Chronic hype criticized in media warnings of catastrophe

Wired: In the feature article “Apocalypse not: Here’s why you shouldn’t worry about end times,” Matt Ridley of the Wall Street Journal ridicules 50 years of media alarmism, but reserves special-case status for human-caused climate disruption. We’re “apocaholic,” he charges, concerning exaggerated or chimerical “warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.” He distributes these into categories named for a modern four horsemen of the perceived threat of apocalypse: chemicals, diseases, people, and resources. “We will combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they arise,” he predicts, “not through the mass fear stoked by worst-case scenarios.”