Christopher Monckton on DDT Use

by Moth, posted in Junk Science

As many people may know ol’ Chris will soon head back to Australia. I’m hoping to simply highlight his strange views and obvious errors with the aim of reminding Aussies who Chris really is. Does he deserve the credibility he has earned on climate change, the reality of Obama’s legitimacy as the US president etc, or has he instead botched together a fairly unreasonable and unrealistic representation of reality?

18 thoughts on “Christopher Monckton on DDT Use”

    1. Cheers Richard.

      My feeling is neither. I’m trying to avoid doing much of either in my videos (I have four over all). In my last, perhaps I give way to a little mockery. I mean, you have to eventually. What I want is to highlight what Chris will say, depending on how sympathetic his chosen crowd is to the message. He will attempt to sound reasonable with the broadest audience and will be the outright conspiracy theorist in the company of extreme right wingers.

      My only hope is that my videos reach enough people before his visit so as that he is greeted with the mood he ought to be with the full weight nonsense he has sprouted across the spectrum of audiences.

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  2. No, I didn’t know about Monckton heading back to Australia. Where can I find more details of that? Who is paying for his visit, Rinehart? Either deniers are feeling the heat in Australia and are looking to re-enforce their confirmation bias, or they are trying to re-kindle opposition to AGW throughout it’s right wing ranks as we approach an election. Because lets face it. It’s predominantly right wing conservatives and libertarians that oppose AGW theory. Otherwise, Monckton in that video wouldn’t make a point of trying to point the finger of blame at “the left” and attempt to demonise them. The right are desperate to con conservatives into believing AGW is a political conspiracy designed and nurtured by the left. Where in reality, many conservative governments around the world not only believe in the science, but are taking action. Where as opposition to AGW is nearly exclusively from the right wing and libertarians. Some do so surreptitiously like WUWT, by having weekly attack stories about Al Gore, while people like Jo Nova openly state on their site that they are libertarian.

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    1. I’ve heard it being talked about with conversations on various blogs and in personal conversations with people. For memory he is due within the month. Sorry that I cannot offer more concrete information than that.

      I think Rinehart is funding the trip in one form or another and, as a guess, I would assume it is because we are in an election year – it makes sense that this is an opportunity to rally the right to support Abbott whom would attempt to change things for the benefit for people like Rinehart. I plan to create a few videos for Abbott too in the near future!

      What is in this video, and the next one I will go live with, are not even the worst of it. I’ll end them with the most amazing claims by Monckton in part four.

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      1. Wait; the headline is: “After 16 years of NO WARMING, Lord Christopher Monckton returns to Australia and NZ for a speaking tour late January – April 2013”

        If he’s returning after 16 years of no warming, since we’ve had warming for the past dozen years, does that mean he’s not coming for another 16 years? We could only hope.

        Would love to be able to get someone to stand up at every appearance and ask, “Since we’ve had the ten hottest years in history in the past 15 years, including the hottest and second hottest, do you really think Australians are too stupid to see through your false claims here, or are you using the tactic that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it?” Or some variation.

        I mean, just because Sesame Street’s Count is dead, that doesn’t mean mathematics doesn’t work any more.

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      2. lol – one can only wish that was the intention and we could instead get on with more important things than entertaining this odd chap.

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      4. lol.. I’m hoping to get enough attention with this and I don’t want to be accused of anything except for proving how batty Monckton is.

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  3. I can’t figure out why you go so easy on Monckton on this issue. It’s not just that he got a few things wrong, he’s making stuff up, wrongly, faster than you can watch the video.

    For example:

    1. Malaria deaths have never been so low as 50,000/year. At peak DDT use, in 1959 and 1960, WHO estimated deaths at something over 4 million annually. In 1972, when the U.S. banned DDT use on crops, malaria deaths were over 2 million per year. But by 2010, largely without DDT, malaria deaths had fallen to under 800,000/year — a more than 75% reduction since peak DDT use. This is the lowest level in human history — but please note that with heavy DDT use, deaths never declined below 2 million per year.

    2. You’re right that DDT has never been banned worldwide — but you fail to mention that the U.S. ban on DDT use more than doubled the amount of DDT available to use to fight malaria. All U.S. production was dedicated to export.

    3. You’re right that the science behind Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was proven correct. But why mention just the one report? I have the full text of the report, “Use of Pesticides,” by the President’s Science Advisory Committee, at my blog. Carson was wholly exonerated — and in fact, the select committee of some of the U.S.’s best scientists recommended quicker and more severe action against DDT. Here’s the report: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/use-of-pesticides-report-of-the-presidents-science-advisory-committee-may-15-1963/

    4. Under U.S. law, a ban on any substance cannot be done on a whim. Were there no science behind the ban, it would have been overturned in court. In fact, the ban has been challenged twice. In both cases, the appellate courts ruled that there is ample scientific evidence to back the U.S. regulations of DDT as they are.

    5. WHO had to stop using DDT in their aggressive campaign to eradicate malaria in 1965 — note this is seven years before the U.S. ban on DDT. WHO discovered, to their dismay, that abuse and overuse of DDT in central Africa had bred malaria-carrying mosquitoes that were already resistant and immune to DDT. So DDT use was curtailed, not because of a ban, but because of overuse of DDT — exactly as Rachel Carson feared, and predicted would happen were DDT use not much more tightly controlled.

    So it wasn’t a desire for power, nor a desire to reduce population, that prompted the people who drove the end of WHO’s malaria eradication campaign. Instead, it was ill-informed nicompoops like Christopher Monckton, who without understanding a whit of what damage they were doing, urged a lot of DDT use.

    Would you be so kind as to tell me when Monckton made the remarks shown in that video? He has been making these false claims for years — and it’s not like no one has corrected him before. I think he finally dropped his completely fabricated tale that Jackie Kennedy convinced President Kennedy to ban DDT in pillow talk, and that got Kennedy to appoint William Ruckelshaus to the EPA specifically to go after DDT. In reality, John Kennedy read Carson’s book himself; EPA did not exist until eight years after Kennedy’s assassination — and no, Kennedy did not come back from the dead to appoint William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus was a Nixon appointee. Also, of note, Ruckelshaus fought the drive to do anything about DDT, until two separate federal courts ordered EPA to do it, or face complete bans of DDT sales, use and manufacturing, ordered by the courts.

    I dealt with Monckton’s Canadian Tour of Lies some time ago: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/climate-change-and-ddt-moncktons-inconvenient-and-inaccurate-history/

    Monckton is a serial liar — he tells lies repeatedly, and in many different places over time. Shame on him.

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    1. Cheers for all that info. Indeed I linked to your excellent article in the comments of and mentioned it in my first video on Monckton.

      I believe Monckton made the comments last year, but they are pretty much the same as that you mentioned in your article? Here’s a link to the actual video.

      I don’t think I really went too easy on him. By looking at the entire video, you can see this one point is just a small part of a much larger pile of…

      My hope with this video (and the two to follow) is to let ol’ Chris do the talking. Unlike the material in the following two, the story of DDT is probably less well known to the wider audience, so I gave some additional information and then let him repeat key parts of the section of the talk again.

      As we descend into his madness, this becomes less important to do so.

      My only hope with these videos is to put Chris in his correct light prior to his upcoming Australian tour so that the audience will give him his correct level of credibility deserved.

      Thanks again for adding to the informational content alongside the video above and directing me a few years ago to Chris on DDT in your original post!

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      1. Thanks for the link, by the way.

        The first typo is really a style issue:

        ==> 1970s, not 1970’s

        2nd slide on Science 1963

        ==> “principal” instead of “principle”
        ==> “pesticides” is missing the letter “d”
        ==> Should it be “aiming” instead of “aims?”

        Next slide: Should be “different from” instead of “different to”

        Next set of slides:

        ==> should be “regardless of bans,” not “bands”
        ==> “targets” not “tragets”
        ==> “resistance”

        I probably shouldn’t complain — I can’t even figure out how to make movies on these things.

        Keep up the great work, please.

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    1. Cheers for that.. looks interesting. Of course we all know what people like Monckton will make of it; it’s a dirt smear campaign. But we ought not to take him seriously anyway.

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