Dr. Kesten C. Green and Tom Harris note how past scares about such things as mercury levels in fish, EMF powerline emissions, and DDT in the environment correlate closely with the alarmism ginned up over “manmade global warming” (AGW):

. . . vivid, alarming forecasts, even those based on weak foundations, are persuasive. For a while at least.

Unlike “global warming,” however, these scares truly are anthropogenic in origin:

In modern times, when we are safer than we have ever been, some activists have become rich and famous by exploiting our ready acceptance of alarming scenarios: “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” This statement about global warming by climatologist Professor Stephen Schneider (now deceased) serves as a warning to us all that we should always be ready to ask hard questions of alarmists.

The victims of these baseless alarms should not only “ask hard questions” but also make an effort to interrogate these “activists'” bank accounts.

Time not only heals all wounds, but it also tends to wound all heels:

When people learn more about an issue, the persuasion formula that initially worked so well for alarmists breaks down. People become less persuaded by appeals to trust the authorities, less susceptible to fear, less willing to accept emotional appeals from celebrities, less gullible. Trends in polls show that this is already happening with the global warming scare.

All the nefarious tools of modern propaganda techniques are employed to scare the populace, but knowledge and time serve to explode such myths:

Alarming forecasts of humans harming themselves and the environment by their actions are a common social phenomenon. They become widely believed for a time, cause unnecessary anxiety, and result in costly government policies, then fade from public attention as it becomes more difficult to maintain the alarm in the face of counter-evidence and closer public scrutiny.

Julian L. Simon cataloged nearly two dozen scares that adversely affected public policy in the past.

Here are just a few:

The “Big Drop in Sperm Count Since ’38”.

Chlorinated water causing birth defects.

Electric razors causing leukemia.

The “prototype of all resource scares”: The Stone Age shortage of flint.

Also shortages of copper, tin, forests, and wood for fuel.

A fear of “electricity accumulating in the Earth” thanks to Ben Franklin’s lightning rod.

“1798: Food – the Malthusian mother of all scares that warns: increasing population must lead to famine. Since then there has been continuous improvement in average nutrition.”

“1800s: Running out of coal in Great Britain.”

Almost as soon as oil began to be exploited, the start of countless recurrent alarms about running out of petroleum.

Rachel Carson’s panic about DDT: “With the aid of DDT, ‘India had brought the number of malaria cases down from the estimated 75 million in 1951 to about 50,000 in 1961. Sri Lanka … reduced malaria from about three million cases after World War II to just 29 in 1964.’ Then as the use of DDT went down, ‘Endemic malaria returned to India like the turnaround of a tide.’ By 1977 ‘the number of cases reached at least 30 million and perhaps 50 million’.”

The ban on PCBs: “A side-effect of banning PCBs is malfunctions in large electrical transformers. One such case caused the July 29, 1990, blackout covering 14 square miles in Chicago, leading to rioting and three deaths.”

It’s unfortunate that the list of unfounded scares gets longer every year. It’s even more unfortunate that people lose their lives when public policy makers get panicked into acting on them.

Green and Harris’s Pajamas Media article — “Past Alarmism and the Future of Manmade Global Warming” — is here. Simon’s short list of premature alarms is here.