Deltoid

Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I’ve also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk “junk science”.

Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy’s site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he “debunks” you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is “junk science” is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might support. Studies that support a right-wing agenda are endorsed, while studies that don’t are harshly criticized. John Quiggin noticed the same thing, while Milloy almost admits it in his definition of junk science:

“Junk science” is bad science used to further a special agenda, such as personal injury lawyers extorting deep-pocket businesses; the “food police,” environmental Chicken Littles and gun-control extremists advocating wacky social programs; overzealous regulators expanding bureaucratic power/budgets; cut-throat businesses attacking competitors; unethical businesses making bogus product claims; slick politicians; and wannabe scientists seeking fame and fortune.

He no longer uses this definition (too much of a give away?) but archive.org has preserved a copy.

Armed with this knowledge we can predict the junkscience.com verdict of any scientific result without having to even look at how the study was carried out. Here are some examples:

The ozone hole? Completely natural:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

Oh really? Look at this graph, which shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). Pretty obviously there was no hole in the 1950s. Anyone writing about ozone depletion who is unaware of this fact has to be actively avoiding learning the facts about ozone depletion.

The Theory of Evolution? A plot to promote atheism. (OK, Milloy didn’t write that article, but it was endorsed as the “Commentary of the Day”).

Laws that require safe storage of guns? A study by Cummings et al used a pooled time series design similar to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” to study the effect of laws that make gun owners criminally liable if someone is injured because a child gains unsupervised access to a gun. They found that the laws were associated with a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children.

Here’s what Milloy writes about Cummings study:

This was an ecologic epidemiology study, meaning the conclusion is based on very “macro” comparisons of groups of people. The study involved no data about individuals, just groups. Traditionally, these studies are only useful for forming hypotheses for further testing, not irrefutable facts.

In particular, no data was collected on compliance with these laws and the relationship of compliance to the decrease in injuries. There may have been fewer unintentional firearm-related injuries in states with safe storage laws, but this study assumed compliance with the laws and assumed that compliance is responsible for the decrease in injuries. A big assumption considering the result.

The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.

So how much stock can be put in a weak result based on inadequate data?

Now this criticism applies equally to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”, only more so, since the crime decreases found by Lott were much less than 23%. (For the bit that reads “assumed compliance with the laws” you need to read “assumed frequent encounters between criminals and permit holders”.) So what is Milloy’s take on “More Guns, Less Crime”? Does he call it an even weaker result based on inadequate data? No, he endorses it

I emailed Milloy and asked him to explain his inconsistent treatment of the Cummings and Lott studies. His reply:

That wasn’t my summary… but quotes from the article.

The weakness is the article is that there is no direct link that it is gun ownership that is causing the decline in violent crime. But the statistics cited are actuarial, not estimated or hypothesized.

Yes, he didn’t write the summary that praised Lott’s work, but he did endorse the summary instead of treating Lott’s study like that of Cummings. And actually Cummings’ study used actuarial statistics while Lott did not, so his “explanation” is nonsense. No, it is clear that to Milloy, Cummings is junk science, while Lott is to be endorsed.

Given all of the above, it should come as no surprise that junkscience.com is another astroturf operation. As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) was a front secretly created and funded by a PR firm acting for Philip Morris. Here is the key document (with annotations by Stewart Fist). TASSC and junkscience.com shared the same address and were both run by Milloy. Studies that find harmful effects from tobacco smoke seem to attract particularly venomous attacks from junkscience.com. PR Watch has the full story of Milloy’s history.

And this conduct by Milloy is absolutely disgraceful.

Update:The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was folded up in 1998, but the term “sound science” continues to be used in the same, political, way. Chris Mooney has the scoop on the latest developments.

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.

Michael Peckham writes “Milloy’s criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. ”

John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with evolution and while he savagely criticizes real science, he won’t criticize creationist bunk.

Steve Michel writes

I read Milloy’s book a few years ago, and while some of it’s good, in general it’s just a conservative rant. It’s more interested in protecting big corporations from lawsuits (which are, admittedly, sometimes on the edges of science) than it is in, say, the kind of religiousy-correct junk science promoted by conservatives around the country.

Jeff writes “Tim Lambert does a good job illustrating the moral bankruptcy of a typical anti-liberal - Steve Milloy of junkscience.com”

Radagast examines Milloy’s article on mad cows and finds it wanting.

Demosthenes comments on Milloy and TASSC (the tobacco companies’ astroturf operation).

I always have believed and always will believe that it’s not the arguer but the argument that is important. Even if Milloy works for Phillip Morris, he may have a point. Still, this sort of willful misrepresentation bothers me a lot.

I agree that the argument is more important than the arguer, that’s why I didn’t mention Milloy’s funding source till after I had demolished his claims. The funding explains why he made so many false claims, it does not prove that those claims are false.

Meanwhile, John Brignell has attempted a defence (scroll to bottom of page) of Milloy. He ignores the substance of the criticism and focuses on the language so that he can dismiss the criticism as name calling. He complains that pointing out that Milloy is funded by tobacco companies is “playing the man and not the ball”. His objection would have a tiny bit more force if he hadn’t immediately turned around and gone for the man himself by implying that John Quiggin is unqualified to criticize Milloy:

A is able to call B a charlatan. B holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center. The qualifications of A must be pretty impressive. Wonder what they are.

Unfortunately, when Brignell goes for his man, he misses and falls flat on his face. Compare Milloy’s CV with Quiggin’s CV. As far as I can tell, Milloy has never conducted any research and has published only one paper, which was a poster at a conference and he wasn’t even the first author, while Quiggin has well over one hundred refereed journal papers. I wrote to Brignell suggesting that he provide links to both CVs so his readers could judge the matter for themselves, but Brignell did not so (though he did list Quiggin’s degrees).

In an update, Brignell finally gets around to commenting on the substance of the criticism. He claims, without offering any evidence, that on the scientific issues Milloy is largely correct. He does disagree with Milloy about the gun lobbying, so it would seem that he thinks that this claim is correct:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

And just to be sure, here is what Brignell wrote about it earlier:

Watch out for a new bunch of mysterious figures lurking about Britain’s beauty spots at the dead on night. They are not smugglers or clandestine lovers, but fridge dumpers. It is the latest coup by the almighty Greens of the EU. Believe it or not, because of new EU regulations, DEFRA, fresh from its foot and mouth triumph, is asking the British to refrain from buying fridges. It is now illegal to dispose of both the coolant and the insulant in fridges, but in Britain there is no legal way of doing it. All because of a hole in the ozone layer that was probably always there and an unproven theory as to how it was caused.

Brignell read my post which contains this graph, that shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). It is perfectly clear that there was no hole in the 1950s. It is perfectly clear that the hole was not always there. There is not one scrap of evidence to support Brignell’s claim. Yet even when confronted with the evidence that proves his claim is false he continues to maintain that it is true. Disgraceful.

A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it “baloney”. One interesting thing I’ve noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the conclusion that he is full of it. In this post modisch details how dreadful Milloy’s arguments are. While in this post Myria, who seems generally sympathetic to Milloy, concludes:

Frankly FOX should be embarrassed to have this poorly thought out criticism on their site.

When I wrote earlier about Steve Milloy, I commented on his attack on a study that found that the introduction safe-storage laws was followed by a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children. Milloy claimed:

The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.

Milloy repeats this factor-of-two principle many times on junkscience.com. For example, on this page Milloy asserts:

Relative risks from 1.0 - 2.0 should be ignored.

(This page explains what a “relative risk” is if you don’t know.)

In my earlier post I observed that Milloy somehow neglected to apply this factor-of-two principle to Lott’s work. Today I want to write about the origins of his principle. It’s a very interesting story.

When I first read his comments I was rather puzzled. A measure that reduced crime by 45% would be a pretty spectacular success, but by Milloy’s principle it would be ignored. If you look in statistics text books you will not find Milloy’s principle. You will find that two sorts of significance are important:

Statistical Significance

Is it likely that the result occured by chance? A result that has less than a 5% probability of occuring by chance is usually considered statistically significant. (Although values other than 5% could be used.)

Practical Significance

Does it make a difference that matters? A measure that only made a difference of a handful of crimes in the whole country probably isn’t worth worrying about.

Another important thing statistics texts will tell you is that correlation is not the same thing as causation. Just because the safe-storage law was followed by a 23% drop in injuries it doesn’t follow that the law caused the drop. Some other factor might have caused the drop. Some people misunderstand this to mean that correlation doesn’t have anything to do with causation. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but it is evidence for causation.

Milloy’s factor of 2 principle arises from neither sort of significance. Larger factors are more likely to be statistically significant, but a factor of 2 can easily by statistically significant. If we are talking about a very rare crime, a factor of two change might not be practically significant, but for more common ones it most certainly would be. Finally, larger factors are stronger evidence for causation. There aren’t many things that make a factor of ten difference, so if we find a correlation with a factor of ten difference, it’s unlikely to really be caused by something else, while things that make a factor of two difference are more common, so factors of that size are more likely to be really caused by something else, but that certainly does not mean that they should be “ignored”.

The only authority that Milloy offers in support of his principle that risks of less than a factor of two should be ignored is an out-of-context quote from a National Cancer Institute press release about a study finding a link between breast cancer and abortion. If you look at the whole press release you will see that they are not saying that all risks of less than a factor of two should be ignored, but that a risk of less than two along with other evidence suggests that the link was spurious (as subsequent work found). Milloy even complains that the NCI didn’t follow his principle in other cases.

That brings me to an amazing story that was revealed in the Philip Morris documents archive. You see, in 1992 the EPA concluded that passive smoking caused lung cancer with a risk factor of about 1.25 for a non-smoker with a smoking spouse. Philip Morris obviously wanted to discount this finding. If only epidemiology guidelines included Milloy’s factor-of-two principle, then they could point to them and dismiss the EPA’s result. So Philip Morris set out to get the epidemiologists to adopt Milloy’s principle.

They funded the creation of TASSC and junkscience.com. Milloy used junkscience.com to energetically attack the EPA’s passive smoking conclusions and promote the factor-of-two principle. They also organised a series of seminars to try to get the scientific community to adopt what they called what they called “Good Epidemiology Practices” (GEP). The GEP guidelines were mostly perfectly reasonable things like

3. Statements of study design should contain a description of statistical techniques.

However, slipped into the middle of the GEP guidelines was this:

8. Odds ratios of 2 or less should be treated with caution, particularly when the confidence intervals are wide. There is a likelihood that the odds ratio is artefactual and the result of problems with case or control selection, confounders or bias.

The reaction of the scientists to the GEP guidelines was something like this:

“Excellent idea! We need guidelines for good practice and these fit the bill. We should adopt them…

Oh, except for number 8 about odds ratios. That doesn’t make sense so we’ll drop that one.”

Philip Morris kept pushing its GEP guidelines to various scientific organizations for several years, but eventually they realized that it just wasn’t going to work, as explained in this internal memo:

Approximately three years ago, the concept of GEP’s was discussed in considerable detail in PM. Corporate Affairs thought it was a wonderful idea, because at first they … felt that part of a code for Good Epidemiological Practices would state that any relative risk of less than 2 would be ignored. This is of course not the case. No epidemiological organization would agree to this, and even Corporate Affairs realizes this now.

The full story of GEP, with copious references to Philip Morris’ internal documents is detailed in a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The fact that the Philip Morris executives thought that their GEP plan had a chance of succeeding tells us something about how they think science is conducted. The scientists did not adopt Milloy’s factor-of-two principle because it was, well, wrong. The Philip Morris executives thought that the truth of something did not matter to the scientists—you could get them to say something just by lobbying them. This attitude seems common to promoters of “sound science”. They seem to think that real scientists aren’t interested in finding out what is true or false but instead just concoct results to advance a poltical agenda or get more funding. In other words, they think real scientists operate like they do.

Efforts to promote Milloy’s bogus factor-of-two principle continue to this day. Just last month Iain Murray published an article where he wrote:

Epidemiologists generally agree that one cannot ascribe medical causation to a risk factor if the factor is associated with less than double the occurrence than normal.

No, epidemiologists do not “generally agree” with this. In fact, Philip Morris’ efforts to get then to agree with this proposition have proven that do not agree with it at all.

And where was Murray’s article published? Tech Central Station, another astroturf operation like junkscience.com. And who employs Murray? The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is partly funded by Philip Morris.

John Quiggin has an interesting post putting the disinformation peddled by folks like Steve Milloy and Iain Murray in a broader context:

But at some point, it must be necessary to abandon the case-by-case approach and adopt a summary judgement about people like Milloy and sites like TCS. Nothing they say can be trusted. Even if you can check their factual claims (by no means always the case) it’s a safe bet that they’ve failed to mention relevant information that would undermine their case. So unless you have expert knowledge of the topic in question, they’re misleading, and if you have the knowledge, they’re redundant.

Of course, there’s nothing surprising about paid lobbyists twisting the truth. What’s more disturbing is the fact that the same approach dominates the Bush Administration. Admittedly, governments have never had a perfectly pure approach to science, but the distortion of the process under Bush is unparalleled, to the extent that it has produced unprecedented protests from the scientific community. Natural scientists aren’t alone in this. Economists, social scientists and even military and intelligence experts are horrified by the way in which processes that are supposed to produce expert advice have been politicised.

Daniel Davies has some criticism of a Steve Milloy Fox News column that purported to debunk a study that found that sugary drinks were linked with weight gain and diabetes. Milloy has a column on Fox News where he regularly disinforms his readers. Today I’m going to look at a Steve Milloy effort titled Gun Control Science Misfires, where he attacks two studies that he clearly has not even read. Milloy writes:

Dr. Kellerman claimed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine study that having a firearm in the home is counter-productive. He reported “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.”

Kellermann did not report that, nor did the study find that. Kellermann actually reported that:

For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms.

Note that most of the self-protection homicides were not of intruders.

How did Milloy happen to misquote Kellermann? Well, he didn’t bother to read Kellermann’s paper but relied on this article by Miguel Faria. And Faria didn’t read Kellermann either, but relied on this article by Edgar Suter. The same misquote seems to have been spread far wide, appearing in a law review article, an amicus brief, and a report from the Statistical Assessment Service (apparently written by Iain Murray).

Pro-gun writers often complain about gun-control advocates using this study to make the misleading claim that gun misuse is 43 times as common as defensive use, but if you search you find that just about every such reference is made by pro-gunners objecting to the statistic.

Milloy then attacks another Kellermann study:

In a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study, Dr. Kellerman again reported guns in the home are a greater risk to the victims than the assailants. In addition to repeating the errors of his prior research, Dr. Kellerman used studies of populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction such as a history of arrest, drug abuse and domestic violence. Moreover, 71 percent of the victims were killed by assailants who didn’t live in the victims’ household, using guns presumably not kept in the home.

This is wrong from beginning to end. Once more it is clear that Milloy did not bother to look at Kellermann’s study, instead relying on Faria who is relying on Suter. The 1993 study used a case-control design, completely different from the 1986 study, so even if there were errors in the that study, the 1993 one does not repeat them. Suter just doesn’t know what a case-control study is. Ironically, Milloy does know what a case-control study is, and if he’d read it, might have been able to come with a coherent critique. For example, Milloy complains that the population studied was disproportionately dysfunctional, but that is not an error. The cases were people who were murdered, and yes they were disproportionately dysfunctional but that is the nature of murder victims. And 71% of the victims were not killed with guns from outside. A glance at the tables in the survey shows that claim to be false.

After dismissing Kellermann’s work as junk science, Milloy gets to John Lott. Instead of citing third hand criticism, he cites Lott’s findings with not a word of criticism:

laws that permit the carrying of concealed weapons are associated with a 69 percent decrease in death rate from public, multiple shootings such as those that occurred in Jonesboro, Arkansas and Columbine High School.

Oddly enough, when writing about a study by Cummings that linked safe-storage laws with reductions in accidental shootings Milloy wrote:

This was an ecologic epidemiology study, meaning the conclusion is based on very “macro” comparisons of groups of people. The study involved no data about individuals, just groups. Traditionally, these studies are only useful for forming hypotheses for further testing, not irrefutable facts.

Now Lott’s study was an ecologic study at the group level and Kellermann’s case-control study was at the individual level, but Milloy uncritically accepted Lott and trashed Kellermann. I wonder why? Furthermore, when I asked him why he had criticized Cummings while posting an uncritical summary of Lott’s work he didn’t defend Lott but tried to pretend he wasn’t endorsing Lott’s findings:

That wasn’t my summary… but quotes from the article.

But here he does endorse Lott’s findings.

Here’s the most telling thing about Milloy—you can tell what his conclusions about a scientific study will be without having to look at the methodology of the study. If he doesn’t like the conclusions he will find some grounds, no matter how specious, for dismissing the study as “junk science”.

Update: SayUncle comments on a draft of this post that I accidently posted:

The problem with Kellerman’s study is he compares self-protection gun deaths to other gun deaths, which discounts the self-protection that does not result in the death of someone.

Kellermann clearly notes this problem in his 1986 study, which also discounts gun misuse that does not result in death. This was one of the reasons why he did the 1993 study which does measure self-protection that does not result in death.

In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies’ demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found:

Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for development of type 2 diabetes in women, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars.

Todd Zywicki, who endorsed Milloy’s piece as a “devastating critique” has mounted a defence of Milloy. Unfortunately it is clear that Zywicki has not read the article (subscription required) or even the abstract describing the study.

Zywicki dismisses concerns about Milloy’s character raised by Davies and John Quiggin as not relevant to the question of whether the JAMA study is a good one or not. It isn’t, but Zywicki hasn’t read the JAMA study. Instead he is relying on Milloy to accurately describe it. Milloy’s character suggests that his description of the study might be misleading; and in fact it is misleading and as we will see below, Zywicki has been mislead.

Zywicki writes:

Milloy says that the once the researchers “statistically adjusted their results for bodyweight (a risk factor for diabetes) and for caloric intake (a proxy measure of consumption of sweetened foods other than soda), the 83 percent increase [in type 2 diabetes prevalence] dropped to an even more statistically dubious (and soft-pedaled) 32 percent increase.” Now it seems to me that Milloy is obviously correct here—bodyweight and non-soda caloric intake seem to me to obviously relevant to trying to isolate the marginal effect of the increased soda consumption. So the 83 percent figure is really an irrelevant number

Milloy has mislead Zywicki into thinking that the 83% increase in diabetes was partly caused by confounds—that the women who drank more sugary drinks also happened to be heavier and eat more and that these factors are what caused most of the increase. But right in the abstract they clearly state (my emphasis):

After adjustment for potential confounders, women consuming 1 or more sugar-sweetened soft drinks per day had a relative risk [RR] of type 2 diabetes of 1.83 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.42-2.36; P<.001 for trend) compared with those who consumed less than 1 of these beverages per month.

So what is the 32% figure that Milloy tried to pass off as the “real” increase? Well, they found that increased soda consumption was associated with weight gain and weight gain is known to be a risk factor for diabetes. The 32% increase is the extra risk factor for soda consumption on top of the increase from the weight gain from drinking more soda. It would only be the real risk if sugar-sweetened drinks did not cause weight gain, but they do.

This is not the only matter that Milloy has misled Zywicki about. Zywicki writes:

Milloy similarly notes that the study does not control for genetics or lifestyle issues

But the study did control for genetics and lifestyle issues (my emphasis):

We evaluated whether the association between sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption and risk of diabetes was modified by BMI, physical activity, and a family history of diabetes using analyses stratified by these variables and by modelling interaction terms.

Milloy even accuses the authors of “scientific misconduct” for not mentioning another study that Milloy alleges contradicts their results. But that other study was not about soft drink consumption but about overall sugar consumption. The new study suggests that consuming sugar in a drink where it is more rapidly absorbed may increase the risk of diabetes. This is hardly contradicted by results that suggest that sugar intake including that in solid food is not a risk factor. Zywicki endorses the serious charges that Milloy makes without checking whether they are accurate.

Update: The Washington Times has also published Milloy’s misleading article and Reason’s Nick Gillespie was also taken in. Matthew Yglesias reckons that libertarians should just argue that they have a right to unhealthy food instead of trying to debunk the science that shows them to be unhealthy.

Update 2: Nick Gillespie links here (thanks!) and to a Tech Central Station article by Jon Robison that criticizes the JAMA study. Robison, like Milloy, tries to pass of the 32% increase in diabetes, which is the extra risk after accounting for the effect of weight gain, as the total increase in risk. Robison also asserts that “Epidemiologists generally agree that relative risks less than 2 should be ignored or at least viewed with extreme skepticism”. In fact, epidemiologists do not “generally agree” with this. I explain why in this post.

William Connolley catches junkscience.com claiming that Global Climate Models can’t recreate the temperature record of the 20th century. However, they can and its no secret unless you get your science from junkscience rather than actual scientists.

Andrew Kenny in The Spectator writes

Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler’s holocaust 6 million, Stalin’s famine and terror 8 million, and Mao’s famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT. …

In 1971 DDT was poised to rid the world of malaria. In 1972 it was banned. …

This was the time of Rachel Carson’s mendacious book Silent Spring, about the horrors of pesticides, when the newly emerging green ideology was looking for a cause célèbre. … The greens, leaning heavily on Ruckelshaus, were determined to ban it and did so, with catastrophic consequences for poor people with dark skins. Tens of millions of humans were sacrificed on the green altar.

The US extended the ban overseas by various measures, including refusing aid to countries that used DDT. Other rich countries, urged on by their greens, followed suit. Malaria, which had been in retreat, came surging back, killing multitudes.

In a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear Ron Bailey agrees with Crichton that the greens killed 50 million:

Along the way, Mr. Crichton makes vividly apparent how environmentalist misinformation costs lives and money. He has Kenner tell fatuous Hollywood environmentalist Ted Bradley (Martin Sheen?) that banning DDT was “arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.” Why? Because DDT was the best defense against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “All together, the ban has caused more than 50 million needless deaths,” Kenner says. “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it.” True enough.

Junkscience has a death clock that puts the death toll even higher at 90 million deaths.

However, it is conceivable that relying on a science fiction writer and an astroturf web site might not be wise. so I checked to see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature. “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” published in Nature by Chapin and Wasserstrom tells us what really happened. The graph on the left shows that malaria did skyrocket in India in the 70s. But not because they cut back on DDT spraying because of pressure from environmentalists. The graph shows that they didn’t cut back on DDT, but dramatically increased its use. So how come malaria increased? Well, the increase in DDT use was in agriculture. This caused the insects to become resistant, so they had to use more DDT to get the same effect. This caused more resistance, so even more DDT was used and so on. The end result was that in the areas where DDT was used in agriculture, the mosquitoes became completely resistant and DDT no longer stopped them from spreading malaria, with the disastrous results shown in the graph.

Was this catastrophe predictable? Well, yes. In fact, Rachel Carson warned about it in Silent Spring. If India had followed the example of the United States and banned the agricultural use of DDT and reserved it for public health many millions of cases of malaria would have been prevented. However, India probably could not have afforded the more expensive alternative insecticides to DDT, so this may not have been feasible. But there were other alternatives that would have greatly reduced pesticide use and slowed the development of resistance. Chapin and Wasserstrom continue the story:

In response, entomologists developed what they call integrated pest management systems[85-86], the key to which lies in timing insecticide applications so that the crop is protected from predators only at the most vulnerable stages of its growth cycle. As it turns out, cotton buds destroyed by pests regrow throughout the plant’s life, so that producers can afford to sustain a high level of insect damage before there is a need to apply pesticides. Simple precautionary measures may also lower their chemical costs: up to 75 per cent of the hibernating boll weevil population may be eliminated by the ploughing under of crop debris after harvest. Thus many growers west of the Mississippi now spray their fields only seven or eight times each season instead of 25 or 30; similar measures have been developed for raising corn, rice and many kinds of fruit[87].

So why did WHO not urge cotton producing countries to employ integrated management systems that would not interfere with malaria eradication programmes? A possible answer may perhaps be found in the activities of another international agency, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Like WHO, FAO was established to provide technical advice and assistance to members of the United Nations. In the case of pesticides, which are manufactured and distributed by a few multinational corporations, FAO’s advice might have played a critical role in reducing environmental contamination. Both farmers and extension agents in developing nations must normally rely on pesticide company salesmen for information about how to use agricultural chemicals — much as physicians in Western countries rely upon pharmaceutical companies for information about new drugs. Beginning in 1967, therefore, FAO put together a small working group of experts on integrated pest management which published technical manuals and disseminated other information[88-94].

Three years later, it commissioned an American entomologist, Dr Louis Falcon, to develop an integrated system in Nicaragua, a system which achieved remarkable success within a few seasons. Similar programmes were subsequently undertaken in Mexico, Peru and Pakistan[95].

But FAO did not recommend these programs.

Why did FAO choose this course of action, which in retrospect does not appear to have been guided by an accurate appreciation of the perils of pesticide addiction? It is important to examine how pesticide manufacturers have influenced the policies of international agencies. As public concern about the effects of toxins like DDT began to grow in the 1960s, these corporations formed a trade association called GIFAP (Groupement International des Associations Nationales de Pesticides) which in turn worked directly with UN technicians through a FAO bureau known as the Industry Cooperative Programme (ICP). By the early 1970s joint FAO-ICP regional seminars had been organized in many parts of the world to promote new and better ways of distributing agricultural, pesticides. More important, high-level officials in WHO and FAO, who share the industry’s views on many major issues, invited GIFAP to play an active part in agency “consultations” and other internal meetings[98,99]. In this way, for example, no fewer than 25 corporate representatives lent their expertise to the meeting in Rome on pesticides in agriculture and public health and served on subcommittees responsible for formulating UN policy. Not surprisingly, these subcommittees stressed the need to apply more pesticides in a more effective manner rather than to limit their use or replace them with alternative forms of pest control. And what is more curious, none of these deliberations included representatives of other international constituencies such as environmental groups, labour unions or farmers’ organizations. Perhaps for these reasons, in June 1978, the current director general of FAO, Eduard Saoumi, finally expelled ICP from his agency[100].

So the people with significant responsibility for the resurgence in malaria were the chemical companies that stymied efforts to reduce the agricultural use of pesticides. And it was chemical companies that helped set up the astroturf junkscience site that has attempted to blame Rachel Carson for causing the resurgence. Nice. It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident. Bastards.

Update: See follow-up post

Rolling Stone has published a major feature on global warming. Steve Milloy was mentioned as one the chief anti-science guys in the debate, so he has a column in Fox news trotting out all the usual tired old discredited arguments:

• “the sort of crystal ball climate modeling that the IPCC report relies on has never been validated against historical temperatures” Not true.

• “Watson, of course, overlooked at least 17,000 scientists who signed a petition cautioning against global warming alarmism” See here.

• “[Dr. Cicerone] managed leave the impression of a substantial 20th-century human-caused warming [while] ignoring the cooling between 1940 and 1975 that has always created problems for advocates of anthropogenic global warming.” No it doesn’t.

Milloy even resorted to an argument that has not only been discredited, but shown to be an outright lie:

But Dr. Hansen’s predictions of global temperature increases have also been famously wrong. While Dr. Hansen predicted a 0.34 degrees Centigrade rise in average global temperatures during the 1990s, actual surface temperatures rose by only one-third as much (0.11 degrees Centigrade)

In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed the results of the most likely one, scenario B. As the graph on the right shows, scenario B turned out to be a very good prediction. However, in 1998 Pat Michaels published a blatant lie about Hansen, erasing B and C and claiming that scenario A was his prediction. Since then, folks like Michael Crichton and Steve Milloy have been repeating the lie.

Unfortunately, even something this blatant doesn’t bother Michaels apologist Leigh Cartwright, who offers this:

He’s not lying; he’s only talking about one scenario brought forward.

There are more posts on Steve Milloy at the new site.