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."
