The Institute of Public Afairs’ Dr Kesten Green lists the 20 most unscientific scares.
Green writes,
There is a long and dismal history of alarming forecasts that were literally too bad to be true. But many people believed these predictions that human actions would harm the environment and thereby cause disaster for people. As early as 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that the human population would grow beyond the ability of the environment to support it. Before him, Socrates bemoaned the loss of forests around Athens. Arguably the most harmful alarm was about DDT, the banning of which has cost many millions of lives…
Here then, in brief, is a Top 20 of environmentalist alarms and their outcomes. Please, let’s learn from them by not being so gullible!
Of no surprise is that almost all of the “alarmist” pronouncements would have the human race living in cold dark apartments excepts for a couple hours a day, eating organic food grown within 150 miles of their home, no meat or fish of course, wearing clothing made from hand harvested cotton and using buses or other mass transit to get to work in order to support a massive welfare state while societies glitteratti pat us all on the head for being good socialists while they sip champagne(organic grapes of course) and continue to live on other peoples money. Take all the villians in “Through the looking glass, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged” and you don’t come close to the havoc and misery these folks want to impose on the human race in order to save it and mold it in an image of their myopic philosophy.
It took 147 years to accumulate the first 4 environmental alarms (or one alarm every 36.75 years. The next 16 alarms occurred over 46 years or an environmental alarm every 2.875 years. With all the new regulations EPA is promulgating we should be seeing a new environmental alarm ever 6 months. Throw in a new endangered species by USFWS and we will have a new environmental alarm every 3 months.
the fact that some worries do not pan out does not mean that all worries represent alarmism. The last item on the list restates what “always cool headed” physicists say about cell tower/cell phone radiation: this is non-ionizing radiation that can not damage DNA, hence it can not be a cause for increased incidence of cancer. And yet, in todays science news, there is this astonishing item: Tufts University group caused a tadpole to grow a fully formed eye in its gut by modifying electrical properties of cells. Clearly, direct DNA damage is not the only way to profoundly alter behavior of cells. In fact, cells have more than enough energy within themselves to damage their own DNA, which they do all the time, as cancers do arise spontaneously. When one posits a possibility that prolonged exposure to electromagnetic fields may cause increased cancer risk, one proposes small change to a probability of spontaneous DNA damage.
Habitual alarmists are dangerous, and annoying. Habitual debunking can be equally bad, however.