A climate of fear - In Depth - theage.com.au
Isn't it obvious that these environmental doomsayers are deliberately trying to manipulate people? They are intentionally using scare tactics to panic people into going along with their bizarre public policy agenda. But this article deals with a good question: "how afraid should we be?" Maybe a little fear isn't such a bad thing where technology and climate are concerned.

It makes sense that the mushroom cloud, the great spectre of the 20th century, would return to spook the 21st. Bill McKibben, author of a foundation text of the climate change era, The End of Nature (1990), explicitly links the last great fright to the new one. Climate change is "the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century", he wrote last year. Some don't buy any of this "climate porn", as a UK think tank recently described such talk. Al Gore's movie is "bullshit from beginning to end", according to Ray Evans, a former Western Mining executive and author of the Lavoisier Group's Nine Facts About Climate Change (2006). For Evans and many others, man-made climate change panic is a bugaboo, perhaps even a hoax. Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It's a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don't want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.