CLIMATE PANIC IS AN OLD FOLLY AMONG "LEARNED" MEN

"In the 1770s the Lunar Society of Birmingham, England, whose members were some of the leading thinkers of the era, regularly gathered to discuss their concerns about global climate change. They were interested in the scientific aspects of the change, but being entrepreneurs as well as thinkers, they also formulated plans to cope with it. Their basic strategy was to stop the cooling of the earth by dragging icebergs away from the Arctic regions to let them melt in the tropics. That's right: they were worried about global cooling.

The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1766-1809) was an informal club of never more than 14 men, who met to exchange information on scientific experiments, discuss scientific theory; and promote their own entrepreneurial activities. As the name indicates, they met on the Monday nearest the full moon each month. Among them were several godfathers of the Industrial Revolution, men whose contributions to science and technology, as well as industry and manufacturing, render their names still familiar: James Watt, developer of the steam engine, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton, who was also founder of the Birmingham Mint and a major manufacturer of metal products; Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and a distinguished naturalist in his own right; William.....

Small summarized: "I am led by this and many other reasons to suppose, nay to believe, that the frozen space of the Globe is annually increased at the rate of about the 300th part of a degree of latitude . . . so that after a certain number of years all Europe, and finally the whole surface of this earth, will be frozen, as the Moon is now and has long been." Quickwitted and ingenious as he was, Small had a scheme to deal with this horrifying prospect, namely, a "project for producing perpetual summer," which he outlined for Watt. The central feature was to use gunpowder to blow up the polar ice, thus creating icebergs, which could be towed to the tropics. There the icebergs would serve as air-conditioning units, rendering the tropics more temperate and habitable. Simultaneously, of course, the removal of ice from the arctic would slow the southerly spread of the freeze that threatened to cover all Europe and finally the whole earth.

Small's next words give us a glimpse of his views on the political institutions of his day, especially monarchy, and are interesting in light of Jefferson's connection with Small. "I will be bold to say, that if all the gunpowder which has been spent by their Imperial and Royal Majesties the Emperors and Empresses of Constantinople, Germany and Russia, the Kings of France, Spain, Britain and Prussia, within these last twenty years, had been laid out upon it [his iceberg project], the powder would have produced at least as much benefit to every one of them as it has done by being expended on their own schemes. I have had thoughts of writing a circular letter to these potentates, and if you give me any encouragement, notwithstanding my laziness, I will still do it, although there is but little to be made of kingly heads, I fear.".....

In a very long "philosophical footnote" to the above passage, Darwin says that visitors to the north provided evidence that the "islands of ice" steadily grow and that the winds passing over them deliver cold temperatures to points south. "We cannot doubt that the northern ice is the principal source of the coldness of our winters . . . " Darwin wrote. "Hence the increase of the ice in the polar regions, by increasing the cold of our climate, adds, at the same time, to the bulk of the Glaciers of Italy and Switzerland."

The great firm of Watt & Boulton became much too busy in the next few years making steam engines to pursue the "iceberg removal" project. The idea of moving icebergs to achieve various human objectives still comes up from time to time: to irrigate the vegetable gardens of California or to provide more drinking water to Los Angeles. But so far as modifying the climate is concerned, our preoccupations have reversed in the past two centuries: from global cooling in the late 1700s to global warming in the late 1900s".

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Bring back DDT, quickly

It's not just the best way to control disease-bearing mosquitoes - it's safe, too

"The West Nile virus deaths being reported across North America are a grim echo of a larger tragedy. Each year 1 million lives are taken worldwide by another mosquito-borne killer: malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance. But the real tragedy is that its horrific death toll is largely preventable. The most effective agent of mosquito control, the pesticide DDT, has been essentially discarded - discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety but on environmental dogma.

The environmental crusade against DDT began with Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide diatribe "Silent Spring," published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide anti-malaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence - Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson's book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT's crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.

Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation - alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.

But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began - with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT - yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature "has not even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome." Indeed, in a 1956 study, human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.....

So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today's malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with 1 million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists - who profess to be the defenders of life - continue to press for a global DDT ban?

The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to "tamper" with nature. The large-scale eradicationof disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT's sin....."

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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