Global Warming

CHAPS

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Anyone read the newest issue of National Geographic? WOW is it good, apparently we need to lower the amount of carbon in the air by 70% to restore the balance in the atmosphere. And for those of you that think "oh yeah who cares?" well you better start carrying because we will see all of the negative effects in OUR life time not our kids or our grand kids life times. In 2005 alone their was 16 hurricanes! 4 of which were devastating. Reading this article has REALLY opened my eyes to how bad we have let it get. We have only thought about what will grow the economy and not about the consequences. Well as it is here in Canada we are already seeing the changes, our winter this year was pathetic and today it was 45 degrees outside with the humidex! We so we are getting less and less snow and hotter and hotter summers. So what does this mean? Well the lakes will dry up and pests that normally die in the winter will survive, i'm already seeing WAY more flies and hornets. The polar icecaps are melting so that sets off a chain reaction all across the world, something melts in one place and we have a Tsunami in another. We are actually going to have to change our lifestyles, build more windmills to generate power, use more hydrid cars, make ourselves less dependant on cars, by from local markets and not rely on eating things like oranges in the winter. I just thought i'd make you guys aware of this, because now it's REALLY got me thinking.
 
Ubiquitous

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a while ago I was at the movies and as the previews were playing, one of them was Al Gore's doc on Global Warming.. near the end of it I heard some older, moustached jackass mutter "Bull****"... It made me want to drop kick him in the nuts... the ignorance of people... Proven facts, before their eyes... and they mutter "bull****"...
 
kwyckemynd00

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Chaps...we've hit this subject quite a few times. Search it up. As part of my Honors Majors Biology II course I was required to do a symposium on Global Warming based off of research found in a book called State of Fear by Michael Chricton. He provided sources for all of his materials and he provides a damn good case.

Any retort of his book involved "he has no credibility" or "he's an idiot" b/c that's the best anybody has against the information he provided. In short, with just the information you'll find in that book you'll probably conclude that Global Warming is not only blown way out of proportion, but even something we shouldnt be concerned about. In addition to that, most green movement postulations are overblown, wrong, or dangerous. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the green movement has been one of the largest disasters for human life (yes, human life) of the past century! The world-wide [near] banning on DDT, a pesticide that is "common knowledge" dangerous but laboratory proved safe, has resulted in MILLIONS of deaths per year in 3rd world countries b/c it was the only good line of defense to mesquito-born malaria we know of! Just recently, a couple years back, South Africa finally said F U to the world and started using DDT again b/c they had a 50 fold increase in deaths after it was removed from the country. The worst it has been proven to do is bioaccumulate in some animals, such as fish :rolleyes:

Read the book or get the audio CD's.
 
kwyckemynd00

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Also, make sure whatever data you're looking at is RAW DATA. The green movement people tend to add "adjustments" to their numbers and multipy adjustment factors through their equations etc. :rolleyes:
 

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The Day After Tomorrow, is a movie that i liked talks about it in hollywood way but the visualization was out of this world, worth watching in my opinion
 
kwyckemynd00

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Yeah, great entertainment value :) But, horribly poor 'education' value.
 
Jayhawkk

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Actually I think the greater arguement right now isn't if there is or isn't global warming but if we're a large enough cause that reducing our pollution output would actually have an effect.

Personally, I think the reductions should be pursued for a couple reasons. a) The planet is staying the same size while the population grows. b) While the planet may be fine the people will still suffer. c) Which suffers more from being wrong?

Our 'science' has changed 180 degrees many, many times over. I think putting trust into the safer of the two if we were to be wrong would be the best bet.

realclimate
Timesonline
Solar Variation Theory
Science Mag
illconsidered

Just posting some oposing views/theories
 
kwyckemynd00

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a) True
b) Not necessarily. Increased CO2 production and temperature may have minimal effect on weather, but it will definitely be favorable for crop growth.
c) We'll suffer from "precautionary measures". What the green hippies are asking for would call for a drastic overhaul of our world and would ruin lives across the globe. EVERYTHING would change. We're moving toward energy efficiency anyway withotu the intervention of the green freaks...and at a reasonable pace. The hippies are trying to force it on us right away and that's prob not a great idea.
 
Jayhawkk

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Yeah, gradual increased efficiency and reduced emissions is the best way, imho.
 
Skyblue

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I love that book, State Of Fear. It really makes you think twice about some of the rubbish you hear on the news.
 
Ubiquitous

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Kwycke, don't make me dropkick you in the nuts.... :lol:
 

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Chaps...we've hit this subject quite a few times. Search it up. As part of my Honors Majors Biology II course I was required to do a symposium on Global Warming based off of research found in a book called State of Fear by Michael Chricton. He provided sources for all of his materials and he provides a damn good case.

Any retort of his book involved "he has no credibility" or "he's an idiot" b/c that's the best anybody has against the information he provided. In short, with just the information you'll find in that book you'll probably conclude that Global Warming is not only blown way out of proportion, but even something we shouldnt be concerned about. In addition to that, most green movement postulations are overblown, wrong, or dangerous. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the green movement has been one of the largest disasters for human life (yes, human life) of the past century! The world-wide [near] banning on DDT, a pesticide that is "common knowledge" dangerous but laboratory proved safe, has resulted in MILLIONS of deaths per year in 3rd world countries b/c it was the only good line of defense to mesquito-born malaria we know of! Just recently, a couple years back, South Africa finally said F U to the world and started using DDT again b/c they had a 50 fold increase in deaths after it was removed from the country. The worst it has been proven to do is bioaccumulate in some animals, such as fish :rolleyes:

Read the book or get the audio CD's.
Duh!! You must have missed the news in the Politics section... :D Mikey is definitely part of the "5" global clearing houses of everything we see and read and know. In other words, he is part of the Illuminati !! :study:


BTW, that is a very well argued post of yours. :goodpost:
 
Jayhawkk

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It just baffles me when I can walk into D.C. and barely breath or see on a smog heavy hot day but leave the city and be fine and people will argue we have no effect on the earth's natural process. I guess nature just tends to do this in heavily populated areas.
 

CHAPS

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I"m feelin it this summer here in Ontario, Canada, you walk out the front door and it's hard to breathe and you instantly feel wet from the humidity. I've talked to a guy from Jamaica and Barbados and they both said this summer has been worse than anything they ever experienced. I can handle heat, just dry heat i hate this humid crap, makes your feel gross.

It's nice to see everyone is realizing that things have to change, apparently you all were WAY more aware of it that I was. I new it was getting bad just not HOW bad. Apparerently Bush is going to have a plan to cure global warming, ready in 6 months. Hopefully his many advisors and daddy will be doing the thinking for him on this one.
 
Jayhawkk

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The needing a shower right after you shower weather? Yeah gotta love that crap.
 
CDB

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It just baffles me when I can walk into D.C. and barely breath or see on a smog heavy hot day but leave the city and be fine and people will argue we have no effect on the earth's natural process. I guess nature just tends to do this in heavily populated areas.
That's not the point. Industry does have an effect especially if you take an incredibly small sample, like right where it's centered, and postulate on that. The point is what is the effect of human industry on global climate, if it is at all measurable in the aggregate, and then once we know that (which we still don't) what can and/or should be done about it? There have been short lived hot and cold patches as well as long lived hot and cold periods. Deserts were once oceans, jungles are now grass lands and glacier covered dirt is now arable soil. The world didn't end because of those changes, and the challenge is to take with a grain of salt the natural human tendency to see pattens and deep meaning in shifts of the weather, tossed chicken bones and teas leaves alike. Especially when there is, once you research it, a long history of Chicken Littles claiming the imminent end of the world unless the rest of the population defers to them and allows them, in their infinitely enlightened and far visioned disposition, to run every single aspect of the rest of the world's lives.

There hasn't been a single generation in history that didn't have its doomsayers claiming we are all going to starve, melt, freeze, be damned or turned to dust presently unless we allowed them to run our lives. Those of us in this day and age just need to educate ourselves so that when the Chicken Littles cloak their claims in 'science' - science always being mistaken as a set of "facts" rather than a process of inquiry by the Chicken Littles and their dupes alike - we can be as skeptical as we need to be so we don't fall for what is and always has been through history the biggest line of **** anyone ever cut up and tried to convince someone else to snort.
 
Jayhawkk

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I couldn't care less about the global repositioning of the jetstream or any other crap really. I care enough about those incredibly small areas that are effected. I'm not a doomsayer either. I just want gradual changes over time that will slow the results you see in populated cities because as we continue to grow on this planet we're going to have a lot more of those example places.
 
Skyblue

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As long as I get snow in the winter and a tan in the summer, I could care less. Look at the Japanese, they have crazy population density, and pretty bad polution but they live FOREVER.. which means .. nothing.
 
kwyckemynd00

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As long as I get snow in the winter and a tan in the summer, I could care less. Look at the Japanese, they have crazy population density, and pretty bad polution but they live FOREVER.. which means .. nothing.
I believe global warming to be a "gross exaggeration almost at the point of a myth, but not quite", so this is simply a corrective statement: pollution in one place doesn't mean it'll have no effect. Where the pollution is taken to, by jetstreams and such, is where the effect will be felt. So, you can pollute like crazy in Place X and never feel it while Place Y could feel it all and never pollute.
 
kwyckemynd00

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It just baffles me when I can walk into D.C. and barely breath or see on a smog heavy hot day but leave the city and be fine and people will argue we have no effect on the earth's natural process. I guess nature just tends to do this in heavily populated areas.
We definitely can have an effect on "air quality" that can effect our health and the health of other life. But,that's not the argument here :)
 
kwyckemynd00

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Kwycke, don't make me dropkick you in the nuts.... :lol:
LOL...that's what all of my opponents say at the end of our global warming arguments :lol: especially after I show them the raw data on global temperatures over the past 100 years. lol.

if anybody has State of Fear on hand, there is a link to those numbers courtesty of NASA I believe. I made my grandma read the book after she came over talking about global warming :D she's got like 40 pages left (of 700).
 
Jayhawkk

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Too many scientists on both sides of this particular arguement and me without my degree in this field can only go with what seems like the best arguement. My side has the benefit of having no bad side effects if we're wrong :)
 
kwyckemynd00

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Just making a small update:


Solar Activity & Temperature over time.
Courtesy of Standford Uni: Global Warming & Solar Variability

Notice the correlation? :) I didnt know we were responsible for variations in solar output, too...damn humans :rasp:

I'll try to address the "so many scientists on both sides of the issue" thing later. I had, a while ago, some good statistics from a poll that reviewed the scientists who produced peer reviewed global warming research. Pretty good stuff...
 
Jayhawkk

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I don't think so mutha****a!!! You will adress my so many scientists, right NOW!
 
kwyckemynd00

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Damnit...I just looked for 30 minutes. I'm done. It was in "state of fear" in the bibliography, but I gave it to my grandma to read :D
 
Jayhawkk

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Don't torture your grandmother with that kind of crap. give her porn.
 
kwyckemynd00

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Jayhawkk has a small peepee and doesn't know anythign about global warming :rasp:
 
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CDB

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I couldn't care less about the global repositioning of the jetstream or any other crap really. I care enough about those incredibly small areas that are effected. I'm not a doomsayer either. I just want gradual changes over time that will slow the results you see in populated cities because as we continue to grow on this planet we're going to have a lot more of those example places.
Once more Jay, that's not the point. As people become more wealthy they can afford to use cleaner technologies, and there is some evidence that's the route people choose. So in 200 years we may all be voluntarily living in near zero emission zones using technology that has little or no environmental effect. However, if that type of wealth isn't allowed to grow, especially in third world countries, significant amounts of people will never be able to afford the cleaner technology and then the effects of industry might become huge over time. In other words it goes to the question of what we can and should do about pollution in the short term, and the answers if you give any creedence to the above are the direct opposite of the greenies and their propositions.
 
Jayhawkk

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As people become more wealthy they can afford to use cleaner technologies, and there is some evidence that's the route people choose.
Have a few cites saying this? From what i've seen. Cleaner and safer technology isn't used by corps and individuals until it's pretty much forced on them.
 
CDB

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Too many scientists on both sides of this particular arguement and me without my degree in this field can only go with what seems like the best arguement. My side has the benefit of having no bad side effects if we're wrong :)
The lost jobs and wealth that will result from new strangling regulations beg to differ.
 
Jayhawkk

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The lost jobs and wealth that will result from new strangling regulations beg to differ.
First, wealth isn't everything
Second, you would be surprised the jobs created from regulations
Third, if you read my posts you'll see that i'm for long term,slow progress. Not a over night or economy breaking approach.
 
CDB

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Have a few cites saying this? From what i've seen. Cleaner and safer technology isn't used by corps and individuals until it's pretty much forced on them.
It's hard to tell, it's been postulated and when you look at pollution relative to productivity and wealth creation there is a justification for the view. As to the no consequences, that's like saying there's no cost to theFDA delaying the release of drugs. The people who die while waiting for potentially effective therapies would disagree. And grant everything the environmentalist move says as true, it still is a long way from that to the command and control methods government uses. Case in point: stack scrubbers for coal plants which many plants were forced to install to reduce emissions. Command and control. Burning different types of coal, low sulphur coal, would have helped lower emissions just as much for some plants, they were simply denied this choice to comply with standards. In a general sense also when the government comes out with rules saying everyone must lower emissions of pollutant X, greenies love it, even though it forces massive costs on insignificant emitters of that pollutant. Say one plant is emitting 1 part per million per hour, other plants are emitting 4000 parts per million per hour. The latter would have to lower their rate to 2000, the former have to shoulder the cost of lower theirs to .5, regardless of the fact that their emissions were already insignificant.

That's the kind of legislation the greenies love though. Once more, grant their arguments as true, their solutions don't follow. In fact more often than not they are way off base and do everything to destroy wealth creation and industry and do little to 'help' the environment that couldn't have been done more effectively in a different manner.
 
Jayhawkk

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I'm in agreement with you on that. I'm for intelligent solutions and the gov't has a history of having anything but. There was a story lastnight how the FDA and the makers of Vioxx had a little thing going to release it although thre were concerns.

Gov't runs poorly and inefficiently but that is really another thread all together.

My generic solution: Look for and fund alternate fuels. Work on ways for businesses to reduce pollutants. Do this with a strict but reachable goal that has a sliding scale due to the variety of business.

Fixing the watch dog gov't among other things is the next broken link.
 
CDB

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First, wealth isn't everything
Second, you would be surprised the jobs created from regulations
Third, if you read my posts you'll see that i'm for long term,slow progress. Not a over night or economy breaking approach.
Without wealth we have nothing. Family doesn't matter much when you can't afford the medicine needed to keep your kids or parents alive. It's the creation of wealth that has advanced us so far and kept the wild at bay. Get rid of wealth, which is essentially accumulated surplus productivity, and you put us ever and ever more in an environment where scarcity in the basics of life is the rule, not the exception. Wealth is everything. Wealth also is not money, as some modern economists think, nor is it the tendency toward prolific consumption.

As a second point, government created jobs are not adding to the overall creation of wealth. If they were socialism would work and why not simply have the government create a job for everyone. Government jobs are by definition parasitic, they have to come after the productive process and leech off of it. There may be some productive value in government action but since there's no balance sheet, no profit and no loss it's impossible to identify where resources are well spent and where they are wasted. For example a government employee who nets 50000 a year and grosses 60000 a year is being paid 50000 a year. The 10000 A year in taxes is an accounting fiction. However, to maintain that fiction people are paid every year to assess these 'taxes' and levy them, make sure they are enforced, etc. Those are not productive jobs, if a true incentive toward efficiency existed in government they'd simply admit the fiction and pay their employees untaxed. Instead even more money is used to maintain it.

Regulation almost always does more harm than good, and the 'jobs' it creates are not the result of a genuine economic opportunity to profit which is what a job really is, but are the result of government coersion. Since the need for the job was not the result of true demand, and since the wages are not set freely but determined a priori by the government, there is no way to determine if the job is a good or bad allocation of resources.
 
CDB

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My generic solution: Look for and fund alternate fuels. Work on ways for businesses to reduce pollutants. Do this with a strict but reachable goal that has a sliding scale due to the variety of business.

Fixing the watch dog gov't among other things is the next broken link.
Grant that alternatice fuels are a good idea, which ones should be developed? You see all government decisions are political, not economical. In a free market say there is a legitimate demand for an alternative fuel to petroleum in its various forms. Prices are affixed freely to the resources available for development of such fuels through R&D. Once more, in the free market, those prices would be reflective of the collective judgement of tons of people as to the viability of each fuel. The cheapers ones would be more economical, easier to develop, easier to transition into the current infrastructure, etc. In other words there is a built in incentive to develop the 'right' fuel, the one that will best satisfy the demand.

Get the government involved and well, corn growers are a huge lobby therefore corn based ethanol is the way to go. And regarding far future technologies, we'll fund everything else the same way (politically) despite the whether or not the technology is feasible or even necessary given other less costly alternatives. All that money is then taken from tax payers and disbursed politically to favored businesses. Much of that is essentially wasted resources. Something might come of it, a viable technology that leads to an alternative fuel source. What about the tons of other resources spent on developing other technologies that never made it? That's a cost, it may be one you're willing to shoulder but it is a cost.

If you leave the economy alone to actually work it will meet the demand for cleaner energy, and it will do so a lot better than the government. Want to spur that jump? Get the government out of the oil business, allow prices to adjust freely. If they go down minus the government interaction, so much the better. We get to be more productive with petroleum and generate more wealth to generate more solutions to cleaning up the pollution it can cause. If the prices go up then the alternatives become more economical to invest in, capital is made available as outlined above in the free market approach and we end up wit cleaner energy. Either way it's the government standing in the way, not helping the situation. I'm sorry, but it seems to me very naive to think that the government could ever act as a solution to such a problem as the evironmentalists say we are facing. The government is in fact one of the biggest polluters on the planet, its time horizon is not dictated by a long term investment in the capital interest of certain resources, simply by the next election cycle.

If you like, here's a free market take on how to deal with air pollution: Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution - Mises Institute. It's a long (webwise) but worthwhile read.
 
Jayhawkk

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I saw it on a webpage and it had a hypnotic thing going on...I think it may be the anti-christ.
 
kwyckemynd00

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Today I was listening to the radio, and they were detailing Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have their global warming meeting.

One of the great thing that happened during that time was one of the reporters had the balls to ask: "How do you know global warming even exists?" They basically responded with "it is and that's all there is to it." Not too surprised personally.

But, what I was thinking would be a wonderful question to ask them would be this:


DDT was a insecticide that was banned in almost all countries across the world in a movement similar to this current call to action against the supposed "global warming" threat. Similarly, although much more reasonably, chloroflorocarbons (CFC's) were banned. The result of banning DDT had an absolutely horrific effect on third world countries, mostly African, where the mesquito-born malaria problem was taken from a controlled nuisance level of tens of thousands of deaths yearly to a disasterous level of MILLIONS OF DEATHS annually. DDT has since been proven harmless to humans. Banning CFCs similarly effected third world populations who needed access to cheap refrigerants. Now, their food is spoiling at an astonishing rate and people are dying.

Can you guarantee that your proposed radical actions to address the supposed "global warming" threat by reducing carbon emissions will not have a similar effect? And if the UK and CA's specific programs will not, can your researchers guarantee us that a world-wide movement would also spare these poor souls in third world countries the disastrous outcomes we've bestowed on them as a result of similar political movements?
 
Jayhawkk

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I haven't looked it up but I thought DDT was a problem because it weakened eggs and was causing large impacts problems on species with low birth rates to begin with.
 
kwyckemynd00

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Last bit of peer reviewed evidence I saw, it bioaccumulates over long periods of time in aquatic animals like fish :rolleyes: To humans, I don't believe there is any reasonable toxicity. Heck, one of my teachers was telling me about he and his friends always running in the dust when the DDT truck would drive by :D lol
 
kwyckemynd00

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DDT - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is till used in 3rd world havily infected places and the other concerns seem still in line with changing the use of DDt.
Wikipedia is an "okay" resource. It is a "wiki" and is compiled by its viewers. See the "edit" button? You can change anything you'd like in that entire article.

It was recently reinstated in South Africa's arsenal against mosquito-born malaria (in 2005 I believe) because of the astounding death rate increase with its banning. I did a report on that one. Many are just beginning to use it again. There were literally millions of deaths as a result of the anti-ddt movement.
 
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CID at Harvard University :: "DDT Should Not Be Banned"

South Africa Readers Digest, December, 2000

This insecticide is critical for controlling a dangerous upsurge in malaria
DDT Should Not Be Banned

By John Dyson

When Oka Priyanti Came home from school on a Wednesday morning in April, her, mother Sumiati, working outside their bamboo house in the hills of central Java, Indonesia, asked what was wrong. "I'm dizzy and my tummy's sore," the. 13-year-old girl complained.

The village clinic gave her medicine, but by Friday, Oka was fighting a raging fever. Her father, Kholil, rented a mini-bus to take her to a hospital. But the vehicle had scarcely left the village when Oka died in her parents' arms.

Oka had contracted malaria from a mosquito bite; she was the third of Kholil and Sumiati's six children to perish from the disease. Countless other families are suffering similar - and needless - tragedies throughout the developing world. For malaria, until recently under tight control, is staging a devastating comeback.

According to the World Health Organisation estimates, there are 300-500 million cases of malaria each year and around one million deaths. These numbers are climbing, by up to 20 percent a year in some regions. Peru, for example, experienced a seven-fold increase between 1990 and 1996. Cases of a fatal strain of malaria jumped from 140 to 36 000 in the Loreto region of the Amazon basin. South Africa had 8 750 cases and 44 deaths in 1995, but nearly 51000 cases and 393 deaths in 1999. Just one village near Oka Priyanti's home in Indonesia had around 15 cases a year through the early 1990s, but 921 last year.

Residents of Western countries are also at risk. Not only are travellers to the developing world being infected but occasionally disease carrying mosquitoes are being brought into Europe by aircraft from the tropics.

According to many scientists and health experts, a number of factors are responsible for the resurgence, including the increasing resistance of the malaria parasite to treatment drugs. But one reason towers above all others.

"For years, the rich, developed nations that no longer have malaria have pressured tropical countries which do into giving up DDT," says Don Roberts, professor of tropical public health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. "When countries stop using DDT, malaria spirals out of control." Even so, the United Nations Environmental Program is on the verge of a momentous, and controversial, decision - to phase out the use of DDT."

Lethal to insects: DDT was long considered a wonder chemical. The story began on the eve of the Second World War, when a Swiss chemist named Paul Hermann Müller noticed something strange. No matter how thoroughly he cleaned a cage in which he'd tested the chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, the flies he put into it died as soon as they touched the glass.

DDT, it turned out, was long lasting and extremely toxic to insect nervous systems, but virtually harmless to humans. During the war it was sprayed on, landing sites to protect invading Allied troops, And US forces were issued DDT with which to talc themselves for lice prevention. In 1944, the entire city of Naples was dusted to snuff out an epidemic of typhus-carrying body lice. For his work developing DDT, Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.

After the war DDT was used throughout the world to combat yellow fever, typhus and, elephantiasis. But top on the hit list were the more than 60 species of mosquito that carry the malaria parasite.

DDT kills mosquitoes on contact. Used with other measures, such as draining swamps, DDT spraying programmes wiped out malaria from developed countries, including the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

DDT was powerfully effective even where malaria was not eradicated. India's annual malaria death toll of 800 000 was cut to virtually zero by the late 1960s. In Sri Lanka, DDT reduced, 2,8 million cases a year to just 17. In parts of Indonesia, nearly a quarter of the population were infected with malaria when Oka's parents were still teenagers, but twice-yearly sprays of DDT cut infections to one in a hundred.

"To few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT," the US National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1970. It reported that DDT had prevented many millions of deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.

Mosquitoes may develop resistance to DDT. Still, the chemical is a very powerful repellent when sprayed on the inside walls of human habitations; mosquitoes that fly inside soon leave: In one experiment in the Amazon region of Brazil, the human bite rate was 97 percent less in a hut sprayed with DDT than in one that wasn't.

Today, indoor spraying is the only permitted use for DDT. "To control malaria you don't necessarily have to kill the mosquito," says US Navy medical entomologist Mike Bangs. "You only have to stop it biting humans."

Agricultural ban: While DDT was being employed in the fight against malaria, farmers were also dusting crops with mountainous quantities of the stuff to kill insect pests. This posed a potential environmental threat, for traces of DDT were soon found in the fat tissues of every living thing from humans to polar bears and albatrosses. Concern also mounted when it appeared that DDT might be responsible for the decline of several, bird species. The United States banned the agricultural use of DDT in 1972 and most developed countries did the same.

DDT is still used in some 26 countries for malaria control. The amounts needed are dramatically less than in agriculture. It might take a ton or more DDT to dust a small cotton field, whereas it takes only two grams per square metre to treat the inside walls of a house. The DDT put on 1000 acres of cotton during a single growing season, for instance, would have protected a whole country like Guyana from malaria for a year.

Nevertheless, American, European and Canadian aid agencies, the World Bank, the United Nations and other international agencies have urged developing countries not to use DDT for any reason.

The results? According to Professor Don Roberts, malaria cases have jumped 90 percent in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the past decade, and 80 percent in Guyana. Says Roberts: "Only Ecuador temporarily increased DDT use and - surprise! - malaria dropped by 60 percent."


The fundamental problem is the lack of available and affordable alternatives to DDT. There is no effective anti-malarial vaccine. Scientists are trying to genetically modify mosquitoes so they no longer carry the malaria parasite, but effective results are a long way off.

Other available anti-mosquito insecticides, such as synthetic pyrethroids, are not as effective and more expensive. In Indonesia, for example, DDT spraying was stopped in 1989 after 38 years of use. The next best insecticide was five times more expensive so the whole spraying programme faltered.


When US Navy malariologist Kevin Baird went to the Menoreh Hills in Java, where Oka lived, to start a treatment drug study in 1995, it took him a month to track down 25 cases. Earlier this year he found 70 in one day. "The critical question is whereon this island crowded with more than 100 million people the outbreak will stop," he says. "Many people will probably die - history tells me that DDT could save them."

No one is safe: Several environmental organisations want to abolish DDT entirely, claiming it is a threat to human health. For example, Clifton Curtis of the World-Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund asserts, "As long as DDT exists anywhere on the globe, none of us is safe."

But DDT's record speaks for itself. For years most Americans and Europeans ingested substantial amounts of DDT in food every day; the United States alone sprayed 70000 tons on crops every year for 20 years. Kids on bikes weaved in and out of the DDT clouds blown over the streets in countless American towns to control mosquitoes. Many millions of homes in Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America have been sprayed once or twice a year with DDT. Yet no adverse health effects have been reported. "Scientists have searched exhaustively , but found nothing substantial," says Mary Galinski, a molecular biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of Malaria Foundation International.


Says Chris Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: "There is no convincing evidence that DDT, as used indoors against malaria mosquitoes, has caused any harm to humans."

While DDT opponents point to scientific studies indicating a danger to human health, the evidence, says Amir Attaran, of Harvard University, is vague and contradictory. For example, one US study found that women with higher incidences of DDT in their bodies were more likely to have breast cancer. But numerous other studies failed to come up with the same result.

Nevertheless, DDT has been lumped with 11 other, persistent organic pollutants - `the dirty dozen' - now set. for reduction or elimination by international treaty at a meeting being held in Johannesburg from December 4 to 9, under the auspices of the UN Environmental Program. More than 110 countries and at least 50 Non-Governmental Organisations, will be taking part. Once agreed; the treaty will be legally binding worldwide.

Open Letter: More than 400 medical doctors and scientists around the world have signed an open letter insisting that even if DDT is banned from agricultural use globally, exception must be made "for the life-saving use of DDT in malaria control". The letter notes that "at worst there are small health risks, and very large health benefits to DDT house spraying. We therefore have no doubt that it would be, a terrible error to eliminate DDT, which probably saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year from malaria."

The treaty negotiators are starting to sit up and take notice of DDT's supporters. The final document to be hammered out in Johannesburg is likely to allow countries to continue using DDT for malaria control, until suitable alternatives are found. But even if DDT gets a reprieve, dangers remain. Warns Amir Attaran, who organised the letter, "A de facto ban is inevitable unless environmentalists from rich countries immediately stop putting, pressure on poor countries to give up DDT."

The site of this, year's DDT showdown is ironic, because South Africa this year returned to using DDT for malaria control when levels of the disease surged. "As soon as we stopped using DDT it came back across the Mozambique border with horrific results," says Korea Gumede, a local environmental health officer.

Says entomologist Rajendra Maharaj, who is in charge of South Africa's malaria control, "When thousands of human lives are at risk you, can't throw away something that works, just. because a few. people think it's evil.


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Jayhawkk

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All that does is say the ill effects of DDT do not outweight the benefits of the lives saved for the cost, in 3rd world countries.

It's misleading...It makes a comparison of DDT and no DDt but not DDT and an alternative version.

The title should be

Why DDT should not be banned in marlaria infected poor countries ...or

Why alternate insecticides need to be made affordable for poor countries.
 
kwyckemynd00

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Here, I highlighted a few points. I don't know where you got what you did out of my post. Maybe you misread it:

CID at Harvard University :: "DDT Should Not Be Banned"

South Africa Readers Digest, December, 2000

This insecticide is critical for controlling a dangerous upsurge in malaria
DDT Should Not Be Banned

By John Dyson

When Oka Priyanti Came home from school on a Wednesday morning in April, her, mother Sumiati, working outside their bamboo house in the hills of central Java, Indonesia, asked what was wrong. "I'm dizzy and my tummy's sore," the. 13-year-old girl complained.

The village clinic gave her medicine, but by Friday, Oka was fighting a raging fever. Her father, Kholil, rented a mini-bus to take her to a hospital. But the vehicle had scarcely left the village when Oka died in her parents' arms.

Oka had contracted malaria from a mosquito bite; she was the third of Kholil and Sumiati's six children to perish from the disease. Countless other families are suffering similar - and needless - tragedies throughout the developing world. For malaria, until recently under tight control, is staging a devastating comeback.

According to the World Health Organisation estimates, there are 300-500 million cases of malaria each year and around one million deaths. These numbers are climbing, by up to 20 percent a year in some regions. Peru, for example, experienced a seven-fold increase between 1990 and 1996. Cases of a fatal strain of malaria jumped from 140 to 36 000 in the Loreto region of the Amazon basin. South Africa had 8 750 cases and 44 deaths in 1995, but nearly 51000 cases and 393 deaths in 1999. Just one village near Oka Priyanti's home in Indonesia had around 15 cases a year through the early 1990s, but 921 last year.

Residents of Western countries are also at risk. Not only are travellers to the developing world being infected but occasionally disease carrying mosquitoes are being brought into Europe by aircraft from the tropics.

According to many scientists and health experts, a number of factors are responsible for the resurgence, including the increasing resistance of the malaria parasite to treatment drugs. But one reason towers above all others.

"For years, the rich, developed nations that no longer have malaria have pressured tropical countries which do into giving up DDT," says Don Roberts, professor of tropical public health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. "When countries stop using DDT, malaria spirals out of control." Even so, the United Nations Environmental Program is on the verge of a momentous, and controversial, decision - to phase out the use of DDT."

Lethal to insects: DDT was long considered a wonder chemical. The story began on the eve of the Second World War, when a Swiss chemist named Paul Hermann Müller noticed something strange. No matter how thoroughly he cleaned a cage in which he'd tested the chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, the flies he put into it died as soon as they touched the glass.

DDT, it turned out, was long lasting and extremely toxic to insect nervous systems, but virtually harmless to humans. During the war it was sprayed on, landing sites to protect invading Allied troops, And US forces were issued DDT with which to talc themselves for lice prevention. In 1944, the entire city of Naples was dusted to snuff out an epidemic of typhus-carrying body lice. For his work developing DDT, Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.

After the war DDT was used throughout the world to combat yellow fever, typhus and, elephantiasis. But top on the hit list were the more than 60 species of mosquito that carry the malaria parasite.

DDT kills mosquitoes on contact. Used with other measures, such as draining swamps, DDT spraying programmes wiped out malaria from developed countries, including the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

DDT was powerfully effective even where malaria was not eradicated. India's annual malaria death toll of 800 000 was cut to virtually zero by the late 1960s. In Sri Lanka, DDT reduced, 2,8 million cases a year to just 17. In parts of Indonesia, nearly a quarter of the population were infected with malaria when Oka's parents were still teenagers, but twice-yearly sprays of DDT cut infections to one in a hundred.

"To few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT," the US National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1970. It reported that DDT had prevented many millions of deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.

Mosquitoes may develop resistance to DDT. Still, the chemical is a very powerful repellent when sprayed on the inside walls of human habitations; mosquitoes that fly inside soon leave: In one experiment in the Amazon region of Brazil, the human bite rate was 97 percent less in a hut sprayed with DDT than in one that wasn't.

Today, indoor spraying is the only permitted use for DDT. "To control malaria you don't necessarily have to kill the mosquito," says US Navy medical entomologist Mike Bangs. "You only have to stop it biting humans."

Agricultural ban: While DDT was being employed in the fight against malaria, farmers were also dusting crops with mountainous quantities of the stuff to kill insect pests. This posed a potential environmental threat, for traces of DDT were soon found in the fat tissues of every living thing from humans to polar bears and albatrosses. Concern also mounted when it appeared that DDT might be responsible for the decline of several, bird species. The United States banned the agricultural use of DDT in 1972 and most developed countries did the same.

DDT is still used in some 26 countries for malaria control. The amounts needed are dramatically less than in agriculture. It might take a ton or more DDT to dust a small cotton field, whereas it takes only two grams per square metre to treat the inside walls of a house. The DDT put on 1000 acres of cotton during a single growing season, for instance, would have protected a whole country like Guyana from malaria for a year.

Nevertheless, American, European and Canadian aid agencies, the World Bank, the United Nations and other international agencies have urged developing countries not to use DDT for any reason.

The results? According to Professor Don Roberts, malaria cases have jumped 90 percent in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the past decade, and 80 percent in Guyana. Says Roberts: "Only Ecuador temporarily increased DDT use and - surprise! - malaria dropped by 60 percent."


The fundamental problem is the lack of available and affordable alternatives to DDT. There is no effective anti-malarial vaccine. Scientists are trying to genetically modify mosquitoes so they no longer carry the malaria parasite, but effective results are a long way off.

Other available anti-mosquito insecticides, such as synthetic pyrethroids, are not as effective and more expensive. In Indonesia, for example, DDT spraying was stopped in 1989 after 38 years of use. The next best insecticide was five times more expensive so the whole spraying programme faltered.


When US Navy malariologist Kevin Baird went to the Menoreh Hills in Java, where Oka lived, to start a treatment drug study in 1995, it took him a month to track down 25 cases. Earlier this year he found 70 in one day. "The critical question is whereon this island crowded with more than 100 million people the outbreak will stop," he says. "Many people will probably die - history tells me that DDT could save them."

No one is safe: Several environmental organisations want to abolish DDT entirely, claiming it is a threat to human health. For example, Clifton Curtis of the World-Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund asserts, "As long as DDT exists anywhere on the globe, none of us is safe."

But DDT's record speaks for itself. For years most Americans and Europeans ingested substantial amounts of DDT in food every day; the United States alone sprayed 70000 tons on crops every year for 20 years. Kids on bikes weaved in and out of the DDT clouds blown over the streets in countless American towns to control mosquitoes. Many millions of homes in Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America have been sprayed once or twice a year with DDT. Yet no adverse health effects have been reported. "Scientists have searched exhaustively , but found nothing substantial," says Mary Galinski, a molecular biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of Malaria Foundation International.


Says Chris Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: "There is no convincing evidence that DDT, as used indoors against malaria mosquitoes, has caused any harm to humans."

While DDT opponents point to scientific studies indicating a danger to human health, the evidence, says Amir Attaran, of Harvard University, is vague and contradictory. For example, one US study found that women with higher incidences of DDT in their bodies were more likely to have breast cancer. But numerous other studies failed to come up with the same result.

Nevertheless, DDT has been lumped with 11 other, persistent organic pollutants - `the dirty dozen' - now set. for reduction or elimination by international treaty at a meeting being held in Johannesburg from December 4 to 9, under the auspices of the UN Environmental Program. More than 110 countries and at least 50 Non-Governmental Organisations, will be taking part. Once agreed; the treaty will be legally binding worldwide.

Open Letter: More than 400 medical doctors and scientists around the world have signed an open letter insisting that even if DDT is banned from agricultural use globally, exception must be made "for the life-saving use of DDT in malaria control". The letter notes that "at worst there are small health risks, and very large health benefits to DDT house spraying. We therefore have no doubt that it would be, a terrible error to eliminate DDT, which probably saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year from malaria."

The treaty negotiators are starting to sit up and take notice of DDT's supporters. The final document to be hammered out in Johannesburg is likely to allow countries to continue using DDT for malaria control, until suitable alternatives are found. But even if DDT gets a reprieve, dangers remain. Warns Amir Attaran, who organised the letter, "A de facto ban is inevitable unless environmentalists from rich countries immediately stop putting, pressure on poor countries to give up DDT."

The site of this, year's DDT showdown is ironic, because South Africa this year returned to using DDT for malaria control when levels of the disease surged. "As soon as we stopped using DDT it came back across the Mozambique border with horrific results," says Korea Gumede, a local environmental health officer.

Says entomologist Rajendra Maharaj, who is in charge of South Africa's malaria control, "When thousands of human lives are at risk you, can't throw away something that works, just. because a few. people think it's evil.


Direct site comments or questions to CID's Webmaster.
Copyright ©2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Last revised 9/16/2000
 
kwyckemynd00

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*note: DDT bioaccumulates in fat, but that isn't indicative of a danger to human life!

And, alternative pesticides were not only less affordable, BUT nowher as effective in comparison to DDT. It was clearly stated in the article.

I think somebody was "skimming" tisk tisk.
 

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