“Not Evil, Just Wrong” opens to thunderous silence

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.

Well, they can take solace in the fact that the John Birch Society, itself trying to rise from the dead, liked the film according to the comments in The New American.  But even the Birch Society reviewer watched it on DVD, not on a big screen.

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.

DDT was never used in an eradication effort in most nations of Africa, because the governments were unable to get a campaign to fight the disease on all fronts as necessary.  Do we know whether DDT was used in Uganda prior to 1967?

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."]

Environmentalists have been lobbying since 1998 to allow DDT use in extremely limited circumstances, with controls to protect human health (the National Academy of Sciences notes that DDT, though among the most useful substances ever created, is more dangerous than helpful, and must be eliminated). [I should have noted here, "Opposition came from the George W. Bush administration."]  In the past three years opposition to DDT use in Uganda has come from large agricultural companies, tobacco growers and unnamed groups of “businessmen” who sued to stop DDT use.

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.

How long is this film?  90 minutes, IMDB says.  UNICEF notes that a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds.  So while you watch this film, 180 children will die from malaria, and you will have done absolutely nothing to stop the next one from dying.

Send $10 to Nothing But Nets instead.

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:

Naomi Oreskes: The lecture Lord Monckton slept through, which he hopes you will not see

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:

Monckton lies again (and again, and again, and again, and again . . .)! The continuing saga of a practicer of fictional science

When Monckton claimed that Jackie Kennedy was responsible for malaria in Africa, I thought it a great stretch.

Holy cow!  Monckton gave a speech in Minnesota, and if this quote is representative, it was a one man re-enactment of the Burlington Liar’s Club quarterfinals for 2002 through 2008 (he was disqualified for lack of humor).  Monckton spoke at Bethel University in St. Paul on October 15, 2009:

Here is an excerpt from his speech:

Here is why the truth matters. It was all very well for jesting Pilate to ask that question and then not to tarry for an answer. But that question that he asked, “what is the truth?” is the question which underlies every question and in the end it is the only question that really matters. When you ask that question what you are really asking is “what is the truth about the matter?” And we are now going to see why it matters morally, socially, and politically, as well as economically and scientifically. That the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth should inform public policy on this question. Now, 40 years ago, DDT, the only effective agent against the malaria mosquito was banned. And you saw in that film [Cascade Policy Institute film "Climate Chains" was shown prior --ed] what the effect of that ban was. Before the ban, the inventor of DDT got the Nobel Peace Prize because he had saved more lives than anyone else in the history of the planet. Malaria, one of the greatest killers of children in the Third World had all but been eradicated. There were still 50,000 deaths per year. But when DDT was banned by exactly the same faction, that is now trying to tell us we must close down five sixths of the United States economy that figure is actually in the Waxman- Markey bill. That same faction banned DDT worldwide. The consequences are on the slide there. The number of deaths went up from 50,000 to a million a year and stayed there. For 40 years. 40 million people, nearly all of them children, died of malaria solely and simply because DDT had been banned for no good scientific reason or environmental reason whatsoever. And it was only after every single one of the people responsible for that dismal, murderous decision had retired or died that on September the 15th 2006, Dr. Arata Kochi of the World Health Organization said “Normally in this field, science comes second and politics comes first. But we will now take a stand on the science and the data, and he ended that ban on DDT and made it once again the front line of defense against the malaria mosquito. After pressure from me, among others.

Right there Monckton disqualified himself from ever being a Boy Scout with egregious disregard for the first point of the Scout Law. Oh, Monckton is dependable, but dependable only to tell falsehoods and stink up the place.  That excerpt provides the Recommended Annual Dose of both voodoo science and voodoo history.  Count the problems with me:

1.  DDT has never been the only effective means to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes. DDT was  a very effective pesticide, though dangerous — but never the “only effective agent against the malaria mosquito.”  The U.S., for one example beat malaria (and yellow fever, and other mosquito-borne diseases) well enough to finish the Panama Canal in 1915 without DDT, by controlling mosquito breeding areas and using screens to protect sleeping workers from mosquitoes.  Malaria, once endemic in much of the U.S., was practically eliminated by 1939.  DDT was used in limited fashion to complete the eradication in the U.S., after World War II — but most of the work had already been done.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (founded to control malaria) relates at its website:

Control efforts conducted by the state and local health departments, supported by the federal government, resulted in the disease being eradicated by 1949. Such measures included drainage, removal of mosquito breeding sites, and spraying (occasionally from aircrafts) of insecticides.

Aircraft spraying insecticide, 1920s

Drainage activities, Virginia, 1920s

We still have the non-pesticide solutions, and they still work.  But 40 years ago, there were other pesticides that worked against the malaria vector mosquitoes.

The national library of the ancient Kingdom of Ghana had volumes on how to eradicate malaria, more than 500 years ago.  Monckton can’t even be bothered to Google the topic, let alone visit one of America’s more than 15,000 free county libraries, to get the facts?

2.  No Nobel Peace Prize was ever given for DDT, and the prize given wasn’t for saving malaria victims. Paul Müller won the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 1948, for his discovery that DDT killed insects.  There was no Peace Prize awarded in 1948.  A chemist working in biological chemicals won the Peace Nobel later — but it was Linus Pauling, who won in 1962 for his work against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  [UPDATE:  Listening to Monckton's speech, I note that the transcriber made a serious error.  Monckton did not specify the Nobel Peace Prize; it is still true that the Medicine Prize that Müller won was not on the basis of DDT's saving an uncountable number of lives.  The chief medical advantage cited was the use of DDT fighting typhus; malaria gets a mention.  Monckton can't be bothered with accuracy on such things, however, as is clearly shown.]

The bizarre claim about saving “more lives than anyone else in the history of the planet” comes from a wacko claim of the Lyndon Larouche cult, apparently based on a typographical error in a 1980 book from the National Academy of Sciences.

3.  Malaria rates have been greatly reduced in the 20th century, but malaria has never been “all but eradicated.” In the past 120 years, malaria has always killed more than 900,000 people a year; for most of the past 60 years, the death toll has been more than a million people a year, sometimes as high as 4 million people killed.  Annual malaria deaths have never been under a half million, let alone as low as 50,000.

4.  DDT has never been banned for use to control malaria. 40 years ago, in 1969, DDT was freely available world wide.  Sweden banned the stuff from agricultural use in 1970; the U.S. followed with a ban on agricultural use of DDT, especially sprayed from airplanes.  DDT for fighting malaria has always been a feature of the U.S. ban.  As a pragmatic matter, DDT manufacture on U.S. shores continued for more than a dozen years after the restrictions on agricultural use of the stuff.  In an ominous twist, manufacture in the U.S. continued through most of 1984, right up to the day the Superfund Act made it illegal to dump hazardous substances without having a plan to clean it up or money to pay for clean up — on that day the remaining manufacturing interests declared bankruptcy to avoid paying for the environmental damage they had done.  See the Pine River, Michigan Superfund site, or the Palos Verdes and Montrose Chemical Superfund sites in California,  the CIBA-Geigy plant in McIntosh, Alabama, and sites in Sand Creek, Colorado, Portland, Oregon, and Aberdeen, North Carolina, for examples.

5.  Nothing in Waxman-Markey anticipates closing down any part of the U.S. economy. This is a claim Monckton appears to have plucked from between his gluteals.  Here’s one summary of the bill (notice the money allocated to boost industry), here’s another, and here’s the summary from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

6.  There’s no way to blame malaria deaths on a lack of DDT. As noted, DDT has been available for use in Africa and Asia since its patent.  More importantly, malaria death rates have been influenced by the failure of effectiveness of pharmaceuticals against the malaria parasite itself in humans.  DDT fights only the mosquitoes that carry the parasite.  But the difficulty wasn’t in beating the mosquitoes; the difficulty was in curing humans (from whom the mosquitoes get the parasite to pass along).

7.  DDT was restricted on the basis of overwhelming evidence of harms. This is one of those charges that is self-refuting in the hands of DDT advocates and anti-science people.  You don’t have to go far to find claims that EPA acted contrary to an extensive hearing record that took months to compose.  But then they turn around and claim, as Monckton does here, that there is no such record?  The facts are that the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) hearings were conducted under the gun.  Two different federal courts had ordered the review, which had been started with the Department of Agriculture before the creation of EPA.  The hearing record itself fell out of favor with some officials, and even EPA’s library had difficulty finding a copy of the decision by Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney — but intrepid fact seekers like Jim Easter tracked down the documents and posted them for all to see.  Easter notes that the record is clear on harms to wildlife, bio-magnification, and other dangers of DDT.  In fact, the only place Ruckelshaus differed from Sweeney was on the issue of cotton.  Sweeney thought he couldn’t prohibit use on cotton, Ruckelshaus found authority in the law and did so.

Be clear:  EPA banned DDT use on agricultural products, especially cotton, and broadcast spraying.  EPA’s “ban” allowed continued manufacture of DDT, and it allowed use for health emergencies and other emergencies.

8.  There never was a ban on DDT by the World Health Organization (WHO). So Monckton’s bizarre fiction that “. . . it was only after every single one of the people responsible for that dismal, murderous decision had retired or died that on September the 15th 2006, Dr. Arata Kochi of the World Health Organization said normally in this field, science comes second and politics comes first,” and then Kochi ended the ban, is whole cloth.

9.  There is no evidence anybody ever paid any attention to Monckton on DDT, but Monckton took credit for the imaginary end of the imaginary ban: ” After pressure from me, among others.”  There’s a distant possibility that Monckton might have written a letter to WHO — but let Monckton produce the thing from the archives of WHO.  Until that time, we should classify Monckton as an emboldened prevaricator, perhaps a victim of Munchausen’s Syndrome (not by proxy in this case).   I’m calling Monckton’s bluff.   Let’s see his cards on this issue:  When did he say anything to WHO about DDT, to whom, and what did he say?  He’ll not be able to produce any documentation, I’ll wager — and I’ll bet he can’t even produce hearsay testimony.

Nine falsehoods in a paragraph — a rate of falsehood not equalled even by Jon Lovitz’s pathological liar character. What is wrong with the excrement detectors of the people who sit in those audiences with this guy?

How far out of bounds is Monckton?  Even the shrill discussion at Little Green Footballs puts Monckton in the not-to-be-taken-seriously category.

Monckton, the Burlington Liars Club called:  They want their good reputation back.  Check your answering machine, too — the Bethel College group should be calling any minuted, to ask you to pay for the exorcism of their building after you spoke there.

By the way, how do we know Monckton is a coward?*  He has refused to debate me.  As he notes, anyone who refuses a debate is a coward.  And yet, he refuses each of my challenges.  Now he’s refusing to debate a Tenderfoot Boy Scout using Boy Scout Law rules.  How much of a coward does that make him?

_______________

* Of course that logic is flawed.  But he uses it against Al Gore.  Monckton can’t get Gore to suffer him, and so, Monckton, a moral pipsqueak, calls Gore a coward.  The “Freemarket Institute” people ate it up.  It’s more likely that Gore simply refuses to get into a urination contest with a known skunk.  Still, Monckton refuses to debate — what is he afraid of?

No lie!

Anti-Gore film’s producer tries tantrum to get publicity

Phelim McAleer, one of the producers of the anti-Al Gore film “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” sneaked into a Gore press event and threw a tantrum the other day.

Why is this relevant?  Oh, the tantrum was rude, but if you’re a hack film producer with a political screed whose film looks like a flop, you’ll do anything to get publicity for the film.  Perhaps we should not be too critical of publicity whores.

It’s not relevant because of that.

It’s relevant because one of the charges against Gore by the fruit-and-nut brigade is that Gore refuses to talk to the press.  How can they complain about Gore’s treatment of them when any mention of this event makes the Gore critics appear untruthful?

The war against Rachel Carson still rages

Tim Lambert and Deltoid takes apart the hapless and pointless attack on Rachel Carson by J. F. Beck, in some publication named Quadrant.

Beaten so badly in the realm of law making, regulatory hearings, in the courts, and in the science journals, critics of a clean environment are reduced to attacking a woman who has been dead for 45 years.

That’s the best they got?

Also see:

• The Partisan looks at Beck’s article here, and here

Monckton will lie about anything

Lordy! Monckton said to the Winnipeg Sun (in Manitoba, but you knew that) :

He continues: “Remember DDT, the pesticide used to kill mosquitoes that carried malaria. Jackie Kennedy read a book saying it was harmful, got her husband the president to bring pressure to have it banned and in 40 years 40 million people, mainly children, died. Now we’ve come to our senses and re-introduced it but only after the fashionable left did their damage.

Not so fast.  Here are a few of the errors.

1.  Key phrase:  “the pesticide that used to kill mosquitoes that carried malaria.”  It’s not very good anymore.  Mosquitoes acquired alleles that allow them to digest DDT, rather as food, instead of getting poisoned by it.  This evolutionary response was speeded when DDT was overused (abused, that is) by big farmers.  The World Health Organization had a campaign to use DDT to knock down a mosquito population for about six months, quickly treat all the humans who had the disease, and so when the mosquitoes came roaring back after six months, there would be no malaria for them to get from one person to spread.  WHO stopped the program when the quickly-evolving resistance to DDT made it impossible.  This was in the years 1964 through about 1966.  DDT was not banned, and production and use of the stuff continued around the world.

2.  President Kennedy was asked about DDT at a press conference.  He said he’d read the book.  It wasn’t “meddling” by Jackie Kennedy — though she would have been right had she done it.   Jackie Kennedy proved her mettle later as an editor of books, a real force to be reckoned with and a woman of great judgment.

(Yeah, I had sound trouble with it, except for the press conference with Kennedy.)

3.  Kennedy didn’t act against DDT.

4.  Kennedy did ask the experts to check out Carson’s book.  The President’s Science Advisory Commitee (PSAC) (including Nobel winners) spent several months studying the book and its footnotes, and checking with other experts.  In May 1963 they issued a verdict:  Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was accurate and true, but suffered one flaw:  Carson’s alarm wasn’t loud enough nor demanding action quickly enough.  PSAC urged Kennedy to act immediately to slow or stop the use of DDT.  Alas, he was assassinated six months later.

5.  Though the federal government stopped massive use of DDT on its side, large agricultural interests used it extensively.  After a decade of devastation across the country, in two separate trials federal judges ruled DDT a dangerous substance — they withheld injunctions when the newly-formed EPA promised to expedite hearings on tighter regulations for the stuff which had been floundering for a few years.  So it was that in 1971, more than seven years after John F. Kennedy’s death, a full administrative hearing on DDT began at EPA.  DDT had been fully available world wide for 9 years after Carson’s book.

6.  In 1972, still under court order, the EPA administrative law judge Edmund Sweeney ruled that a new label for DDT would be adequate control.  Under the new label, use would be severely restricted, and broadcast spraying on crops would be prohibited, but DDT would be freely available.  If someone wanted to, they could buy DDT and broadcast it themselves.  Under the labeling rules, nothing could be done to such violators.  Judge Sweeney carefully documented in his hearings all the benefits and drawbacks of DDT.  A more restrictive proposal, such as a ban, would not do much more than the new label (if the label was followed), and Sweeney said that he did not find that EPA had the power to do any more.  EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus got a more detailed review of the law from his legal team, and concluded that EPA could indeed ban broadcast use, and so he did.  At least two of the DDT manufacturers sued, claiming there was no scientific basis for a ban.  Under U.S. law, if the scientific data do not back up such a rule, the courts are obligated to overturn the rule.  Both courts granted summary judgment for EPA, meaning that even if all the evidence were interpreted to favor the pesticide manufacturers, they would still lose on the law.  There were no further appeals.

7.  The EPA ban allowed DDT to be used in emergencies, especially if there were an emergency involving malaria or other insect-borne disease.  The EPA ban did not cover manufacturing, and U.S. DDT manufacturers ran a lively export business until 1984. On the day before the Superfund law took effect in 1984, requiring manufacturers to clean up toxic wastes they had dumped in violation of law, several of the DDT manufacturers declared bankruptcy, leaving the Superfund to clean up DDT sites in Texas and California, and other places.  Clean up continues today, 25 years later, costing tens of millions of dollars a year.

Manufacture of DDT today is chiefly in India and China.  Pollution problems abound near those sites.

8.  DDT use was never banned in Africa, especially for use to fight malaria.  Considering mosquito resistance and immunity, however, Africans generally chose not to use DDT.  DDT’s reputation was further tarnished when it was revealed that broadcast outdoor spraying had killed food fishes in several places, leading to near starvation for local populations.  South Africa used DDT right up through 1996, then stopped.  When mosquitoes with malaria flowed over the border from neighboring nations without adequate disease control programs, malaria rates shot up, and DDT was again used as a last-ditch defense.

9.  Malaria in Africa rose when malaria parasites developed immunity to the pharmaceuticals used to treat the disease in humans.  Without an effective drug regimen, death rates rose, too.  DDT could not offer any help in this fight.

10.  One of the greatest barriers to fighing malaria in Africa has been unstable governments.  For example, it is difficult to believe that Idi Amin, the horrible dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979,  and claimed to have eaten some of his executed enemies, refused to spray DDT because he wanted to be environmentally friendly.  If Monckton wants to make such a claim explicitly, he’s nuts (he may be nuts anyway, but this unspoken claim of his is particularly insane).   Other nations had less spectacular misrule, but the effect was the same:  When governments could not, or did not mount fights against mosquitoes and malaria, malaria spread.  This had nothing to do with DDT, nor with a lack of DDT.

11.  When WHO suspended their campaign against malaria using large-scale DDT spraying out of doors, malaria killed about two million people annually, down from a peak of nearly four million 15 to 20 years earlier.  Today, malaria kills about 900,000 people annually.  Monckton says the lack of DDT has been responsible for 40 million deaths in the last 40 years.  That’s a good trick, really — it’s a lower rate than others have claimed, but it assumes that every malaria death could have been prevented with DDT, something we know is not the case.  More, it assumes that the U.S. ban on spraying DDT on cotton in Texas in 1972 somehow caused Africans to stop using DDT in 1965, a neat feat of time travel, and an astounding feat of regular travel, Texas being about 10,000 miles from most of Africa, too far for mosquitoes to migrate.

In three sentences, Monckton crammed in 11 grotesque falsehoods.  And that paragraph was not even the topic of the article.  And what is it about these propaganda attacks dead women?  Unholy attacks on Rachel Carson are bad enough — now Monckton goes after Jackie Kennedy, too?  Do these guys carefully choose targets who cannot respond, and who, because dead, cannot sue for libel?

Is it true that a Lie can get halfway around the world before Truth gets its boots on?  Isn’t there some Truth Police who could stop Monckton from spreading that crap?

Oh, and while I’m thinking about it:

• Dawg’s Blahg has some good notes about Monckton
• Lots of good comments at Deltoid on this very topic
• Update, October 17, 2009:  Good Lord!  He’s at it again.

Spread the word, stop the madness:

Definition of “urbanization”: Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky on Flickr – Photo Sharing

Pleasant to watch, this time-lapse composition highlights the light pollution aspect of increasing urbanization across the United States.  The photographer, a Dutch architect, notes that each streak of light represents a city, as he flies across the American Midwest to touchdown in San Francisco (SFO).  It’s a visual definition of urbanization, isn’t it?

On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city!

Luckily the flight was half empty, so I was able to set up an improvised stabilizer mound made up of my bags, pillows, and blankets for my camera to sit on.

We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.

Technique: 1600iso; beginning – 1 (30sec) exposure / 45secs; end – 1 (4sec) exposure / 10 secs; total elapsed time: around 3 hours?

Equipment used: Nikon D300 (interval shooting mode), Tokina 12-24mm.

Music: Bloc Party – Signs

Stunning, beautiful and troubling at the same time.

more about “Definition of “urbanization”: Glowin…“, posted with vodpod

Can you use this in your classroom?

Tip of the old scrub brush to One Man’s Blog.

Share the light with your friends:

Bear facts

A grizzly mauled a sheepherder and killed some sheep and dogs, along the Upper Green River in Wyoming.

Ralph Maughn’s blog has a lively and informative discussion on the incident, and on bears and bear protection in general.

For all the hard work they do, North American sheepherders sure seem to me to get short shrift in U.S. markets.  When was the last time you could find anything but New Zealand lamb at your supermarket?  And I ask this from Texas, the largest sheep producing state in the U.S. (with very few grizzlies).

While you’re at Maughn’s blog, look at this piece of good news:  You don’t have to eat ‘em.

Climate change denialists cripple American industry

Did you see Tom Friedman’s column today?

Is there any way to interpret away his conclusions that the war against green jobs is killing American industry?

Is there any way he could be wrong?  Read it; doesn’t it make you want to fix things?

O.K., so you don’t believe global warming is real. I do, but let’s assume it’s not. Here is what is indisputable: The world is on track to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050, and many will be aspiring to live American-like, high-energy lifestyles. In such a world, renewable energy — where the variable cost of your fuel, sun or wind, is zero — will be in huge demand.

China now understands that. It no longer believes it can pollute its way to prosperity because it would choke to death. That is the most important shift in the world in the last 18 months. China has decided that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry and is now creating a massive domestic market for solar and wind, which will give it a great export platform.

In October, Applied will be opening the world’s largest solar research center — in Xian, China. Gotta go where the customers are. So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.

Rasberry Crazy Ants – where’s Godzilla when you need him?

Texas holds more than its share of nasty pests:  Imported Argentine Fire Ants, Canadian thistle, zebra mussels, creationists — and now, Rasberry Crazy Ants, Paratrechina sp. nr. pubens.

(Hey, Texas A&M spells it “Rasberry” without a “p,” so do I.  It’s named after Pearland, Texas, exterminator Tom Rasberry, who first identified the Texas pest.)

Remember the wonderful old Japanese monster movies, where monsters from past Tokyo ransackings would return to fight the new monsters?  Texas could use a good Godzilla or two.

Texas A&M’s Center for Urban and Structural Entomology has an extensive information and warning piece out on the beasts — reprinted for you below the fold.

Look what else you can find:

• A Fort Worth Star-Telegram story on Rasberry crazy ants, in yesterday’s Seattle Times
• Scientific American story saying Rasberry crazy ants threaten honeybee hives
• May 2008 story about the ants in Texas, from the Houston Chronicle
• KOCO Channel 5 (Oklahoma) wonders if the ants are headed to Oklahoma, but finds a local ant that might be nearly as bad — claims that the new ants eat fire ants

Van Jones: LGF got it right

Van Jones’s advantages, added together, summed too closely to the detrimental sum of having him as an advisor in the executive branch, I think.

But Glenn Beck’s unprincipled attack on Jones as a “9/11 truther” brought up issues that were not among the baggage Jones carried. Little Green Footballs explained that Jones’s statement that he didn’t call for an investigation of George Bush seems to be accurate.  LGF has no authors who trend to the liberal side (are there even any Dems there?).

With such a target-rich guy as Jones, why does Beck go with the least credible evidence possible?  When the facts flow your way, why make stuff up?  Beck’s bizarre claims about DDT offer more evidence the guy has just floated around the bend in the reality and ethical river.  More on that later.

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub said Little Green Footballs was right? Better spread that news!

More evidence of climate change: Arctic methane hydrates evaporating

It’s a pretty picture, but it should strike a bit of fear once you know what it is.

New Scientist explains:

Sonar image of methane plumes rising from methane hydrates on the Arctic Ocean floor; image from National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (Britain)

It’s been predicted for years, and now it’s happening. Deep in the Arctic Ocean, water warmed by climate change is forcing the release of methane from beneath the sea floor.

Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. The bubbles are mostly methane, which is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide.

The methane is probably coming from reserves of methane hydrate beneath the sea bed. These hydrates, also known as clathrates, are water ice with methane molecules embedded in them.

The methane plumes were discovered by an expedition aboard the research ship James Clark Ross, led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham and Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, both in the UK.

Fortunately, the methane is not making it out of the water — yet.  The gases are absorbed before they get to the surface — but that increases ocean acidity.  If, and when, the methane hits the atmosphere, it will contribute to greenhouse warming of the planet.  This could create a runaway heat effect:  Warmer waters cause hydrates to release methane to the atmosphere, which causes the atmosphere to warm more, faster.

Scientists have not dismissed all other possibilities, but methane hydrate melting is the most likely cause:

Cohen cautions that the Arctic methane may not be from hydrate, but could be coming from the methane’s primary source, which might be deep within the Earth.

If that was the case, the warming of the West Spitsbergen current may not be to blame.

He says that the large amounts of methane being released make this unlikely, however: “If the methane is all primary, it would be an unprecedented amount.” So the idea that the hydrates are at least partly to blame is more plausible. “It’s not definitively proven, but it’s certainly reasonable,” he says.

Alaska’s salmon go missing. Why?

It’s one of those environmental mysteries that would be fun and intrigueing, were it not so worrisome.

Alaska’s King Salmon disappeared from traditional river runs this year.  Again.

From Reuters: "A sockeye salmon scurries through shallow water in the Adams River while preparing to spawn near Chase, British Columbia northeast of Vancouver October 11, 2006. REUTERS/Andy Clark"

Reasons could be one of many, or several:  Changing ocean currents, pollock fishing accidental catches of salmon, plankton blooms, conditions on the rivers, competition from “ranched” salmon.

Consumers may see only the rise in price and a change in labeling in the supermarket.

Effects on employment and food supply in Alaska are huge, and crippling.

Canada fisheries are affected, too.

Climate change probably plays a role, in any scenario anyone poses:

“It’s quite the shocking drop,” said Stan Proboszcz, fisheries biologist at the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. “No one’s exactly sure what happened to these fish.”

Salmon are born in fresh water before migrating to oceans to feed. They return as adults to the same rivers to spawn.

Several theories have been put forward to try to explain the sockeye’s disappearance:

* Climate change may have reduced food supply for salmon in the ocean.

* The commercial fish farms that the young Fraser River salmon pass en route to the ocean may have infected them with sea lice, a marine parasite.

* The rising temperature of the river may have weakened the fish.

The Canadian government doesn’t know what’s killing the fish, but believes the sockeye are dying off in the ocean, not in fresh water, based on healthy out-migrations, said Jeff Grout, regional resource manager of salmon for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

In this case, even a small change in climate can have huge effects on ecosystems and specific populations of animals.  It’s one of those climate change issues that climate change skeptics and denialists prefer not to talk about at all.  If, as they allege, concern over climate change is entirely political, driven by bad information and false claims from over-active environmentalists, these problems should not exist at all.

But the problems do exist.  A fishery that had been stable for 50 years previously, the entire time it was tracked so carefully, suddenly becomes fishless.  Watch those rivers and fisheries.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Pamela Bumsted.

Help save the salmon; tell others:

How about another cup of coffee? (Global Warming Conspiracy)

Encore post from September 17, 2007 — maybe more appropriate today than ever before.

Found this on my coffee cup today:

The Way I See It #289

So-called “global warming” is just

a secret ploy by wacko tree-

huggers to make America energy

independent, clean our air and

water, improve the fuel efficiency

of our vehicles, kick-start

21st-century industries, and make

our cities safer and more livable.

Don’t let them get away with it!

– Chip Giller
Founder of Grist.org, where
environmentally-minded people
gather online.

<p style=”text-align: center;”><a title=”Add to Facebook” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3014.png” alt=”Add to Facebook” /></a><a title=”Add to Newsvine” href=”http://www.newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3024.png” alt=”Add to Newsvine” /></a><a title=”Add to Digg” href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3034.png” alt=”Add to Digg” /></a><a title=”Add to Del.icio.us” href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3044.png” alt=”Add to Del.icio.us” /></a><a title=”Add to Stumbleupon” href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3054.png” alt=”Add to Stumbleupon” /></a><a title=”Add to Reddit” href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3064.png” alt=”Add to Reddit” /></a><a title=”Add to Blinklist” href=”http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&amp;Description=&amp;Url=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3074.png” alt=”Add to Blinklist” /></a><a title=”Add to Twitter” href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3084.png” alt=”Add to Twitter” /></a><a title=”Add to Technorati” href=”http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3094.png” alt=”Add to Technorati” /></a><a title=”Add to Furl” href=”HTTP://TIMPANOGOS.WORDPRESS.COM/2009/08/18/HOW-ABOUT-ANOTHER-CUP-OF-COFFEE-GLOBAL-WARMING-CONSPIRACY/” target=”_blank”><img style=”border: 0pt none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt;” src=”http://getsocialserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/gs3104.png” alt=”Add to Furl” /></a></p>

New junk science movie: “Not evil, just wrong”

I warned you about it earlier.  Crank science sites across the internet feature news of another cheap hit on Rachel Carson and science in movie form.

“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:

1. 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.
2. ” . . . [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.
3. “They want to raise our taxes.”  No, that’s pure, uncomposted bovine excrement.
4. “They want to close our factories.”  That’s more effluent from the anus of male bovines.
5. 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 Clean Air Acts 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.

6. “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.
7. “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.
8. 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.
9. “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.

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.”

It’s easy to suppose these producers used the same ambush-the-scientist technique used earlier by the producers of the anti-science, anti-Darwin film “Expelled!“

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):

Remember, too, that this film is already known to have gross inaccuracies about Rachel Carson and DDT, stuff that high school kids could get right easily.

Anyone have details on McElhinney and her colleague, Phelim McAlee?

More:

• A few sane, scientific-minded people have noted the film, too.
• Ecorazzi had some sharp words
• Update, October 12, 2009:  One of movie’s producers acting badly, as Al Gore provides evidence of the movie’s errors

Related posts, at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• The killer CO2 cloud climate change “skeptics” don’t want you to know about
• Monckton will lie about anything
• Monckton lies again (and again, and again, and again, and again . . .)! The continuing saga of a practicer of fictional science
• Post premiere update, here

Please spread the word: