Eco-hysteria over DDT... a lesson on global warming alarmists? (updated)

John Stossel:

Who says there's never any good news? After more than 30 years and tens of millions dead - mostly children - the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT.

DDT is the most effective anti-mosquito, anti-malaria pesticide known. But thanks to the worldwide environmental movement and politically correct bureaucrats in the United States and at the United Nations, the use of this benign chemical has been discouraged in Africa and elsewhere, permitting killer mosquitoes to spread death.

I don't expect any apologies from the people who permitted this to happen. But I am thankful this nightmare is ending. ...

... Junk-science debunker Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wonders why the environmentalists took so long to change their minds.

"There are no new facts on DDT - all the relevant science about DDT safety has been available since the 1960s," Milloy says.

Milloy adds:

"It might be easy for some to dismiss the past 43 years of eco-hysteria over DDT with a simple 'never mind,' except for the blood of millions of people dripping from the hands of the WWF [World Wildlife Fund], Greenpeace, Rachel Carson, Environmental Defense Fund, and other junk science-fueled opponents of DDT."

Milloy reminds us that the same people who spread DDT hysteria are now pushing the global-warming scare.

"If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now?"

That's a fair question. For now, let's celebrate the coming elimination of malaria in Africa.

Amen. But beware the hysteria. It has it's price too.

Update: A must-read on the subject from Phillip Ellis Jackson - An even more Inconvenient Truth: The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming...

The people who bring you the news of the day about nonexistent wiretaps and hypothetical invasions of privacy disguised as actual events are the same ones reporting on the “scientific evidence” that man is slowly turning Earth into the planet Venus. Unfortunately for the NRDC, Al Gore, and other radical environmentalists, since man didn’t cause global warming, man can’t cure it.

Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way. Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die.

Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true? And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it? ...

Great writing... well done!