Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming — How Scares Are Costing Us the Earth

It didn’t start with Al Gore and global warming. From salmonella in eggs to asbestos, from the Millennium Bug to bird flu, and from DDT to passive smoking, the media establishment trumpets our impending doom from a new cause every few weeks! In fact, as Christopher Booker and Richard North prove in “Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming” — How Scares Are Costing Us the Earth, these “scare” crazes have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. “Scared to Death” is the first book ever to rip the cover off the “scare” industry and tell the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades.

Booker and North show how junk science powers the “scare” industry, analyzing the crucial role that scientists play in each scare — by misreading and manipulating the evidence. They also detail how the media establishment and unscrupulous lobbyists eagerly promote each scare with a blithe disregard for facts. And what does it all lead to? More Big Government statism, of course! “Scared to Death” vividly portrays how politicians and officials again and again come up with an absurdly disproportionate response to each scare, creating forests of new regulations and leaving us taxpayers to pay the price — which may run into billions of dollars.

“Scared to Death” culminates in a chillingly detailed account of the inside story behind the greatest fake scare of them all: the belief that the world faces disaster through manmade global warming. Booker and North fearlessly take on Al Gore and other proponents of this sky-is-falling hysteria in a devastating critique of the global warming myth. They compare our credulity in falling for scares to mass hysterias of bygone days, such as the Salem witch hysteria. Our age, say Booker and North, is a “new age of superstition.”

“Scared to Death” is your guide back to reality. How “scare” crazes are manufactured to erode your freedoms (and grow Big Government even bigger):

• How every “scare” craze is usually only sketchily defined, maximizing the opportunity for alarmist speculation about the damage it might cause (plus three other elements that all “scare” crazes have in common)
• How scares became a disaster waiting to happen, beginning with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s The “Beef War”: how the “mad cow disease” scare led officials to destroy huge numbers of healthy animals solely as a public relations exercise
• How more farmers killed themselves amid the stress of the “mad cow” crisis than the number of people who died from “mad cow disease”
• Did you get sick from passive smoking? No, you didn’t: how the longest and most comprehensive scientific study ever carried out into the effects of passive smoking anywhere in the world found that there was absolutely no causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco-related deaths
• Speed bumps save lives by making us all slow down — don’t they? No! Why the most vocal protestors against them have been emergency services
• How the EPA’s attempt to link Sudden Infant Death Syndrome to smoking lacked just one little detail: any basis in fact The study that proved that the health risk from exposure to asbestos was negligible — and the howls of derision and rage that greeted it from the scare industry
• Wind turbines: why even their fiercest supporters might lose their enthusiasm for them if they realized how little they actually contribute to solving the energy problem Why left-wing politicians and trade unions lined up to support the asbestos scare lobby, even though its real purpose was to enrich various commercial interests
• Evidence from the Hubble Telescope that global warming was taking place all over the solar system (even on Jupiter, where there are few, if any, automobiles)
• The hottest year of the twentieth century: 1934! — plus other proof that global warming is a sham

Tags: Christopher Booker, Scared to Death