cheap… Conservative social & political commentary, with frugality mixed in,” blogger Vicki McClure Davidson headlined the piece:
Cold in winter. They don’t expect it. These warming denialists provide the evidence those crabs need, who wonder whether there shouldn’t be some sort of “common sense test” required to pass before allowing people to vote, or drive, or have children.
Oh, it gets worse:
Another site picked up the post. No, seriously. (Has Anthony Watts seen this yet?)
Voting Female [I am convinced that is a sock puppet site designed to insult women; no woman could be that stupid, could she?]
Earth at northern solstice - Wikimedia image
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Appearing to be aware they are losing the battle of the classroom to real science, creationists have taken a sneakier way to undermine science education. P. Z. Myers explains:
A lot of people have been writing to me about this free webgame, CellCraft. In it, you control a cell and build up all these complex organelles in order to gather resources and fight off viruses; it’s cute, it does throw in a lot of useful jargon, but the few minutes I spent trying it were also a bit odd — there was something off about it all.
Where do you get these organelles? A species of intelligent platypus just poofs them into existence for you when you need them. What is the goal? The cells have a lot of room in their genomes, so the platypuses are going to put platypus DNA in there, so they can launch them off to planet E4R1H to colonize it with more platypuses. Uh-oh. These are Intelligent Design creationist superstitions: that organelles didn’t evolve, but were created for a purpose; that ancient cells were ‘front-loaded’ with the information to produced more complex species; and that there must be a purpose to all that excess DNA other than that it is junk.
Suspicions confirmed. Look in the credits.
Also thanks to Dr. Jed Macosko at Wake Forest University and Dr. David Dewitt at Liberty University for providing lots of support and biological guidance.
Those two are notorious creationists and advocates for intelligent design creationism. Yep. It’s a creationist game. It was intelligently designed, and it’s not bad as a game, but as a tool for teaching anyone about biology, it sucks. It is not an educational game, it is a miseducational game. I hope no one is planning on using it in their classroom. (Dang. Too late. I see in their forums that some teachers are enthusiastic about it — they shouldn’t be).
No such thing as a free lunch. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Free software for use in educating kids about biology, sounds too good to be true.
_____________
In comments, Lars Doucet disavows creationist intent. So the creationist/intelligent design factors were added just to make the game more playable, and not as an attempt to introduce or endorse creationism or intelligent design.
“Darwinism” is doomed, Perry Marshall says. The entire theory will crumble in 2013 (like the Berlin Wall — may as well start with an offensive comparison to totalitarianism since everyone knows it will get there eventually), if you just suffer through his lessons, send him some money, suspend all logic and reason, send him some money, forget everything you learned in science, and send him a ltittle money.
Plus, he’s figured out how to reconcile Christianity and science. (Call the Templeton Prize committee.) (No, call James Randi and the FBI fraud squad instead.) You can take his course at Coffeehouse Theology (no Mormons need apply, but hey, they teach evolution at their colleges, so they can’t be real saints, can they?).
According to Perry Marshall, "Perry Marshall's books on Google AdWords are the most popular in the world." No hyperbole, no ego here.
Yes, Spunky, that’s your Hemingway solid-gold S–t Detector™ clanging in your holster, if you’re using the handy, lithium-battery-powered version. If the rest of the story didn’t set your device off, the lack of an immediate plea for money should have.
Do you remember when people had to do a lot of dope to get these kinds of hallucinations? People like Marshall do damage to Carlos Casteneda and famous hoakum.
This is a post out of history, from the good people at NASA’s Earth Observatory, on July 6, 2007. For those of who are not climate scientists or particularly advanced in our acumen in dealing with the large datasets and complex mathematics of global warming, this Earth Observatory Image of the Day may improve understanding.
Climate models predict that the build up of greenhouse gases should warm the lower layer of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, and cool the layer above it, the stratosphere. Greenhouse gases accumulate in the troposphere where they absorb energy radiated from the Earth and re-emit energy back to the surface. Because the gases trap heat in the lower parts of the atmosphere, the stratosphere cools down. This pattern of warming in the lower atmosphere and cooling in the stratosphere is a hallmark of greenhouse gas warming in global climate models.
These images show temperature trends in two thick layers of the atmosphere as measured by a series of satellite-based instruments between January 1979 and December 2005. The top image shows temperatures in the middle troposphere, centered around 5 kilometers above the surface. The lower image shows temperatures in the lower stratosphere, centered around 18 kilometers above the surface. Oranges and yellows dominate the troposphere image, indicating that the air nearest the Earth’s surface warmed during the period. The stratosphere image is dominated by blues and greens, indicating cooling.
Globally, the troposphere warmed, and the stratosphere cooled during this period. Local trends varied. The greatest tropospheric warming was in the Arctic, where warming is amplified as snow and ice melt. The Antarctic, on the other hand, showed cooling. Some researchers have explained the localized cooling as a side effect of the ozone hole on atmospheric circulation over Antarctica. Loss of ozone cools the stratosphere, a change which intensifies the vortex of winds that encircle the continent. The stronger vortex isolates the air over the continent, cooling the stratosphere even further. At different times of the year, the unusually cold air dips down from the stratosphere and into the troposphere.
The cooling trend in the stratosphere was probably not solely due to greenhouse gas warming at lower altitudes; loss of ozone also cools the stratosphere. In the stratosphere, two warm spots over Antarctica and the Arctic appear to defy the overall cooling trend. One explanation for these warm spots is that polar stratospheric temperatures can fluctuate widely. The poles, especially the Arctic, experience periodic events known as sudden stratospheric warmings, during which the vortex of winds that circles the poles breaks down. When this happens, the stratosphere can warm several tens of degrees Celsius in a few days. Although these events are more common in the Arctic, a significant sudden stratospheric warming also occurred in the Antarctic stratosphere in 2002 and may help explain the apparent warming trend. Whether the localized warming trend is significant is still uncertain.
The measurements were taken by Microwave Sounding Units and Advanced Microwave Sounding Units flying on a series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites. The instruments record microwave energy emitted from oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. Warmer molecules release more energy than cooler molecules, so scientists can measure the temperature of the atmosphere by recording the amount of microwave energy being emitted. Early analyses of these measurements showed little or no warming in the troposphere, where models predicted that warming should be occurring. For a time, these measurements caused some people to question the validity of global climate models and greenhouse gas warming. Scientists discovered, however, that the satellites carrying the microwave instruments had drifted in their orbits over time, so that more recent measurements were taken at a different time of day than older measurements. Once scientists accounted for this bias and other differences between the individual instruments, the measurements showed a warming trend in the troposphere, consistent with surface observations of rising global temperature.
Re-analysis of the satellite measurements answered one of the frequently asked questions about global warming: why didn’t the early satellite data show warming in the lower layer of the atmosphere? To read more on this topic, see Global Warming Questions & Answers, which addresses this and other common questions about global warming.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of Remote Sensing Systems. Caption information courtesy Carl Mears, Remote Sensing Systems, and Paul Newman and Joel Susskind NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Spread the historic word:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Note to teachers: They hate you out there global warming denial land.
Watt’s Up denizens ramble in a state of confusion about how the planet can be warming while local records fall in cold weather. [Note to Anthony Watts: Have you explained to your readers that seasons are not governed by CO2 levels, but instead by the tilt of the Earth?]
How to clear up the confusion? Blame it on the teachers. No kidding. Here’s the comment from “r”:
Forget the main stream media. The real roots of this movement, strangely enough, are in grade school and collage teachers.
College teachers are out of touch with the real world. They live in the insulated bubble of academia. They go to school for so long, all they know is school. They never get any experience in the real world of any industry. Therefore, they preach the socialist agenda because it sounds good on paper. The young people they teach do not protest because they don’t know any better yet. Their parents continue to give money to these colleges because they have no idea what their children are actually learning.
Grade school teachers despite having increased course work on classroom management are not required to take many classes in science. They cannot teach science because they don’t understand it themselves. Global warming was introduced to my children through Scholastic Magazine given out at school. The magazine is used as part of the curriculum. The teachers never questioned it. The children were frightened by it and peer pressure keeps anyone from dissenting. The parents are learning about global warming from their children as in 1984.
In fact it is harder for me to protest the fraud of global warming at my own school than it is to protest in the media. I run the risk of alienating myself and my children at school.
If anybody would like to send my schools a note telling them to stop teaching the global warming fraud with reasons why, I would be grateful.
Here’s what I recommend: Send an e-mail to the two people listed above, and congratulate them for offering real science to their students. Tell them you’ve heard that there is a national campaign to stop them from teaching good science, and that you support them and hope the campaign fails.
Anyone who lies to his kids about science, about the environmental issues we face, about life in general, will indeed alienate themselves from their children, if the children are lucky. “r” wishes his kids to be taught voodoo science. Shame on him.
I wonder what “r” thinks of his own teachers.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The guest poster is Willis Eschenbach. His argument? Well, rivers don’t run straight to the sea; they meander. Ergo, water doesn’t run downhill in a complex system. Consequently, no global warming. In another place he argues that humans are not metal, therefore, no global warming.
I mean — sweet Mother of Pearl! — this guy even denies the existence of the Army Corps of Engineers, and river straightening:
The results of changes in such a flow system are often counterintuitive. For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.
No wonder they place all their bets on stealing e-mails from scientists. Somebody show that man the South Platte River through Denver, Colorado, or the Los Angeles River through Los Angeles, or the Mississippi from Arkansas to the Gulf. Somebody give that man a paddle!
Here are a couple of clues: First, water always runs downhill — capillary action being the exception. Eschenbach doesn’t propose capillary action as a driver of river meandering. Any hydrologist will tell you, however, that even a meandering river runs downhill. Second, human beings don’t conduct heat like metal blocks. Even a dead human won’t conduct heat like a copper block, but especially a living human will radiate heat away through several different paths, so that heating the feet of a human will not cause a concomitant rise in temperature of the head. But, heck, if you soak the human’s head in hot water, it won’t warm like a block of steel, either. The examples offered in this piece get pushed past the brink of absurdity. It’s impossible for me to believe that Eschenbach — or Watts — fails to understand the physics so greatly. I can only imagine that they are driven by a fanatic devotion to an idea of the result they hope to see, and that blinds them to the errors they make.
Finally, water’s flow, downhill or up with capillary action, doesn’t negate global warming. Human conductivity affects warming not at all, also.
(No, “constructal theory” doesn’t have much to do with it. Constructal theory generally doesn’t apply to atmospheric conditions, since the air is, technically, not alive, but a dynamic fluid system already highly evolved for these purposes. Even for those cases in which contructal ideas apply to non-living systems, constructal theory does not claim that laws of physics are suspended or held in abeyance, as Eschenbach claims at Watts’s blog. The idea of constructal theory is that systems not in equilibrium, will, over time, figure out (evolve) more efficient means to get into equilibrium. This has nothing to do with the fact of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas. Constructal theory would only suggest that, over time, the atmosphere would develop systems to get heat distributed better despite CO2, which means that warming would not be held in abeyance at all, but spread out further and farther.)
Watts is already hot that I posted science links at his place on another post. Go see what other commenters can get away with. Can the camel’s nose of real science push into the WUWT tent?
Share the lightness:
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In fashion we wish were different but seems all too typical, so-called skeptics of global warming defend their position with invective and insult. But they are vigorous about it. What do you think? What information can you contribute?
Here’s the post that set off the denialists, anti-science types and DDT sniffers, and a tiny few genuinely concerned but under-informed citizens:
AP caption: Former Vice President Al Gore, left, listens to speakers during a meeting at the Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Buckingham, Va., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. Gore visited the area that is the proposed site for a compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Should be obviously silly for anyone to argue former divinity student Al Gore is evil, as this film implies despite the demurrer. It should also be obviously that it’s evil to call Gore wrong on these issues; but that doesn’t stop brown Earther critics of scientists and Al Gore.
“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is slated for release on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington — Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.
The film is both evil and wrong.
Errors just in the trailer:
Claims that Al Gore said sea levels will rise catastrophically, “in the very near future.” Not in his movie, not in his writings or speeches. Not true. That’s a simple misstatement of what Gore said, and Gore had the science right.
” . . . [I]t wouldn’t be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up. In fact, ice is the enemy of life.” “Bad” in this case is a value judgment — global warming isn’t bad if you’re a weed, a zebra mussel, one of the malaria parasites, a pine bark beetle, any other tropical disease, or a sadist. But significant warming as climatologists, physicists and others project, would be disastrous to agriculture, major cities in many parts of the world, sea coasts, and most people who don’t live in the Taklamakan or Sahara, and much of the life in the ocean. Annual weather cycles within long-established ranges, is required for life much as we know it. “No ice” is also an enemy of life.
“They want to raise our taxes.” No, that’s pure, uncomposted bovine excrement.
“They want to close our factories.” That’s more effluent from the anus of male bovines.
The trailer notes the usual claim made by Gore opponents that industry cannot exist if it is clean, that industry requires that we poison the planet. Were that true, we’d have a need to halt industry now, lest we become like the yeast in the beer vat, or the champagne bottle, manufacturing alcohol until the alcohol kills the yeast. Our experience with Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, the CleanAirActs and the Clean Water Act is that cleaning the environment produces economic growth, not the other way around. A city choked in pollution dies. Los Angeles didn’t suffer when the air got cleaner. Pittsburgh’s clean air became a way to attract new industries to the city, before the steel industry there collapsed. Cleaning Lake Erie didn’t hurt industry. The claim made by the film is fatuous, alarmist, and morally corrupt.
When the human health, human welfare, and environmental effects which could be expressed in dollar terms were added up for the entire 20-year period, the total benefits of Clean Air Act programs were estimated to range from about $6 trillion to about $50 trillion, with a mean estimate of about $22 trillion. These estimated benefits represent the estimated value Americans place on avoiding the dire air quality conditions and dramatic increases in illness and premature death which would have prevailed without the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Act and its associated state and local programs. By comparison, the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits.
“Some of the environmental activists have not come to accept that the human is also part of the environment.” Fatuous claim. Environmentalists note that humans uniquely possess the ability to change climate on a global scale, intentionally, for the good or bad; environmentalists choose to advocate for actions that reduce diseases like malaria, cholera and asthma. We don’t have to sacrifice a million people a year to malaria, in order to be industrial and productive. We don’t have to kill 700,000 kids with malaria every year just to keep cars.
“They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.” No, that would be the film makers. Environmentalists advocate reducing filth and ignorance both. Ignorance and lack of ability to read, coupled with religious fanaticism, caused the strife known as “the Dark Ages.” It’s not environmentalists who advocate an end to cheap public schools.
The trailer shows a kid playing in the surf on a beach. Of course, without the Clean Water Act and other attempts to keep the oceans clean, such play would be impossible. That we can play again on American beaches is a tribute to the environmental movement, and reason enough to grant credence to claims of smart people like Al Gore and the scientists whose work he promotes.
“I cannot believe that Al Gore has great regard for people, real people.” So, this is a film promoting the views of crabby, misanthropic anal orifices who don’t know Al Gore at all? Shame on them. And, why should anyone want to see such a film? If I want to see senseless acts of stupidity, I can rent a film by Quentin Tarantino and get some art with the stupidity. [Update, November 23, 2009: This may be one of the most egregiously false charges of the film. Gore, you recall, is the guy who put his political career and presidential ambitions on hold indefinitely when his son was seriously injured in an auto-pedestrian accident; Gore was willing to sacrifice all his political capital in order to get his son healed. My first dealings directly with Gore came on the Organ Transplant bill. Gore didn’t need a transplant, didn’t have need for one in his family, and had absolutely nothing to gain from advocacy for the life-saving procedure. It was opposed by the chairman of his committee, by a majority of members of his own party in both Houses of Congress, by many in the medical establishment, by many in the pharmaceutical industry, and by President Reagan, who didn’t drop his threat to veto the bill until he signed it, as I recall. Gore is a man of deep, human-centered principles. Saying “I can’t believe Al Gore has great regard for real people” only demonstrates the vast ignorance and perhaps crippling animus of the speaker.]
That’s a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer — the film itself may make heads spin if it comes close to that pace of error.
Where have we seen this before? Producers of the film claim as “contributors” some of the people they try to lampoon — people like Ed Begley, Jr., and NASA’s James E. Hansen, people who don’t agree in any way with the hysterical claims of the film, and people who, I wager, would be surprised to be listed as “contributors.”
Here, see the hysteria, error and alarmism for yourself:
Ann McElhinney is one of the film’s producers. Her past work includes other films against protecting environment and films for mining companies. She appears to be affiliated with junk science purveyors at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an astro-turf organization in Washington, D.C., for whom she flacked earlier this year (video from Desmogblog):
It’s the air conditioning one hears, not applause.
Did your local newspaper review the movie? Odds are the movie didn’t play in your town (did it play anywhere other than local Republican clubs?).
“Not Evil, Just Wrong” promoters and producers appear to have abandoned hopes for a wide-scale debut of their film on October 18, instead choosing direct-to-DVD release in order to salvage something from the effort.
At the Birch Society site I responded, and will be astounded to see if it stays (in three parts). The review started out noting that if one asks a friend to explain the cap-and-trade system of controlling carbon air emissions, one is not likely to find that one’s friend fully understands the ins and outs of government regulation of air pollution, commodities markets, and deep economics (why should they?).
Ask a friend or associate, “Can you explain ‘cap and trade?’” More than likely you will be astounded at what a poor grasp (if any) he or she has of the subject, even though the future of our economy and even our country hinges to a large extent on whether or not cap-and-trade legislation passes or not.
I said:
Ask a friend to explain the right to bear arms, and you’re likely to get a bad explanation, too.
Does that mean the Second Amendment is evil? I don’t think so.
This movie [“Not Evil, Just Wrong”] is greatly riddled with errors, and it presents a false portrait of science, history, and government.
For example:
In one scene that made one want to throw bottles at the TV set, a well-to-do environmentalist showed no concern to a Ugandan mother, Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes, over the loss of her child to malaria, a disease that was almost eliminated by the use of DDT, but then resurged when the EPA banned DDT’s exportation and insisted other countries adopt the same policy.
When DDT was heavily used in Africa, about two million people a year died from the disease. Today? About one million die. The rates aren’t low enough, but does the movie need to lie about history to make a point? Why?
Malaria was never close to being eliminated with DDT. Most of the nations that got rid of malaria did it with the combination of better housing (with screens), better health care, and concentrated programs to attack mosquitoes to hold populations down long enough that the pool of malaria in humans could be wiped out. Mosquitoes get malaria from humans — if there is no malaria in humans, mosquito bites are benign.
And if it was, are we really supposed to believe that Idi Amin refused to use DDT out of respect for little birdies and fishies, while killing and [it is often said] personally eating his countrymen?
I don’t think that environmentalists are the root of the problem in today’s malaria rates in Uganda, and any perusal of history suggests a dozen other culprits who could not be considered lesser threats by any stretch.
Now the death toll of malaria victims worldwide, but mainly in Third World countries, mostly young children, is estimated by the World Health Organization to be one million per year.
Near the lowest in 200 years.
Recently the World Health Organization, under strong pressure from human rights organizations, particularly in Africa and Asia, rescinded its ban on the pesticide that has been shown in test after test to be harmless to humans and animals, including birds.
WHO never had a ban on the use of DDT. DDT didn’t work well. It’s foolish to require malaria fighting agencies to use tools that don’t work. [Ooooh. I forgot to note the junk science claim that DDT is harmless to humans and animals — were it harmless, why should we use it? It’s odd to see the John Birch Society organ campaigning so actively to kill America’s symbol, the bald eagle. Are they really that evil, or just that poorly informed?]
The environmentalists continue to push to overturn this ruling, regardless of its toll in human misery and death.
[Gee. I should have responded, “The environmentalists continue to push this goal even as malaria deaths and infections drop — regardless the improvement in human health and reduction of misery and death.”]
Africans have been free to use DDT since the substance’s discovery, and some nations used it extensively throughout the period since 1946. Interestingly, they also experienced a resurgence of malaria anyway. If Africans want to use DDT, let them use it.
In the interim, tests across Africa demonstrate that bed nets are more effective than DDT, and cheaper. DDT alone cannot help Africa much; bed nets alone help a lot. But eradicating malaria will require great improvements in the delivery of health care to quickly and properly diagnose malaria, and provide complete treatments of the disease in humans to wipe out the pool of disease from which the little bloodsuckers get it in the first place.
This film is not interested in helping Africans, however. The film’s producers are interested in trying to make hay besmirching the reputations of people who campaign for a clean environment.
Look at it this way: Every sale of the DVD of “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” deprives Nothing But Nets of a donation of two more life-saving bed nets. So every sale of this DVD more than doubles the chances that another kid in Africa will die from malaria.
Help ban ignorance about world affairs:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s another example of where historians show their value in science debates.
Naomi Oreskes delivered this lecture a few years ago on denialism in climate science. Among other targets of her criticism-by-history is my old friend Robert Jastrow. I think her history is correct, and her views on the Marshall Institute and denial of climate change informative in the minimum, and correct on the judgment of the facts.
You’ll recognize some of the names: Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, and William Nierenberg.
Oreskes details the intentional political skewing of science by critics of the serious study of climate warming. It’s just under an hour long, but well worth watching. Dr. Oreskes is Professor of History in the Science Studies Program at the University of California at San Diego. The speech is titled “The American Denial of Global Warming.”
If Oreskes is right — and I invite you to check her references thoroughly, to discover for yourself that her history and science are both solid — Lord Monckton is a hoaxster. Notice especially the references after the 54 minute mark to the tactic of claiming that scientists are trying to get Americans to give up our sovereignty.
Nothing new under the sun.
“Global warming is here, and there are almost no communists left,” Oreskes said.
Nudge your neighbor:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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