Is this the age of stupid?
I propose to name the not stupid, and shame the stupid.
Rachel Carson
"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings ... Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change ... There was a strange stillness ... The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."
"Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid — indeed, the whole chemical industry — duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media."
Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People of the Century
" Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.
"the insecticide barrage had been augmented by dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion and other fearful compounds many times stronger than DDT, all of which the government planned to distribute through the Department of Agriculture for public use and commercial manufacture."
Time Magazine.
"Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer."
Rachel Carson
Junk science attacks on Rachel Carson debunked at Bug girl's blog.
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Building A Straw Man Out Of Red Herrings.
CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a climate denier activist recruitment site which attempts to camouflage its pro-corporate climate denial agenda by refering to its own activities as a "fight for liberty" by "a community of thousands of pro-freedom activists". It classifies all of its opponents, all economists who urge caution, all who warn of global climate change as luddites, religious left, malthusians etc. Bureaucrash.com, a Blomquist site, is dedicated to activism against the state. In other words, whatever people in a democratic society vote for as a policy geared to leaving this planet in good condition for our descendents, Cord Blomquist is against it.
He will even defend his freedom to pollute by spreading false information about scientists working in the field of climate change and pollution studies, as reported by New Scientist 04 November 2006
"I am used to being in the firing line against individuals and organisations who are motivated by ideology or commercial interests to undermine the scientific community. However, I am concerned that this episode might be evidence of wider campaign by ExxonMobil, and the lobby groups it funds, of personalised attacks on the integrity of individuals who convey the views of the scientific community on climate change."
Bob Ward, exerpt from a letter to Al Gore, 4 January 2007
“ExxonMobil last year provided more than $2.9 million to organisations in the United States which misinformed the public about climate change through their websites.”
“Exxon’s director of corporate affairs, Mr. Nick Thomas, rang me and said that the author of the letter to ExxonMobil had left the Royal Society. I asked whether he had been sacked, and Mr. Thomas said that he could not possibly comment, but it was clearly significant. The implication was left hanging in the air. When I checked, I found that Bob Ward, the senior manager at the Royal Society, had been promoted into another job. The Royal Society is standing by every word that he wrote, as it made clear in a subsequent press release attempting to deal with internet rumours.”
UK House of Commons debate, Hansard, 12 Oct 2006.
Bob Ward is also noteworthy as having complained about inaccuracies in a Channel 4 documentary and DVD "The Great Global Warming Swindle". In an email, 20 September 2007 to Martin Durkin, Bob Ward, made a well-reasoned, point-by-point appeal for the rectification of specific misrepresentations of fact.
"Climate change is an important issue and the public have a right to expect that the information they receive is accurate. The DVD version of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ contains major factual inaccuracies. You were told of these inaccuracies before copies of the DVD were available for sale, so your decision to distribute them anyway constitutes an attempt to deliberately mislead the public about climate change."
The response was:
"From: Martin Durkin
Sent: 20 September 2007 14:31
To: Bob Ward
Bob,
Are you on drugs or something?"
"No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth's climate history."
This was Martin Durkin's straw man argument - in - telegraph.co.uk This fact was never disputed because it is climatology 101. The sun warms the Earth. The sun's output fluctuates in a predictable manner. The global climate is subject to regular variation from that source q.e.d.
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A Right To Pollute?
Freedom is fundamental to our global civilisation. But where there is a right, there must be an accompanying duty falling on somebody's shoulders. Corporate activists are demanding the right to continue with the economics of greed and profligate waste, through the mechanisms of propaganda and misinformation, thus imposing on our descendants an obligation to live in a heavily impoverished environment.
CEI hosts a series of videos in which a man in a white 'mr. scientist' coat presents 'simpletons guides' to various topics. In a guide purporting to be about ethanol, ddt is discussed. Facts are distorted to present the agenda of big business. Comments are disabled, so not only is this bad science, but it is also a stifling of scientific debate. The man, un-named on the web page is Richard Morrison.
Here is what CEI wants you to believe:
This video is a guide to ethanol which endorses the bad science in the ddt debate.
"The story starts with one of the earliest founders of modern environmentalism, rachel carson"
"the supposedly lethal nature of modern pesticides, especially the insecticide ddt."
Supposedly? If dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion and ddt are'nt lethal then perhaps Cord Blomquist and Richard Morrison can be persuaded to ingest a teaspoonful of each on public television.
The website ceiondemand.org is one of many owned by, operated by, or associated with Cord Blomquist., who certainly knows more about keyword stuffing than he does about climate science.
ceiondemand.org uses irrelevant search terms to attract visitors. People using popular search engines to find scientific articles about anthropogenic climate change and related issues are thus quite likely to find a biased site set up by the climate change denier and corporate lobby supporter
Cord Blomquist.
These are the meta keywords (invisible search terms) used for ceiondemand.org to boost its search engine ranks:
"hah, creativity, electricity, energy, environment, humanity, invention, progress, prosperity, technology, all videos, cei shorts, bailout, barack obama, budget, cap and trade, card check, cnbc, economic policy, interview, spending, stimulus, taxes, taxpayers, warren buffett, carbon dioxide, climate change, co2, global warming, greenhouse effect, hockey stick, ipcc, unfccc, debt, deficit, earmarks, politics as usual, pork, pork-barrel, promises, featured, capitalism, collectivism, conservatism, constitution, economics, economy, future, individualism, libertarian, liberty, old left, socialist, news appearances, banking, boston tea party, default, finance, foreclosure, homes, housing crisis, interest, investors, mortgage, obama, property values, real estate, ban, bottled water, chemical risk, consumer choice, consumer protection, nrdc, safety, tap water, water quality, agriculture, alternative energy, biofuels, drinking water, ethanol, factsaboutethanol, marlo lewis, climate, globalwarming.org, greenpeace, tv debate, alarmist, cei, chris horner, cooler heads coalition, red hot lies, skeptics, children, dehydration, disaster, donation, earthquake, emergency, fema, flood, health, hurricane, katrina, new orleans, tornado"
Ask epidemiologists what they think of Silent Spring. You won't like what you hear. Junk science from a well-meaning activist is no better than junk science from Exxon.
P.S. Do meta keywords even get used any more? Boston Tea Party?? Seriously??
P.P.S. Regarding Martin Durkin and Bob Ward, Al Gore's movie had many inaccuracies too. All of them were well known before the DVD went on sale so "You were told of these inaccuracies before copies of the DVD were available for sale, so your decision to distribute them anyway constitutes an attempt to deliberately mislead the public about climate change" goes both ways. I was at the AAAS conference in February when Al Gore put up a slide I knew was completely hysterical but it isn't 2001 any more and the scientists there, even in a room full of fans, objected afterward enough on the grounds that intentional exaggerations and inaccuracies do more harm than good, that he removed the offensive slide from later presentations.