Monday, December 03, 2012

What If Rachel Carson Was Wrong?

The author of this report claims she is:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which argued that man-made chemicals represented a grave threat to human health and the environment. Using harsh and unscientific rhetoric—which was rebuked in the journal Science magazine shortly after its publication—Carson postulated that man-made chemicals affect processes of the human body in “sinister and often deadly ways.”

History has proven Carson’s claims wrong. Contrary to her admonitions, a chemically caused cancer epidemic never came to pass. Researchers who identified environmental factors did not simply target trace chemical exposures as significant, but instead focused on major cancer causes such as tobacco and poor diets. In fact, people are living longer and healthier lives, cancer rates have declined even as chemical use has increased, and chemicals are not among the key causes of cancer.
How many people have died from, for example, malaria, because Rachel Carson got the ball rolling that stopped DDT?


allen (in Michigan) said...

I thought it was pretty old news that Carson was a scientific fraud.

She was well known for leaving out crucial, contradictory facts, couching unsupported assertions as facts and making lurid predictions of imminent catastrophe on no evidence at all.

As to how many people died due to Carson's fraud, that number's easily in the millions. She may not occupy the heights of such other famous sources of human misery like Mao, Stalin and Hitler but she's no piker either.

MikeAT said...

To answer the question at the end of your post Darren, it's millions of black children.

If she wasn't a liberal Jessee, Al et all would have had her drawn and quartered.

Ellen K said...

We routinely allow the agencies that control certification of food, drugs, toys and products to decide what is and is not allowed based on flimsy evidence that fits with the prevailing political overlord of the time. For example, DDT was banned with little real evidence. The Alar scare nearly put a company out of business without any real evidence of damage. Jenny McCarthy has almost singlehandedly condemned thousands of children to suffer from previously eradicated childhood diseases based on unproven assertions that vaccinations cause autism.(Can you image the hue and cry should pot become legalized and then THAT'S shown to be the cause?) Yet the same administration that backs all these types of actions, lets the EPA do testing with higher amounts of corn ethanol in cars using just eleven cars, and despite a nearly 25% engine failure rate, passes it on with little regard to what kind of damage can happen when a car suddenly stops on a speeding highway. It's always about agenda, never facts.