http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/11/10/boboo110.xml
James Delingpole reviews Scared to Death: from BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth by Christopher Booker and Richard North
Imagine you could travel back to Britain in 1998.
One of the amusing things you might do there - in between buying heavily into property and cheap gold - would be to pooh-pooh all those ridiculous panic-mongers wittering on about the Millennium Bug.
"It's just another of those modish, silly scares that never actually come to anything," you could declare with a knowledgeable chuckle on Newsnight and the Today programme.
No one would take you seriously, though. Why should they, when the prime minister himself - presumably with access to much better expert advice than you - had declared the Millennium Bug "one of the most serious problems facing British business and the global economy today. Its impact cannot be overestimated"?
But had the world listened to you instead of to Tony Blair, it might have been spared the estimated $300 billion it spent trying to solve this non-existent problem.
Add to that the many more billions squandered in the past two decades because of similarly groundless scares over dioxins, Mad Cow Disease, leaded petrol, asbestos, Listeria and salmonella, and you begin to understand the aggrieved tone of Christopher Booker and Richard North in their rather terrifying book, Scared to Death.
Why, the authors would like to know, are we so susceptible to doomsday scenarios which, on subsequent embarrassed examination, turn out to be a complete load of cobblers? And what, they ask in their longest and most contentious chapter, does this have to tell us about our current obsession with man-made global warming?
For a scare to take flight, they argue, it must fulfil certain basic requirements. It must be based on something true, which is then hysterically exaggerated into a major threat.
Its danger must seem universal (eg eggs, beef, computers). It must contain the right mix of uncertainty and scientific plausibility. And it must be talked up by the media and "remedied" by the government, usually at enormous expense to the taxpayer.
As a classic case of this, the authors cite the BSE fiasco, which began in 1996 when the health secretary Stephen Dorrell stood up in the Commons to announce the possibility of a connection between Mad Cow Disease and a horrendous new brain disease in humans called new variant CJD.
That night on Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman egged one of Dorrell's scientific advisors, Dr John Patteson, into agreeing that by 2005 no fewer than half a million people would have died through eating infected beef.
In the Observer four days later, the scare was escalated still further, with a prediction that by 2016 CJD victims would be dropping at the rate of 500 a week, the NHS would have disintegrated under the strain, and the French would have filled the Channel Tunnel with concrete.
In the wake of Dorrell's statement, the EU banned exports from Britain of all beef-related products. And for years to come - despite no scientist ever having said it was necessary - all British beef cattle more than 30 months old would have to be incinerated.
The cost of slaughtering these eight million animals would, of course, be borne by the taxpayer to the tune of £3.45 billion - or £57 for every man, woman and child in the country.
And for what exactly? Barely a year after his advice had set this hysteria in train, Dr Patteson was delivering his revised estimate of the number of deaths likely to result from vCJD. Not half a million but, er, 200.
A decade on, even the revised figure looks excessive. Incidence of vCJD has dropped to virtually zero, and the number of deaths has turned out to be little more than 100. And the evidence, say North and Booker, suggests that even those deaths were not caused by eating beef, anyway.
Most of the scare stories analysed in the book - with the authors' characteristically scrupulous attention to detail - follow a similarly depressing trajectory.
The one exception to the rule, they discover, is the organophosphate pesticides responsible for such genuine horrors as Gulf War Syndrome. No doubt the Government was greatly aided in its initial attempts to play down the problem by the scepticism of a public that felt it had been fed one health-scare story too many.
Surely the book's key chapter, though, is its devastating critique of the man-made-global-warming industry. Even if you'd like to disagree with the authors violently - and if your heroes include Al Gore and George Monbiot, you surely will - the chapter is well worth reading for the clear, methodical, well-documented way in which it analyses the growth of the phenomenon.
For "climate change deniers", it will be manna from heaven. For those in the opposing camp it ought, at the very least, to provide serious pause for thought.
James Delingpole reviews Scared to Death: from BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth by Christopher Booker and Richard North
Imagine you could travel back to Britain in 1998.
One of the amusing things you might do there - in between buying heavily into property and cheap gold - would be to pooh-pooh all those ridiculous panic-mongers wittering on about the Millennium Bug.
"It's just another of those modish, silly scares that never actually come to anything," you could declare with a knowledgeable chuckle on Newsnight and the Today programme.
No one would take you seriously, though. Why should they, when the prime minister himself - presumably with access to much better expert advice than you - had declared the Millennium Bug "one of the most serious problems facing British business and the global economy today. Its impact cannot be overestimated"?
But had the world listened to you instead of to Tony Blair, it might have been spared the estimated $300 billion it spent trying to solve this non-existent problem.
Add to that the many more billions squandered in the past two decades because of similarly groundless scares over dioxins, Mad Cow Disease, leaded petrol, asbestos, Listeria and salmonella, and you begin to understand the aggrieved tone of Christopher Booker and Richard North in their rather terrifying book, Scared to Death.
Why, the authors would like to know, are we so susceptible to doomsday scenarios which, on subsequent embarrassed examination, turn out to be a complete load of cobblers? And what, they ask in their longest and most contentious chapter, does this have to tell us about our current obsession with man-made global warming?
For a scare to take flight, they argue, it must fulfil certain basic requirements. It must be based on something true, which is then hysterically exaggerated into a major threat.
Its danger must seem universal (eg eggs, beef, computers). It must contain the right mix of uncertainty and scientific plausibility. And it must be talked up by the media and "remedied" by the government, usually at enormous expense to the taxpayer.
As a classic case of this, the authors cite the BSE fiasco, which began in 1996 when the health secretary Stephen Dorrell stood up in the Commons to announce the possibility of a connection between Mad Cow Disease and a horrendous new brain disease in humans called new variant CJD.
That night on Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman egged one of Dorrell's scientific advisors, Dr John Patteson, into agreeing that by 2005 no fewer than half a million people would have died through eating infected beef.
In the Observer four days later, the scare was escalated still further, with a prediction that by 2016 CJD victims would be dropping at the rate of 500 a week, the NHS would have disintegrated under the strain, and the French would have filled the Channel Tunnel with concrete.
In the wake of Dorrell's statement, the EU banned exports from Britain of all beef-related products. And for years to come - despite no scientist ever having said it was necessary - all British beef cattle more than 30 months old would have to be incinerated.
The cost of slaughtering these eight million animals would, of course, be borne by the taxpayer to the tune of £3.45 billion - or £57 for every man, woman and child in the country.
And for what exactly? Barely a year after his advice had set this hysteria in train, Dr Patteson was delivering his revised estimate of the number of deaths likely to result from vCJD. Not half a million but, er, 200.
A decade on, even the revised figure looks excessive. Incidence of vCJD has dropped to virtually zero, and the number of deaths has turned out to be little more than 100. And the evidence, say North and Booker, suggests that even those deaths were not caused by eating beef, anyway.
Most of the scare stories analysed in the book - with the authors' characteristically scrupulous attention to detail - follow a similarly depressing trajectory.
The one exception to the rule, they discover, is the organophosphate pesticides responsible for such genuine horrors as Gulf War Syndrome. No doubt the Government was greatly aided in its initial attempts to play down the problem by the scepticism of a public that felt it had been fed one health-scare story too many.
Surely the book's key chapter, though, is its devastating critique of the man-made-global-warming industry. Even if you'd like to disagree with the authors violently - and if your heroes include Al Gore and George Monbiot, you surely will - the chapter is well worth reading for the clear, methodical, well-documented way in which it analyses the growth of the phenomenon.
For "climate change deniers", it will be manna from heaven. For those in the opposing camp it ought, at the very least, to provide serious pause for thought.