In the name of banning DDT, GEF bureaucrats are consigning millions to death from malaria

Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects - hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few. But anyone trying to ban the drugs would be tarred, feathered and run out of town. And rightly so.

The drugs’ benefits vastly outweigh their risks. They save lives. We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them. The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs: DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria. Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.

These chemicals don’t cure malaria - they prevent it. Used properly, they are effective, and safe. DDT is particularly important. Sprayed once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do this.

Even better, DDT has few adverse side effects except minor, speculative and imaginary “risks” that are trumpeted on anti-pesticide websites. In the interest of saving lives, one would think eco activists would tone down their “ban DDT” disinformation. However, that is unlikely.

Anti-DDT fanaticism built the environmental movement, and gave it funding, power and stature it never had before. No matter how many people get sick and die because health agencies are pressured not to use DDT, or it is totally banned, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, and allied activist groups will never reform or recant.

Government agencies - including the US Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry - will likewise continue pouring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-DDT research, in futile attempts to prove DDT causes some sort of meaningful harm. And the malaria death toll will continue to mount.

Worse, they have now been joined by the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Facility and even World Health Organization Environmental Division [ all of whom share the avowed goal of ending all DDT production by 2017, and banning all use of DDT in disease control by 2020.
A recent GEF “study” demonstrates how far they are willing to go, to achieve this goal, no matter how deadly it might be. The study purported to prove DDT is no longer needed and can be replaced by “integrated and environment-friendly” alternatives: for example, mosquito-repelling trees, and non-chemical control of breeding sites and areas around homes that shelter insects. 

The $14-million study claimed that these interventions resulted in an unprecedented “63% reduction in the number of people with [malaria], without using DDT or any other type of pesticide.” However, as analyses by malaria and insecticide experts Richard Tren and Dr. Donald Roberts clearly demonstrate (see Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine and AEI Outlooks), the study, conclusions and policy recommendations are not merely wrong. They are deliberately misleading and fraudulent.

GEF did its 2003-2008 study in Mexico and seven Central American countries - all of which had largely ceased using DDT and other pesticides years before the GEF project. Instead of chemical sprays, these countries now employ huge numbers of chloroquine and primaquine (CQ and PQ) pills to prevent and treat malaria: 2,566 pills per diagnosed case in Mexico; 22,802 pills (!) in El Salvador; 50 to 1,319 pills per case in the other countries, according to 2004 health records.

It was these powerful drugs, not the “environment-friendly” GEF interventions, that slashed malaria rates. Indeed, they had begun to do so before GEF even arrived. This terribly inconvenient reality was further underscored by the fact that malaria rates were the same in “study” areas and “control” areas, where GEF did nothing - and that the number of malaria cases increased when the number of pills per case decreased. In other words, GEF could have gotten its same results using one bed net or one larvae-eating fish.

GEF’s fraudulent claims were then compounded by its insistence that the results and conclusions are relevant to other malaria-endemic regions. They are not. Malaria parasites in Latin American countries are Plasmodium vivax; in Africa and Southeast Asia, they are the far more virulent P. falciparum.
CQ and PQ are effective in preventing and treating vivax; they rarely prevent or cure falciparum malaria. Moreover, the eight Latin American countries have 140 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 800 million and a woeful medical and transportation infrastructure; Southeast Asia has 600 million people. Both have infinitely more malaria. Getting adequate medicines that work (far more expensive Artemisia-based ACT drugs) to 1.4 billion people would be a budgetary, logistical and medical impossibility.

But apparently none of these facts occurred to the bureaucrats who did this study. That’s hardly surprising, since the project was designed and directed, not by disease control experts, but by the UNEP and radical environmental groups - which also spent millions distributing and promoting the study and other anti-DDT propaganda all over the world, ensuring that they received substantial media attention.

Anti-pesticide fanatics know this “study” is fraudulent. They just have a very high tolerance for how many malaria cases, brain-damaged people and dead babies are “acceptable” or “sustainable.” They just don’t care enough to bother learning basic facts about malaria, CQ versus ACT, vivax versus falciparum. They need to get out of the malaria control policy business and let medical professionals do their jobs.

(To learn more about stopping malaria, see Tren and Roberts’ book The Excellent Powder, Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary film “3 Billion and Counting,” and the website for Africa Fighting Malaria.)

The final report claims its authors submitted manuscripts to prominent peer-reviewed medical journals. However, nothing was ever published. That suggests that they lied, and never submitted any manuscripts; or they did submit papers, but the manuscripts were rejected as being shoddy, unprofessional, unscientific, or even on par with Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccine-and-autism work. 

To cap it all off, the bogus GEF project appears to have been conducted using funds diverted from already insufficient malaria control budgets. The GEF, UNEP, Stockholm Convention Secretariat and radical environmental groups are using money intended for malaria control to launch anti-pesticide programs in countries plagued by malaria, and gain control over public health policies, insecticides and programs.

Overall, the GEF has spent over $800 million on efforts to eliminate DDT and other “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs). It budgeted nearly $150 million in 2007 alone on its campaign to ban DDT production and use - but spent a lousy $22 million researching alternatives to DDT for vector control.

Until an equally effective and long-lasting substitute for DDT is developed - one that repels, irritates and kills mosquitoes - this vital weapon needs to remain in the disease control arsenal.

The GEF, UNEP, POPs Secretariat and WHO need to withdraw the study; discipline the people who perpetrated this fraud; retract World Health Assembly Resolution 50.13, calling for malaria-infested countries to slash their use of public health insecticides; and issue a statement making it absolutely clear that this “study” was erroneous and deceptive, and should not be considered in setting malaria policies.

Donors to the GEF and radical groups must be exposed. For activists and agencies to continue promoting this study or demand that malaria-endemic countries stop using DDT and insecticides, and adopt bogus “eco-friendly” GEF “solutions,” is gross medical malpractice - and deliberate manslaughter.
Malaria can be controlled, and even eradicated in many areas. We simply need to use every available weapon - including DDT, pesticides, nets, window screens, drugs and other interventions - in an orderly, coordinated and systematic manner; and ensure that mosquito infestations, disease outbreaks, malaria control successes and problems are monitored and evaluated accurately and honestly.

If we do that - and end the anti-pesticide hysteria - we can get the job done.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Those who provide us with the supposed Mean Annual Global Temperature Anomaly (attached) treat the annual points in their graph as if they were constants. The points on the graph do not represent actual observations. They are processed versions of actual observations and they are subject to statistical uncertainties.

The latest CRU paper to calculate these uncertainties is:

Brohan, P., J J Kennedy, I. Harris, S. F, B, Tett, and P. D. Jones. 2006, Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: A new data set from 1850. J. Geophys. Res.  111, D12106.doi:1020/2005JD006546.

This paper combine many sources of uncertainties and the final figures very from year to year, but are typically about plus/minus 0.2C on a 95% confidence basis. Some versions of their graph include these figures as “error bars” attached to the data points.

Brohan et al even admit that they do not include “Unknown unknowns”, even referring to the internationally recognized expert on this subject, Donald Rumsfeld.

Enlarged. The monthly uncertainties by location in 1969 according the Brohan etal paper. Notice how the greatest uncertainty is in the regions, where the data centers find the greatest warming.

It is surpising that they have left out of their discussions the most important source of uncertainty in their figures, one which is “known” to every person who has studied stratistics. It is the uncertainty which arises every time you take an average.

The actual experimental observations upon which the final figures on the graph are based are the daily measurements of the maximum and the minimum temperature at weather stations all over the world. In order to obtain the annual mean maximum or minimum it is necessary to average 365 daily measurements (366 in a leap year).

According to every one of the several textbooks on statistics that I possess. the equation for obtaining the uncertainty of a single mean is as follows uncertainty is plus/minus txSD/Sqrt of number of observations.

The value for t is obtained form the tables of the t distribution given in the textbooks. For 95% confidence limits and numbers of observations above 50 it is close to 2. The square root of 365 is 19.1.

Kerkin (personal communication) recently downloaded a large number of daily maximum and minimum measurements from the NIWA database and calculated the standard deviation, for two weather stations, Albert Park, Auckland and Te Aroha in the North Island of New Zealand. For Albert Park the SD for the maximum was 3.8C and for the mimimum 3.7C. For Te Aroha the SD for the maximum was 4.8C and for the minimum 5.1C.

I do not know how typical of the whole world these might be, but I expect that for countries with a continental climate the SD figures would be much higher. But, anyway, let us take an SD of 4.3C for he maximum and 4.4C for the minimum and try it in the formula.

The 95% confidence limits for the average are therefore plus/minus 2x 4.3/19.1 = 0.45C for the maximum and 2x 4.4/19.1 = 0.46C.

These figures are about double the uncertainties calculated by Brohan et al from all the other possible sources of error.

It is assumed that the average temperature is the mean of the maximum and the minimum. So you have to add up the individual uncertainties to give those for the mean as plus/minus 0.91C.

But that isn’t all. There is an addtional uncertainty from choosing such a bad method for calculation the average. There are no published figures as far as I am aware of attempts to calculate the error of doing this, or its uncertainty. However, NIWA have published a set of hourly temperature figures from 24 New Zealand weather stations for a typical summer’s day and a typical winter’s day at NIWA 2010 ”Meteorologist for a Day”.

I have calculated, from the 48 figures supplied, the averege difference between the Maximum/Minimum mean and the 24 Hour Mean as 0.2C with a standard deviation of 0.8C.

The 95% incertainty can again be calculated as plus/minus 2 x 0.8/sqrt of 48 which gives plus/minus 0.23C. This is an amount about the same as all the uncertainties calculated by Brohan et all.

If the 95% confidence limits are all added together you get 0.2+0.45+0.46+0.23 They come to a total of plus/minus 1.34C on each data point. This is well above the 0.9C claimed to be the global, or the New Zealand temperature rise over the last 100 years, which means that this figure has a very low probability of being correct.

Enlarged. This has the NIWA NZ Seven Sisters Stations raw and NIWA adjusted. 

Cheers
Vincent Gray
“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact” Charles Darwin as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact” Charles Darwin”

Below is excerpted from the American Thinker

The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called “Climategate.” They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved in producing the global surface temperature record used and relied on by governments.

Not only did these climate scientists hide their raw data and their methodology of selection and adjustment of temperature data, but they fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results.  They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals.  There is voluminous evidence in the e-mails to this effect.  In the process, they damaged not only the science enterprise—full publication of data and methods, replication of results, open debate, etc—but they also undermined the public credibility of all scientists. 

However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming.  There have now been a number of investigations of the activities of this group, mainly in the UK.  These have all turned out to be complete whitewashes, aimed to exonerate the scientists involved.  None of these investigations has even attempted to learn how and in what way the data might have been manipulated.

Much of this is described in the “Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the corruption of science” by A. W. Montford.  Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and others have made a commendable effort to show how data might have been altered.  But an independent effort to reconstruct the global temperature results of the past century really demands a dedicated project with proper resources.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project aims to do what needs to be done: That is, to develop an independent analysis of the data from land stations, which would include many more stations than had been considered by the Global Historic Climatology Network.  The Project is in the hands of a group of recognized scientists, who are not at all “climate skeptics”—which should enhance their credibility.  The Project is mainly directed by physicists, chaired by Professor Richard Muller (UC Berkeley), with a steering group that includes Professor Judith Curry (Georgia Tech) and Arthur Rosenfeld (UC Santa Barbara and Georgia Tech).

I applaud and support what is being done by the Project—a very difficult but important undertaking.  I personally have little faith in the quality of the surface data, having been exposed to the revealing work by Anthony Watts and others.  However, I have an open mind on the issue and look forward to seeing the results of the Project in their forthcoming publications.

As far as I know, no government or industry funds are involved—at least at this stage.  According to the Project’s website www.berkeleyearth.org, support comes mostly from a group of charitable foundations.

Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and former director of the US weather satellite service.  He is a Senior Fellow of the Independent Institute and the Heartland Institute.  He is the author or co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming [2007], Nature not Human Activity Rules the Climate [2008], and Climate Change Reconsidered [2009].

The American Tradition Institute today praised yesterday’s overwhelming vote (13-5) by New Hampshire’s House Committee on Science, Technology, and Energy to withdraw the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

“How appropriate it is that the state with the motto ‘Live Free or Die’ would take the lead in giving citizens back their energy freedom,” said Paul Chesser, executive director of ATI. “Schemes like RGGI and renewable portfolio standards force citizens to buy electricity from expensive, antiquated technology like wind and solar. At least we know now a few legislators have some common sense.”

New Hampshire Watchdog, an online news source, reported that the full House is likely to take the bill up next week. Both chambers of the state legislature, called the General Court in New Hampshire, have veto-proof Republican majorities. Gov. John Lynch is a Democrat and opposes withdrawal from RGGI. NH Watchdog reported that in a hearing, “Committee Republicans argued that the climate science cited to pass RGGI has been undermined, and that the program is a hidden tax on New Hampshire ratepayers.”

“Indeed, there has not been any credible analysis of RGGI to determine whether the benefits of participation outweigh the costs, or even to identify what kind of affect it will have on global climate,” Chesser said. “Isn’t that why they wanted to do this in the first place?”

“If lawmakers want to tax electricity in this manner, then it ought to be transparent and clearly identifiable in their bills,” Chesser added. “But let’s hope that the General Court just does away with it.”

For an interview with American Tradition Institute executive director Paul Chesser, call (202)670-2680 or email paul.chesser@atinstitute.org.

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Icecap Note: Repealing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)

Thank you ICECAP supporters for helping us support our efforts in states like New Hampshire. Two Icecap members attended and testified and provided support material to give the Science, Technology and Energy committee the courage to vote 13-5 to repeal RGGI. Your donation, entirely tax deductible will help us do more. We fully expect to be called to testify by state AGs or congressional committees in support of bills limiting the EPA and state initiatives like RGGI. There is usually no funding for the travel expenses involved at least from the government. The mulitmillion dollar NSF grant toting scientists on the other side get their expenses paid by their rent seeking universities for their testimony. Small donations add up.  Thanks again and if you can;’t help with donations do what your can within your state or country to battle back against the oportunists who have used this faux issue to line their pockets and want that gravy train to continue.

Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2010 was the “hottest year on record” - by 0.01 degrees. His claim has been widely touted in the press as strong evidence that the climate is rapidly heating - due to human generated CO2 emissions. Dr. Hansen has also stated : “I would not be surprised if most or all groups found that 2010 was tied for the warmest year.”

But most groups do not support his claim. The other independent source of surface temperatures HadCRUT, shows 2010 cooler than 1998. The graph below shows the month to month differences. Blue represents months where 2010 was cooler than 1998.

Enlarged.

The next graph shows the HadCRUT temperature anomalies for each year since 1998. Last year was not a remarkable year, and was not as warm as 1998.

Enlarged.

Similarly, full year satellite temperatures from RSS show 2010 monthly and annual anomalies lower than 1998.

Enlarged.

Satellite data from UAH also shows 2010 slightly cooler than 1998.

The graph below shows 2010 monthly temperatures for each of the four primary data sets. As you can see, the month-to-month behavior of GISS global temperatures during 2010 was out of kilter with other data sources.

Enlarged.

Note that GISS (blue) showed a large temperature spike in March - which was not seen by others. And from July through November, GISS increased sharply while everyone else showed temperatures dropping - due to a near record cold La Nina. La Nina is indicated by ocean temperatures well below normal across much of the Pacific Ocean.

The November spike was followed in December by the largest month-to-month drop in the 130 year GISS record. What sudden change in the climate could have caused a sharp December drop after four months of rise? A plausible explanation is that the August-November reported GISS temperatures were too high, and that December came back more in line with reality.

NOAA shows that ocean surface temperatures across much of the Pacific have been the coldest on record since July (yet GISS temperatures rose sharply during that time.)

COMPARISONS VS. 1998

The HadCRUT graph below shows that 2010 was not a remarkable year for temperatures, and was cooler than 1998. In fact, HadCRUT also shows that temperatures have not warmed appreciably (if at all) since 1998.

Enlarged.

By contrast, Dr. Hansen claims that temperatures have increased steadily since the mid-1970s. “Global temperature is rising as fast in the past decade as in the prior two decades”

However, even his own data shows no significant trend since 1992, and chances are that the GISS January, 2011 anomaly will be one of the lowest of the past decade.

Enlarged.

The UK Met Office explicitly contradicts Dr. Hansen’s claim: “In the last 10 years the rate of warming has decreased.”

See reasons why Hansen is so hot and much more here.