WHO'S DUMBER, BRENT HERBERT OR TIM DUNLOP?

Lefty blogger Tim Dunlop reckons fisking is lame. Who cares if it's lame, lefty nonsense often cries out to be picked apart.

Tim Lambert's Deltoid, not the best ever science blog, is an especially rich source of fisking material. His latest DDT post -- this one about merely annoying bed bugs rather than malaria transmitting mosquitoes -- is so jam packed with errors that this post could turn out to be a long one.

Here's Lambert:

Brent Herbert debunks some myths about bedbugs and DDT:

Since I discovered that I have bed bugs I have been touring around the internet doing research right from day one and what I have discovered is that the media is doing a terrible job of covering the bed bug story, and as a result many of the bed bug blogs I have read are full of misinformation which echoes this bad reporting in the media. One of the most common themes in the media stories you will read if you do a search for news articles on bed bugs is that we have bed bugs because DDT was banned, thus forcing us to use 'weak chemicals' against bed bugs. This is false. Bed bugs developed resistance to DDT in the 1940s and Rachel Carson did not write Silent Spring until the 1960s, and by this time DDT resistance among bed bugs was so widespread that DDT was no longer the chemical of choice for treating bed bugs. The chemicals that replaced DDT were not 'weaker' chemicals forced upon the country by environmental extremists. The proof of this fact is that it took bed bugs that latter half of the twentieth century to develop resistance to these toxic chemicals, with the end result being that entire generations of people, such as myself, have lived their entire lives to this point in time without even thinking about a bed bug. The chemicals have not changed, and they remain as toxic as they ever were, only the bed bug has changed.

So, here we have a science blogger -- contemptuous of the non-peer reviewed writings of RWDBs -- getting his DDT information from an amateur entomologist posting to Indymedia. Herbert's posting is crap and Lambert's an idiot for linking to it.

Contrary to Herbert's claims, the MSM is hardly saturated with pro-DDT articles. A Google News search for "bed bugs" and "DDT" revealed a total of eight articles, with only one being pro-DDT.

If bed bugs developed DDT resistance in the 1940s, they did so within two and a half years. DDT only came into general use after World War II, with the government's house spraying program starting in July 1947. (Resistance to alternatives developing much less quickly; over nearly a half century.) Herbert offers no proof that resistance was already a problem in the 1940s or that resistance rendered DDT nearly ineffective by the 1960s.

Herbert's post is jam-packed with ludicrous nonsense:

It is worth noting here that the scientific studies that report wide spread pesticide resistance among bed bugs in the United States are coming under attack by the chemical lobby, and this sort of thing is no surprise, and is much like having the tobacco lobby stating the cigarettes add twenty years onto your life. The chemical lobby does not want to get blamed for a pestilential plague of bed bugs, and so they are attacking the scientific studies which demonstrate that bed bug resistance to pesticides is now wide spread in the United States.

Some examples of these attacks would be nice. But he's only getting started:

One falsehood I have read on bed bug blogs states that 'DDT is non-toxic' and I have also heard this statement in media stories, which is no doubt where a lot of the urban legends on the bed bug blogs have their origins. The point to be made here is that all toxins are toxic, to both bed bugs and human beings, with the only differences being in the required dosage and the length of exposure.

What a dummy; everything in excess is toxic. Creatures have differing susceptibilities: humans can consume large quantities of chocolate or onions but should avoid feeding either to dogs, to which both are moderately toxic. Now it's time for the example of an ordinary substance used for the ultimate evil:

It is worth remembering here that Hitler used a common insecticide (Zyklon) to kill Jews in the gas chambers, this insecticide being the same product that was being used at the time to clear German homes of such pests as cockroaches and bed bugs, and when applied in larger concentration, was also effective in the gas chambers when employed against human beings.

Zyklon B releases hydrogen cyanide. Hydrogen cyanide is extremely poisonous and was never a common insecticide. After the Nazi connection it's the xenophobes' turn:

There have been reports that immigrants are responsible for our bed bug plague, but this turns out to be disinformation as well, since if immigrants were bringing over their bed bugs then we would expect to see a plague of tropical bed bugs, but samples taken of the bugs in North America and Europe show that the bug that is spreading is the common temperate bed bug, and thus not an import brought to our pristine shores by unsanitary immigrants...

The U.S. takes only tropical immigrants? After more "chemical lobby" bashing Herbert does some amateur science:

That repeated spraying of stubborn infestations of bed bugs increases resistance is just a logical outcome, in that by thinning out the herd a process of artificial selection takes place, with the weak eliminated and the strong surviving. When a weak bed bug with low resistance mates with a bed bug with strong resistance, experiments reveal that the result is a bed bug with medium resistance. When weak bed bugs are eliminated the result is that there is no competition for mates for the strongly resistant bed bugs and so the off spring of such bed bugs are always strongly resistant bed bugs. If such strongly resistant bed bugs then flee the premises after being sprayed one to many times this may be celebrated as a successful extermination process, thus sparing the chemical lobby the embarrassment of admitting to an environmental disaster, the real result is the spreading plague of resistant bed bugs.

Who's the bigger idiot: Herbert for writing such atrocious crap or Science.com blogger Lambert for linking to it?

There's plenty more hilarity in the article if you can be bothered reading it.

Update: I lodged the following comment at Deltoid (it was in moderation for over eight hours):

Amateur entomologist Brent Herbert wrote: “Bed bugs developed resistance to DDT in the 1940s…”

This pretty hard to believe. DDT wasn’t widely available to the public until after World War II, with the government’s house spraying program starting in July 1947. So, according to Herbert bed bugs showed signs of resistance within 2 1/2 years but other insecticides remained effective for the best part of half a century.

Brent Herbert also wrote: “The chemicals have not changed, and they remain as toxic as they ever were, only the bed bug has changed.”

This is so obviously stupid it doesn’t deserve comment.

Great source you’ve chosen here.

Despite my comment being the first I was accused of trolling by trying to drag the thread "off topic".