Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.
So wrote Matt Ridley at the start of “Lying with science: a guide to myth debunking,” in The Spectator back in March.
Well, not quite the start. He actually began with a famous quote from H.L. Mencken:
The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Ridley then exposed three huge hoaxes published as serious science in putatively reputable scientific journals, and then trumpeted in the media and by politicians, within just a few days of each other shortly before his article. One claim was that “insects could vanish within a century.” Another was that glyphosate (active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup) causes cancer. And the third was that “Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times.”
All three, Ridley demonstrated, are utterly, completely bogus. If you doubt it, read his article. Particularly if you doubt him about the second claim, you might read my own article on that.
Don’t Count on Big Brother
Do you think government agencies can protect us from such lies? Think again.
The truth is that government agencies themselves are top offenders when it comes to scaring the public with bogus science.
Frank Schnell, a retired toxicologist from the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), reveals exactly how the ATSDR and the federal Environmental Protection Agency invented scares about a variety of different substances. Those scares became the rationale for regulations costing billions of dollars—and achieving no significant improvement in Americans’ health or longevity.
Schnell’s “Modus Operandi: How the EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Keeps Your Fears Alive,” just published by the Cornwall Alliance, is a clear, concise, convincing introduction to the tricks those agencies use to create the impression that certain things are toxic when in fact they are not—or at least are not except at exposure levels that are orders of magnitude higher than those to which the regulations force industry to reduce them.