I tried cite-checking two random cites from Silent Spring. It turns out some of her sources from ~1960 or earlier are really hard to find now. Like she cites papers that just aren’t on Google Scholar at all. It’s actually really bad that no one bothered to save copies of the sources for such a popular, influential book. And the source I was searching for is apparently not mentioned on any websites by anyone in all the commentary about Carson. And Google didn’t even go through her cites and add them as citation-only entries in Google Scholar.
I did manage to get a book she cited and confirm that her short quote was accurate and the book seemed to be saying what she said it said. That had nothing to do with DDT and didn’t seem controversial though.
Anyway, most of her cites are difficult to check so I’d like to minimize how many I try to check.
So I’d like to find some criticism by her opponents. What do they claim she was wrong about? So then I could check relevant cites for that. Does she have any critics who ever accused her of getting citations wrong and failing fact checking?
I’ve looked at some criticism but it’s been non-specific crap. I haven’t yet found any specific factual or scientific thing Carson actually said, which critics deny, which I could check Carson’s cites for.
There are two separate potential issues. Maybe Carson was wrong at the time, e.g. she misrepresented her sources. Alternatively, maybe Carson made reasonable claims given the knowledge available at the time, but we later found out some of those scientific ideas were wrong. I’m interested in either of those scenarios. The first scenario is mainly what I could cite check about.