It would be nice if OpinionJournal.com could get DuPont to pen his column more often than once a month. Gems like this one from last Wednesday are all too rare, as DuPont takes down the entire apparatus of globaloney, global warming, climate change arguments, and points out the horrible consequences of listening to the doomsday merchants, all in about 900 words (so, of course, read the whole thing):
When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country–grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate–so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.
Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.
During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm–by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.
….. Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform.
….. Earlier this month the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won’t be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion.
While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions.
….. The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit that its 2001 “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming increases appear more dramatic.
….. Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that “in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka’s malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths” in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.
Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded “a ban, not just a curb,” on the use of DDT “even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control.” International environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings. For more than three decades this view prevailed, until the restrictions were finally lifted last September.
As we have seen since the beginning of time, and from the Vikings’ experience in Greenland, our world experiences cyclical climate changes. America needs to understand clearly what is happening and why before we sign onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut down our industries and power plants, and limit our economic growth.
I’ll be convinced of the sincerity of the top leadership of the “leading” environmental organizations when I see a formal, heartfelt, unconditional (”We were wrong; we are sorry”), multi-organization apology issued for the 50 million-plus deaths from malaria that occurred over a period of decades because of DDT-free purity — long after the alleged dangers of DDT had been debunked. I don’t expect one — but I fully expect the need for another one in a couple of decades after the current globaloney is consigned to the ash heap of history. Of course that one will never come either; enviros will by that time have moved on to trying to sell the world on its next imagined cataclysm.
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Selected Previous DDT-related Posts:
- Sept. 18, 2006 — Sanity on DDT? At the UN? Pinch Me
- May 23 — A Kenyan Newspaper Pleads for DDT Use Against Malaria
- Dec. 20, 2005 — Passage of the Day: John Stossel on DDT Lunacy
- Nov. 21 — Quote of the Day: Not Allowing DDT Has Killed Millions
