Scared to Death

Scared to Death:
From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth

Modern society has regularly, in recent years, been gripped by a series of headline making "scares" - from mad cow disease to SARS -- which have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. This book is the first to tell the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades, showing how they have followed a remarkably consistent pattern. It analyzes the crucial role played in each case by scientists how have misread or manipulated the evidence; by media and lobbyists who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts; and finally by the politicians and officials who come up with an absurdly disproportionate response, leaving us all to pay the price, which may run into billions of dollars.
Scared to Death culminates in a chillingly detailed account of the story behind what the authors believe has become the greatest scare of them all: the belief that the world faces disaster through manmade global warming. In a final chapter, the authors take on its proponents such as Al Gore in a devastating critique of the consensus on global warming and its consequences.

The beginning of chapter 14.

Saving the Planet.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and
widespread rioting will spread across the world . . . deaths from war and famine run into the millions, until the planet’s population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope. Access to water becomes a major battleground . . . Rich areas
like the US and Europe would become ‘virtual fortresses’, to prevent millions of migrants from entering, after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops.

The Observer, 20041

This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime. Unless we act now... these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible. Prime Minister Tony Blair, 29 October 20062 It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply amoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. The time to act is now.

Gro Harlem Bruntland, 9 May 2007

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.

George Monbiot, the Guardian, 21 September 2006

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice...

Robert Frost, ‘Fire and Ice’

It was as early as 1991 that Aaron Wildavsky, a respected professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, first described global warming as ‘the mother of all environmental scares’. In a way it had all started some 20 years earlier, when a number of scientists and environmentalists, followed by the media, first began to predict that Planet Earth could be facing a disastrous change in its climate.
In December 1972, following a conference of academic scientists at one of the USA’s leading universities, its two organizers wrote to warn President Nixon of the strong possibility that the world’s climate might be about to go through a change for the worse, by an ‘order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilised mankind’.
‘There are ominous signs’, reported Newsweek some time later, ‘that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, and that these changes may portend a dramatic decline in food production – with serious implications for just about every nation on earth’.
Newsweek quoted a report by the US National Academy of Sciences that ‘a major climactic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale’. The evidence cited for such a change ranged from a two-week shortening since 1950 of
the English grain-growing season to ‘the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded’ in the USA, where, in 1974, ‘148 twisters killed more than 300 people’.
The science section of Time had already reported on how ‘a growing number of scientists’, reviewing ‘the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years’ were beginning to suspect that ‘a global climactic upheaval’ might be under way.The article opened:

In Africa drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the US, Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting... rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells... a series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.

The fear they were all expressing, of course, was not that the earth was warming but that it was dangerously cooling. It had been noted that, for more than three decades, average temperatures across the globe had been dropping. As a New York Times headline put it, ‘Scientists ponder why world’s climate is changing: a major cooling widely considered to be inevitable’. Time reported how ‘telltale signs are everywhere – from the unexpected thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo’.
In 1973 Science Digest had run an article headed, ‘Brace yourself for another ice age’. This described how, as the earth gradually cooled and the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica grew, winter would eventually last the year round, cities would be ‘buried in snow and an immense sheet of ice could cover North America as far south as Cincinnati’.
For several years the fear of global cooling continued to inspire a spate of articles and books, such as Stephen Schneider’s The Genesis Strategy and Climate Change and World Affairs by a British diplomat, Crispin Tickell. The Cooling (1976) by the US science writer Lowell Ponte claimed that ‘the cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations’. In 1975 Nigel Calder, a former editor of the New Scientist, wrote that ‘the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind’.
But then, quite suddenly, around 1978, global temperatures began to rise again. The panic over global cooling subsided faster than it had arisen.

Source: Amazon.com

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