Bring back DDT.
DDT was one of the most important inventions of the last hundred years. Especially in developing countries. With DDT so effectively controlling mosquito populations, malaria killed a mere 50,000 a year. Since the US enacted its DDT ban in 1972 (with most of the world following suit in the following half-decade) 50 MILLION people have died of malaria. That's a rate of approximately 1.5 million people a year.
The facts are astonishing. In Sri Lanka, DDT limited malaria cases to a mere 29 in 1964. Five years and a DDT ban later, malaria cases numbered a staggering half million. That's a grotesque 172000000% increase in just five years. Meanwhile Ecuador, which was one of the few nations to increase DDT use between 1980 and 1990, has experienced a 60% drop in malaria cases. And yet environmentalists still call the DDT ban a "victory." For whom?
Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, the text so incriminating to DDT, has been found grossly inaccurate. First of all, Carson asserted that there was human cancer risk associated with DDT. Bjorn Lomborg, former Director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute, asserts that, "Our intake of coffee is about 50 times more carcinogenic than our intake of DDT before it was banned...the cancer risk for DDT is about 0.00008 per cent." Hardly a risk. At that rate, 4800 people in the ENTIRE WORLD would get cancer from DDT. A far cry from 50 MILLION malaria deaths.
DDT, even in relatively huge doses, isn't even toxic to humans. During a scientific study in the 1950s, researchers fed a man 35mg of DDT a day. Astoundingly, there were no ill effects. Noted tropical disease professor Donald Roberts quipped, "You could eat a spoonful of it and it wouldn't hurt you." Not so for its most effective replacement, malathion, which is a deadly poison.
It is true that DDT poses a risk to birds. The chemical, although generally harmless to the birds themselves, has been scientifically proven to thin the eggshells of many species. This, as we all well know from our pseudo-Greenpeace 3rd grade science teachers, means that many young birds die before they hatch. This is an environmental tragedy no doubt, and good reason to responsibly limit DDT use. But which would you rather lose: a few thousand birds from responsible DDT use, or 50 MILLION innocent human beings from irresponsible disuse? The sad state of our world is that environmentalists would choose the former.
And we have fallen for them again. 70% of Americans see global warming as a serious problem. 55% say that there is scientific evidence of global warming. But they're wrong. Global warming is another environmentalist attempt to vilify the human race. There is very little actual scientific backing of the theory, and much of the data is as unverified as Rachel Carson's DDT cancer research.
The theory of global warming hinges on the "Greenhouse Effect." Everyone has a vague idea what this means, but I'll give you a more in-depth primer. Essentially, it holds that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap more heat in the upper atmosphere, slowly leading to increased global temperatures. But the satellite evidence is irrefutable. The upper atmosphere -- the place that should be the warmest the quickest under the Greenhouse Effect -- has warmed at a rate much slower than the Earth.
Another claim is that global warming is melting the polar icecaps. No, it isn't. 2% of Antarctica -- a region known as the Antarctic Peninsula -- is melting, mostly due to a local warming trend. This is where environmentalists get those scary photos of huge glaciers falling into the sea. But the Antarctic continent as a whole (the other 98%) is growing. The ice sheet is larger and thicker than at any time in recent history, which reverses a 6000 year warming trend. Some scientists suggest that this will usher in the next ICE AGE. Try getting that info from global warming Chicken Littles.
Among other things, global warming doomsayers like to say that ocean levels are rising from the melting ice caps. Bull. Ocean levels are steady within the microscopic margins of error in the most precise instruments.
The theme of the movie The Day After Tomorrow reflects the doomsayers' new strategy: tell people that whatever weather happens, hot or cold, flood or drought, is caused by global warming. It's not true. The rate of natural disasters is constant over the last hundred years.
Don't be fooled into believing that we are bringing disaster upon ourselves. Most news reports of "melting icecaps!!!?" are based on extremes in inaccurately extrapolated computer simulations. The "huge increases in CO2....blahblahblah!!!" is exaggerated. If the earth's atmosphere was a football field, the increase of CO2 would be represented by the width of a pencil.
Environmentalists see human beings as a blight on this earth, as "disrupting the natural order." Well I got news for you folks: THERE IS NO NATURAL ORDER. Nature is chaotic, always changing. Climate change is nothing new; it's been happening for six thousand millennia. The world we see today isn't the finished product, it's a world in transition. As much as we like to try, we cannot preserve it the way it is. It is ridiculous to think that we should.
