search for notability

"We asked BMW for some development devices" -- Paddy Byers at LNUG tonight. His fascinating work under his own steam getting Node.js to work on Android has recently picked up funding from Webinos, the EU project for cross platform apps, which is partly bankrolled by BMW. The German car maker is already using Android as an embedded operating system in some of its latest models, so the LNUG experts though it a bit stingy not to supply a single 'Android device' for testing by Paddy and team. But a great initiative and, as Byers emphasized, something that could not have worked for him without everything else in the stack - V8, Android and Node itself - being open source before it.

In what are now called Agile Methods for software I had the priviledge of sitting at the feet of the great Tom Gilb in 1980s and then, in 1990s, Ward Cunningham, the genius behind Software Patterns, Extreme Programming and Wiki. Tom and Ward taught me to do the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work in each step of a development. Towards the end of 2011 I've been thinking about an analogous question: what's the simplest way of explaining to someone with an open mind that there is something lacking in the accepted wisdom on climate change?

The answer came by a kind of accident. On 23rd November I visited a small internet startup near Old Street and met some of the developers, one of whom was speaking that night at the London Node User Group in Camden. I decided to make my first appearance at LNUG, which I'd learned from Andrew Nesbitt at Ruby Manor three weeks before has been modelled on the excellent London Ruby User Group. There was an impresssive turnout and I heard much about Node.js itself and the remarkable progress of CoffeeScript. In the pub afterwards I got talking to a developer for another Silicon Roundabout startup who'd done Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. At some point I indicated that I didn't think the conventional story on man-made global warming was as strong as was often made out. My interlocutor was surprised. Here's how I explained the situation.

Consider four numbers:

1. Man's emissions per year
2. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere
3. Temperature (globally averaged temperature anomaly to be a bit more precise)
4. Deaths from extreme climate events.

All these are going up, right? Wrong. The first three are going up, a fact we are continually reminded of in the media. The last one has been falling since the 1920s:

But who is aware of that?

OK, my friend said, but surely the reduction is due to changes in technology.

I said of course. And so are our emissions in the first place. What this shows is that we are winning the battle. It's not a crisis. He looked thoughtful.

Why haven't we heard?

There is in fact a broad academic consensus that however climate has been changing in the last century it has not been making extreme climate events worse. But when the time came for the United Nations' prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to report on extreme events, releasing its Summary for Policy Makers in November - five days before LNUG, the reason it was fresh in my mind - they chose to mention deaths from such events in one paragraph only and that to highlight that 95% were in developing countries, in the period 1970-2008. No mention of the considerable decrease globally since 1920s. And this report is meant to be the last word on the subject for policy makers for many years.

Who apart from avid readers of climate sceptic blogs knows that the fourth number has been coming down for so long? Isn't that slightly important for informed decision making? My new friend seemed to think so.

The attribution problem

One thing I didn't raise last month is the way the fourth number sheds light on bogus reasoning about causation between the others. Often the fact these three have been going up together is presented as evidence that man's emissions must be causing global temperature rise. But if temperatures have been increasing since the 1920s and deaths from extreme events falling in the same period one could equally well argue that higher temperatures cause milder extreme events.

False reasoning in both cases, because there are so many other possible factors. Back to the drawing board, for the ordinary voter and for policy makers. And a Happy, more Hopeful New Year to every reader!

We've been warned, again and again. Finally mother gaia loses patience and a machine spewing out global warming lies helpless in a ditch. Nothing could illustrate more powerfully how evil fossil fuel interests are being overcome. Fight on, brothers. (Credits: Alan Whiteford and the BBC.)

In the last few days a couple of things have reminded me of Smalltalk. First, on the advice of Rob Campbell I downloaded the alpha of Firefox 6 to take a look at the new JavaScript Scratchpad. I tried it with a number of pages, including one with notes from the last four years in my hard-worked variant of TiddlyWiki called Whiteword, which uses jQuery. It was fun to be set free of the constraints of Web Console or Firebug's single line of commands, with limited history, and have a persistent text area from which one can execute arbitrarily long pieces of code, or print or inspect their result. Finally we have something close to the facilities of any text area within a Smalltalk-80 image. Yes, you read that right, we're close to being bang up to date with 1980 - and all this coming to a browser near you in the far from imminent future. Well worth seeing all the same, thanks Mozilla.

The second experience was not so favourable to browser JavaScript. Some errors had crept in to a large dataset of over 10,000 items, at least as seen in an AJAX-ey way in the browser (with not all 10k seen at once, of course, but all downloaded ready to be revealed as needed). I executed some JavaScript from the console to give a useful text representation of the data, as an array. But once I had something of that size and wanted to investigate, including comparing it with other such arrays, from past versions of the system, I at once headed for Ruby. The neat thing is that array syntax is the same for both languages. What isn't so neat is TextMate choking on such a large piece of text. As before, Mac's TextEdit coped with that part fine, defining methods to return the arrays in question. Once I was exploring datasets of that size, with unknown problems, the power of Ruby's Enumerables seemed essential to have as a kind of programmer security blanket. Indeed the main symptom of the problem showed through very quickly (though not its solution, not yet). Having done some array.collects to homogenize the data all it needed was a simple Ruby difference : array1 - array2. But, as ever, I didn't know that to begin with.

Ruby's Arrays and Hashes remind me of Smalltalk too of course, not least because Matz designed them that way. But it's not just a stylistic thing, it's also stability, robustness, completeness and coherence. Once you can take these basics for granted you find yourself concentrating more on the business problem than the language and libraries you're using to probe it. Talking of libraries, I'm glad CommonJS is making strides, partly powered by the interest in Node.js on the server. But I didn't have CommonJS handy inside my legacy pages. With Smalltalk and Ruby you know these fundamentals are there at all times. And that's the way it should always have been in JavaScript, even given the constraints of web download times, at least so it felt to me again this week.

On Thursday evening I recommended the long thread at Climate Etc. on Hiding the Decline (HtD) to around five hundred students at Imperial College in London. More on the event in question on Bishop Hill later this weekend. [Update: It's hilarious and it's here.] But this got me thinking what the five minute summary of HtD would be. Here's mine.

Hide the Decline was a turd. Judith Curry, Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at Berkeley, are joined in this opinion by many, including Jonathan Jones, Professor of Physics at Oxford:

This is not a complicated technical matter on which reasonable people can disagree: it is a straightforward and blatant breach of the fundamental principles of honesty and self-criticism that lie at the heart of all true science. The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong.

But HtD is only one of twelve issues with the Hockey Stick that have become clear since Climategate. One of the most important, the hiding of adverse verification statistics, was addressed by Dr. Pat Frank, a research chemist, on Climate Audit five days ago:

Bradley, Hughes, and Mann did not report the adverse results in their submitted manuscript. In that studied silence is where the offense lays. Bradley’s own words indicate they knew their published work was a contrived misdirection to hide the invalidity of their conclusions. If they had been honest and had reported the true and disconfirming scope of their statistical indicators, they’d not have been able to claim a ‘robust’ reconstruction, would not have gotten published, and would not have been able to make spectacular millennial claims about 20th century temperatures.

The people responsible for HtD in the most famous variant of the Hockey Stick, for the third assessment report of the UN IPCC in 2001, were Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, John Overpeck and arguably the whole 'Hockey Team', including Mann's original co-authors Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. A wide range of opinions have been expressed about whether these people should:

1. Accept that HtD was not best practice
2. Apologise
3. Be publicly disgraced
4. Be excluded from the IPCC
5. Be ejected from climate science.

Pat Frank expressed the final point of view on Climate Audit a week ago:

The system of anonymous peer review is worth saving, in my experienced opinion. But the climategate scientists need to be ejected. All of them. And the institutional editors and officers that went along with them. If they are not ejected, or if there is no official recognition of what they did, then the people in charge of the system will have revealed themselves as irremediably corrupted, and the climate science peer review system will be screwed.

The present author has taken this view since Climategate:

In failing to give up this one section of crucial data voluntarily ... the scientists concerned should be looking for other careers, not being used as the foundation of measures at Kyoto, Copenhagen and beyond that will deprive the bottom billion of the world's poorest of inexpensive electricity.

Resolution of the differences expressed isn't going to be easy.

On 5th November James Delingpole's reponse to the big TV show the night before was an article with the memorable title Why being Green means never having to say you're sorry. It began:

One of the stories from the Bible I’ve never quite understood is the parable of the Prodigal Son. So this utterly useless git prematurely grabs his share of his inheritance, goes out into the world, blows it on being stupid, loses everything, then comes back to his father with his tail between his legs and what happens? Why his father, sap that he is, decides to reward him for being wrong and stupid and useless by greeting him, well, like a prodigal son and killing the fatted calf. No wonder the Other Son – the sensible, intelligent one who was right all along – feels so mightily peeved. If people don’t get their just deserts in life, what’s the point even bothering to do the right thing in the first place?

Anyway, watching Channel 4’s What The Green Movement Got Wrong last night I felt very much like the Other Son. The documentary was a celebration of the fact that two notable green campaigners – Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalog) had finally come round to appreciating that some of the key tenets of their Green religion were flawed and had in fact done more harm than good.

At the end of the piece was this parenthesis:

(Oh: One more thing. Please can the more vexatious idiots among the commenters – you know who you are – refrain from explaining to me what the parable of the Prodigal Son really means. I – duh – do get it. It was, you know, like a rhetorical device used to introduce a piece which, if you read it carefully, you’ll realise has little to do with New Testament parables but is in fact mainly about climate change)

So, what I want to talk about here is the film Love Story. The whole of the series Big Money, Small Voice (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) can be seen as building up to this notorious line:

Being in love means never having to say you're sorry.

Please don't ever confuse such sentimental crap with anything from the most tough-minded human being who ever walked the planet.

What bothered me most I think was your claim at the end:

I – duh – do get it.

Well I duh don't. Never have. If I really got it I would live exactly like Jesus Christ. I have some way to go on that.

You see, James, saying I wanted to talk about Love Story was in fact only a rhetorical device. What I'm really interested in is the relationship between the deep challenges we face from the Green Movement and Jesus.

I'm convinced, like your friend Ian Plimer, that the Green obsession with global warming and the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions is at heart a religious enterprise, only explicable through the lens of a worldview it seems to have more or less replaced in the West. I say 'seems to' because I don't think we ever really 'got' the message of Jesus in the first place. It's that glaring weakness that has led to this truly terrifying deception that could now lead us all the way to the ruthless tyranny of world government. Terrifying that is unless you also get this line:

Perfect love casts out fear.

In other words, being in love means never having to say we give in, never saying the fight is hopeless. For love believes all things and endures all things. I could of course go on, because three things abide and the greatest of these is love.

As for the radical forgiveness Jesus extends to the 'utterly useless git' often called the Prodigal Son (and he wouldn't be offended by your words, in fact he'd agree with them), the grace that so offends his apparently righteous older brother, you have to understand the context of the story:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  Then Jesus told them this parable ...

For Pharisees read holier-than-thou environmental journalists (borrowing an idea from NT Wright, thanks Tom). For 'teachers of the law' read the scientists, activists and policymakers that lay such devastating burdens on the poor and never it seems lift a finger to help them. These are the older brothers. For tax collectors and sinners read anyone who instinctively rebels against that tosh and comes to realise Jesus is their only hope. Of course we don't deserve saving but that's what He does, running out to meet us the moment we come to our senses. And the same goes for anyone.

Maybe you do really get it. In which case, why not write about it - write about the answer even more than the problem. And thanks for your courage - Jesus loves that more than just about anything. Maybe you do get some of it after all.

It began twelve days ago, a year from this blog's inception, sparked by two disagreements between two much bigger UK bloggers, James Delingpole and George Monbiot, about two important contemporary movements: the greens and the Tea Party. Monbiot seemed to blame Big Money for the evils he could see in both areas, particularly recent critics of the greens from within their own camp on DDT.  As I've since explored in detail, I see the DDT part of the argument as contemptible, given the glaring factual errors made about tobacco funding, complete silence on the role of big chemical companies with commercial reasons to kill a rival which is out of patent, and millions of deaths of the world's poorest from outbreaks of malaria since the 1970s, when DDT began to be banned by western governments and - probably much more deadly for the developing world - proscribed by major donors of aid and the import policy of the European Union, all with the tacit support of highly visible green campaigners and much more shadowy corporate interests.

I also believe Monbiot's argument to be highly questionable in the case of the Tea Party, in line with what Delingpole has already said. But at some point the obsession with Big Money has to end. Six posts in twelve days after twelve in twelve months on very different topics seems as good a place as any to draw the line. So now we must motor, building on principles we've already established. Fasten your safety-belts.

Monbiot focuses on support for the Tea Party from the Koch brothers, Charles and David, and Koch Industries, the massively successful conglomerate founded by their father Fred, second largest private company in the United States after Cargill. Like most people Monbiot builds on a marvellous article on the Kochs by Jane Meyer in the New Yorker in August - a great piece of journalism, wherever one stands on the politics, not least because Meyer avoids easy answers as she provides bucket loads of pertinent detail and opinion. I don't doubt a public relations expert working for the Koch family might have some quibbles. But I'm going to rely on Meyer and to some extent on Wikipedia. There's enough to go on.

First then, does Koch represent the biggest of Big Money in the field of American politics? Don't be ridiculous. Meyer has the good grace to mention George Soros, recently the subject of detailed attention from Glenn Beck, Tea Party icon at a less-than-unbiased Fox News. But even Soros is surely a Johnny-come-lately to the scene of the crime. I don't even agree with Andrew Marr last week that Big Money only came to the fore with the Kennedy clan in 1960. It goes back way further than that. Who exactly did General Smedley Butler outsmart in 1934, after he was approached to lead a fascist takeover of the States and, to his eternal credit, refused both the power and the money? If you don't know who, you have some reading to do. The fact it's so little mentioned today may point to something else we've already noted: the power of really Bad Big Money to paint itself out of history when it would be much more helpful to have it in - so we can learn the lessons. But we can hardly give every example of that. For the moment let's salute General Butler, the "fighting Quaker", as another who listened to the Small Voice when it mattered - and totally outwitted the Big Money of his day. I'd sign up to his unit any time.

Mention of Soros as deadly enemy of the Tea Party produces another interesting angle: the tendency for those looking too much - or at least too stupidly - for Big Money at the heart of everything to smear by association. Thus because Philip Morris helped fund one think tank in the early nineties which went on to question the record of the greens on DDT, when later two quite separate outfits led by Roger Bate picked up and developed some of the same arguments, in particular Africa Fighting Malaria, he and they must by definition be in hock to Big Tobacco. In fact AFM had opposition from tobacco giants as it campaigned to allow African experts to use DDT in public health as they see fit. When the issue is so important to get right, such childish conspiracy theories are not just stupid, they are morally reprehensible. Is it not possible for people to care about millions of children dying unnecessarily, without ulterior motive? Or is there no conscience left in the world, except in your tiny sect, funded from magical coins of purest disinterest? That often seems to be the underlying message, as proud as it is historically stupid.

Here's a slightly more amusing example. George Soros' wealth is based on a hedge fund he founded with Jim Rogers, who is also an outspoken supporter of Ron Paul on the gold standard and other matters. For example, here's a prescient interview Rogers gave in 2007 to the Financial Times:

That's Ron Paul Rogers is supporting, veteran libertarian Congressman and darling of the Tea Party. So, if you're into guilt by association you can have a field day. If you hate the Tea Party, Soros immediately comes under suspicion. If Soros is the epitome of evil ... you get the idea. Smearing by association is dumb. Let's at least do better than Monbiot on that. (You could also play with the fact that Rogers chooses to be based in China, just like Maurice Strong, the first head of the UN's Environment Programme, which eventually gave rise to the IPCC of Climategate fame. Oh, and a billion other, highly entrepreneurial people. Which reminds me, the world may be a bit more complex than any of our theories. What a relief that is.)

There are, as the BBC has been keen to point out, at least two important strands in the Tea Party: the libertarians, typified by Ron Paul and his son Rand, now Senator-elect for Kentucky, and the so-called religious right, with its concerns about abortion, gay marriage, and school prayers. They may not always get along. As for Koch money, it is very unusual indeed for Big Money to be devoted to the cause of libertarianism. But even libertarians disagree with each other on all kinds of issues - not least whether war (or any state-sanctioned violence) is ever justified. One of the fascinating things about Fred and Charles Koch is that in the fifties they were influenced by Robert LeFevre and his Freedom School - and LeFevre was an out-and-out pacifist. When Fred Koch helped found the John Birch Society in 1958 it soon took against the growing American involvement in Vietnam - though as far as I know the society has always accepted the right of a state to use violence to protect its citizens. But the debates clearly went deep. And the fact such groups were for decades ridiculed by the Washington elite is now itself becoming a quaint historical anomaly, as the Tea Party finally rides into town. I'm not the only one to find that intriguing.

Rand Paul's critique, on winning his election, of Barack Obama standing alongside Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez at the Copenhagen climate summit last year and apologising for the industrial revolution, no less, and thus tacitly agreeing with ruthless dictators as they seek not only to blame the West for all their ills but to bring disastrous government meddling on us all, is another point of policy which could hardly for me be made better. The fact Rand was standing alongside not dictators but his wife, his children, his mother and his father as he said it makes it particularly poignant:

You might take it from that that I'm a Tea Party supporter myself. Well, I certainly agree with one thing the Wall Street Journal reported about them as they triumphed that day:

Almost uniformly they said they remained wary of everyone in Washington—including their own candidates.

That is also the Small Voice speaking - the voice of good conscience combined with bad experience. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, as the Person behind the Voice originally said. We're coming to Him, don't worry, just as James Delingpole felt he had to on 5th November. His instinct wasn't wrong.

On 22nd November two political careers ended: John F Kennedy's in 1963 and Margaret Thatcher's in 1990 (though strictly it took six more days for John Major to replace Thatcher as prime minister). The Kennedy anniversary was marked in two ways this year by the BBC: by repeating JFK, the controversial 1991 movie about the assassination, and by a provocative new piece by Andrew Marr, JFK: The Making of Modern Politics, about how Kennedy came to be president in the first place.

Watching both for the first time in the last 24 hours it was striking how each was pointing to Big Money as culprit. For Marr the money of the Kennedy clan did for Hubert Humphrey and invented modern politics, with its obsession with image and lifestyle (very dishonestly, in projecting Kennedy's good health and the planted lie - fully deniable later of course - of Humphrey's draft dodging during the War) rather than issues of substance. And as Jim Garrison meets the mysterious insider in Washington in the central moment of Oliver Stone's film, it's Big Money threatened by defence industry losses, if JFK gets his way with Cuba and Vietnam, that is behind the murder in Dallas, however many protective layers of deniability lie between it and the deadly action.

Agreeing with Marr is a much easier job than agreeing with Stone, because there is so much complex detail in the movie about which it's hard to become expert. But here's one perhaps paradoxical verdict: I have no problem seeing both Marr and Garrison (and thus Stone, who chooses to portray the New Orleans prosecutor heroically throughout) as men listening to the small voice of conscience - in other words men wanting to uncover and tell the truth, even where it goes against a prevailing view in the surrounding culture.

Garrison was certainly risking more than Marr in doing so. Although no JFK assassination buff, two things had lodged in my mind for many years: first, the idea of a magic third bullet which had to change direction many times to inflict known damage to Kennedy and Connolly in order for Lee Harvey Oswald to be the sole assassin, as became the official view of the Warren Commission. Basic science and common sense said that had to be bunk.

At a completely different level, Allen Dulles, recently sacked by Kennedy as CIA chief, being appointed to the Commission to investigate his death was enough for me to be sure that there was no interest in arriving at the truth there. (It was interesting indeed to hear Garrison's mystery interlocutor in Washington make exactly the same point in the film.) For old Wall Street lawyer-insider Dulles already represented for me not just Big Money but Big Money gone Bad, over a lifetime, with no place left perhaps where conscience could start to clean up.

Which is to make another key distinction. It's never just size that matters, it's the much older question of good and evil. Although we're taught that ''the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" that dictum and the size of someone's bank account won't tell us which hearts have given themselves over to the false love, driving out both compassion and truth. For that we have to look carefully at the record and use our judgment. And make sure that our own small voice is in good working order as we do. Unless some are willing to do this, breaking the Wall of Silence, the consequences for a society can be dire, as pioneering journalist Uki Goñi says eloquently of his native Argentina (the shocking links between Allen Dulles' career in and after the War and 'Odessa' being too much to spell out on this occasion):

Margaret Thatcher made her own contribution to ending murderous dictatorship in Argentina in 1982. But marking the anniversary of the Tory coup that removed her eight years later, Peter Oborne puts his finger on one cause more than any other: the lady's fervent opposition to the idea of a single European currency. Very neatly, at a very different moment in the Euro story, Oborne takes the knife that did for the ex-premier and twists it the other way, asking various strong proponents of the UK joining the euro in the past twenty years whether they are now prepared to admit that they were wrong and she was right. Nobody dares to reply. The Wall of Silence as Goñi would call it - and a key mark for me of the involvement of (bad) Big Money in an issue behind the scenes, as noted with DDT last time.

In praising Oborne Daniel Hannan notes that one old euro believer does now admit he was mistaken: Danny Alexander, assistant to George Osborne in the Treasury. It may not seem much. But one voice of honesty can make a big difference, especially when it's close to the current levers of power. That's the very simple point of this series. Game on, as always.

Let's return to the claims that began this investigation into Big Money, DDT and malaria. On 5th November George Monbiot wrote that Stewart Brand had got some of the details wrong in his book Whole Earth Discipline (first published in October 2009) and then declared:

Brand, in turn, appears to have fallen for a myth generated by corporate-funded lobby groups, as John Quiggin and Tim Lambert document in Prospect magazine.

In the article referred to, from May 2008, Quiggin and Lambert had made the following claims:

By 1990, it seemed that the public health issues surrounding DDT had been largely resolved. In developed countries, DDT had been replaced by less environmentally damaging alternatives. But soon the situation changed radically. The tobacco industry, faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places, sought to cast doubt on the science behind the mooted ban. But a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science.” Its primary vehicle was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris.

TASSC, led by an activist named Steve Milloy, attacked the environmental movement on everything from food safety to the risks of asbestos. One of the issues Milloy took up with vigour was DDT, where he teamed up with the entomologist J Gordon Edwards. With the aid of Milloy’s advocacy, Edwards’s attacks on Rachel Carson moved from the political fringes to become part of the orthodoxy of mainstream US Republicanism.

Tobacco companies created a European version of TASSC, the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), led by Roger Bate, another tobacco lobbyist. In the late 1990s, Bate established “Africa Fighting Malaria,” a so-called “astroturf” organisation based in Washington DC. His aim was to drive a wedge between public health and the environment by suggesting that by banning DDT to protect birds, environmentalists were causing many people to die from malaria. Between them, Milloy’s TASSC and Bate’s Africa Fighting Malaria convinced many that DDT was a panacea for malaria, denied to the third world by the machinations of rich environmentalists.

What amazed me from the start was that Roger Bate had been invited to respond to these allegations in the same issue of Prospect, that he denied point blank ever being a tobacco lobbyist or that the two organizations he had led since 1994, including Africa Fighting Malaria, had received a penny from any tobacco company (in fact, 'absurdly', they had opposition from Big Tobacco in their campaign to enable the use of DDT against malaria in Uganda), and that none of this was even mentioned by George Monbiot.

It's not as if the debate is unimportant. By now between thirty and forty million have died from malaria since the use of DDT was drastically reduced in the 1970s, including, mistakenly, in public health. Even Quiggin and Lambert are forced to admit:

Second, by virtue of its massive misuse in the 1960s and 1970s, DDT gained a bad reputation that was hard to shake. As a result, says WHO’s Allan Schapira, donors have sometimes insisted on the use of an insecticide other than DDT, even in “countries where the government wished to use DDT, and there was evidence that it was the best option for malaria-vector control.”

Everyone I've read accepts that DDT was overused in agriculture up till the 1970s. But its 'bad reputation' - a nice phrase for what Michael Crichton calls 'a kind of hysteria' brought on by the green movement - should never have led to donors (whether governments or NGOs) insisting that it must not be used in situations where it would have saved thousands of lives. Money was being given to some of the poorest countries in the world on this condition - no doubt it seemed like Big Money to them - and they were being influenced, bribed even, by their 'elders and betters', often by their old colonial masters, to turn a blind eye while thousands of their own people died without cause. Who was most guilty in each case is of course hard to unpick (though any attempt to kill off DDT by Big Money with a competitive interest, such as Bayer, is clearly a disgrace). It's certainly true that the green movement had decisively influenced the culture which led to such flawed and fatal decisions. Even if it did so with the best of motives a heartfelt apology would seem the least that is now required.

Instead, and not for the first time, Monbiot, Quiggin and Lambert take refuge in a conspiracy theory based on Big Money being against them. Because the tobacco industry was involved in funding them - which it wasn't at all - Roger Bate and Africa Fighting Malaria could safely be ignored. I also at once spotted this in Bate's response:

While I regret that Quiggin and Lambert continue to parrot these anti-DDT sentiments, there are many ill-informed arguments for the use of DDT to be found, especially online. I may not have done enough in the early years of this decade to respond to those excesses, and may even occasionally indulged in them myself ...

It was refreshing as always seeing someone taking personal responsibility, someone with the small voice of conscience apparently still working - something decisively absent from Quiggin and Lambert, as their defence of green activism and propaganda over many decades hides behind inert phrases such as 'DDT gained a bad reputation'. As for Monbiot, what reason could there possibly be for him, two years later, not to link to this detailed refutation by Bate and let the Guardian readers make up their mind? You be the judge. You now have both.

What I will say is that searching for Big Money behind an idea or a movement to which you are opposed too often leads to such blindness and stupidity. I certainly wasn't looking for such a thing when I investigated the malaria situation nearly five years ago and came across a defence of the green record from Sonia Shah in The Nation in March 2005 that included this eye-popping paragraph:

Finally, it is true that environmental groups initially supported a UN-led worldwide ban on DDT in 2000. But they quickly about-faced when informed about its use--albeit limited--in malaria control. "You can only accuse them of naïveté," says malaria expert Amir Attaran. Not so chemical giant Bayer. "We fully support EU to ban imports of agricultural products coming from countries using DDT," wrote Bayer's Gerhard Hesse in an e-mail message leaked to the Financial Times last year. Chemical giant Bayer manufactures brand-name insecticides much pricier than cheap, off-patent DDT. "DDT use for us is a commercial threat," Hesse wrote.

Knowing a good deal about the dark role of Bayer in the Holocaust I couldn't believe it. Why was nobody else drawing attention to this? But that's another thing that truly obscene Big Money seems to achieve: it buys silence. Thus when the BBC discussed whether the eradication of malaria was possible three weeks ago, DDT wasn't even mentioned.

George Monbiot's recent attacks on Big Money have included fingering the Koch brothers and Koch Industries as the secret brains behind the Tea Party. It's another fascinating example and at least there's more substance to it than wholly imaginary tobacco money pushing the scientific and humanitarian case for DDT against malaria. More anon.

It's children that have suffered the most as a group from fatalities from malaria since the disease got out of control again in a number of countries from the 1970s so it's fitting perhaps to humble ourselves and listen to a four and a half minute summary of the DDT story, as told by Michael Crichton a few years ago to a group of intelligent young people.

To my mind the science is presented fairly, as are the resulting moral imperatives. The greens are not made scapegoats for this vast humanitarian disaster. Crichton instead presents the situation as a failure of all of us in the white, developed world to care for those of other continents and colours. It's one of the most potent appeals to the small voice of conscience, from a lifelong Democrat, that I've ever heard on the subject.

What George Monbiot was concerned about ten days ago was the specific claim from Stewart Brand that greens had campaigned for and achieved a worldwide ban on DDT. Strictly speaking, although the use of DDT has decreased drastically since the insecticide became a major public concern of environmentalists, not just for crops but for health, it's true that there has never been a outright world ban. Monbiot also seems to imply that green organisations have been open to the arguments of medical experts on the benefits of indoor residual spraying of DDT as one very powerful weapon in the war against malaria. But is that all that needs to be said?

The situation is reminiscent for me of a man interviewed by the Allies shortly after the Second World War who'd been a senior director of the vast German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, the biggest of Big Money worldwide in this field by 1939. Here's how the conversation went:

Q. What did you do when they told you that I.G. chemicals was [sic] being used to kill, to murder people held in concentration camps?

A. I was horrified.

Q. Did you do anything about it?

A. I kept it for me [to myself] because it was too terrible .... I asked Muller-Cunradi is it known to you and Ambros and other directors in Auschwitz that the gases and chemicals are being used to murder people.

Q. What did he say?

A. Yes: it is known to all I.G. directors in Auschwitz.

We'd all agree I hope that the reaction of Georg von Schnitzler was inadequate to the situation in which he found himself. Either the parallel with the green movement since 1962 (the year Schnitzler died, strangely enough, peacefully in his home) jumps out at you or it doesn't. Perhaps thirty million deaths of the poorest in the world have been at stake in that time. Did you hear any of the prominent environmental organisations trying to raise the alarm about the grave humanitarian implications of poor African countries or India not using DDT for safe, indoor spraying? I didn't.

There's another striking link between the Auschwitz story and DDT sixty years later. The unit that supplied the poison gas for the Nazi extermination camps was a subsidiary of IG Farben by the name of Bayer. For understandable reasons the IG Farben brand was considered a bit tarnished after the Second World War and there was also the pesky issue of concentration camp survivors wanting some financial recompense for their immense suffering working as slaves for Farben's sub-camps or being experimented upon to test some of the latest Bayer drugs. For some reason though the Bayer name largely avoided this brand contamination and the company was spun out from its parent, with others like BASF, to play its role in the world of Big Money from the 1940s. And in this new life another senior executive made an unforgettable contribution to the debate about DDT in 2004.

This week marks the anniversary of the unauthorised leaking of some emails from the University of East Anglia. One Gerhard Hesse of Bayer was victim of a similar thing six years ago, as reported by the Financial Times on 29th September 2005:

In congressional testimony, Richard Tren of the Africa Fighting Malaria campaign said lobbying for restrictions might have commercial motives. Mr Tren cited an email to health academics from Gerhard Hesse, business manager for "vector control" - eliminating carriers of disease - for Bayer CropScience, cautioning against DDT.

Bayer manufactures alternative insecticides to DDT, which are generally more expensive. In the email, seen by the FT, Mr Hesse said: "We fully support EU to ban [sic] imports of agricultural products coming from countries using DDT." He said such a ban reflected the danger of DDT leaking into the agricultural system and ending up as residues in food.

But Mr Hesse, who sits on the partnership board of the WHO's "Roll Back Malaria" coalition, also admits: "DDT use is for us a commercial threat."

He argues that the commercial threat is not dramatic because of DDT's limited use, saying it is "mainly a public image threat".

Mr Tren told the Senate committee: "We fear that commercial entities such as Bayer . . . are using bad science and fear about DDT in order to advance their own particular interests."

In a statement, Bayer said Mr Hesse meant to refer purely to DDT for crop use. "Bayer CropScience rejects any interpretation that the company would support the EU move to ban imports of agricultural products coming from countries using DDT for company specific competitive reasons," it said.

"Gerhard Hesse's statement in this respect was written in a way which might lead to wrong conclusions. It does not reflect the actual opinion of Mr Hesse and of Bayer CropScience."

The EU said it did not ban food imports from countries using DDT but required them to comply with maximum residue limits.

Or as Roger Bate, Richard Tren's colleague at Africa Fighting Malaria, explained it in 2008 in the response article to the one George Monbiot pointed to in Prospect Magazine ten days ago (which for some reason Monbiot didn't see fit to link to):

While Chinese and Indian government-backed companies continue to produce DDT for their own public health programmes, and for export, no western company has produced DDT for over a decade. Major chemical companies such as Bayer, Dow Chemical, Du Pont and BASF produce alternative products, and have incentives to see DDT phased out. Bayer actually agitated against the use of DDT, abusing its position as private sector delegate to the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, as reported in the Financial Times. AFM was alone among advocacy groups to raise this as a concern.

One of the great concerns at the moment is that even China has agreed to phase out production of DDT, as part of its international agreements, so increasingly the stuff is becoming impossible to buy or at least much more expensive than it should be. The introduction to the book The Excellent Powder, published earlier this year, has the details. There is still it seems, behind the scenes, a very effective campaign against DDT and this is seen, by many of us, as an outrage to the poor who suffer so much as a result. But I do accept Monbiot's point that it's not all the fault of environmental groups. There's a Big Money element that some green groups may have played into, hopefully entirely by accident.

What are the lessons to be learned from the involvement of Big Money in this terrible story, and others like it? We'll try to see our way through to that next time.