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Holding the Earth hostage
Carrie Lukas
Washington
Times
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
It's well known that bad news sells more papers and attracts
more viewers than good news. Something works even better than
bad news: A story about a threat with the potential to harm our
families and society.
As Christopher Booker and Richard North detail in "Scared
to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us
the Earth," recent decades have witnessed a flurry of scares
that have gripped the public. These scares exact high costs: Wrong-headed
policies are put in place that make us more vulnerable instead
of less; costly measures are taken that disrupt economies and
the public needlessly worries and changes their lives to response
to the latest media bogeyman.
Mr. Booker and Mr. North identify a dynamic through which a marginal
public concern mushrooms into a full-blown scare — from
salmonella and mad cow disease to DDT and asbestos, and focus
on what may be the greatest, most costly scare of all: Global
warming.
(Article continues below)
Competing factions drive a scare's progress. There are pushers
"whose interest is to promote the scare and to talk it up,
such as scientists for whom it provides the promising of winning
public attention or further funding," and blockers whose
interest is to downplay it. The lay reader is unlikely to be surprised
at the role that the media and politicians play in sensationalizing
a threat.
More jarring is the role that the scientific community plays.
As the authors write: "At the heart of every scare we have
looked at has been a group of scientists or technical experts
making a wrong or exaggerated guess on the basis of what eventually
turns out to be inadequate data."
The most compelling example of this dynamic and the misuse of
science is global climate change. Mr. Booker and Mr. North caution
readers by exploring how the current "consensus" came
to be, the political forces that have pushed these conclusions
and the competing explanations for the warming trend that have
often been suppressed by those vested in human-caused climate
change.
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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