As Inhofe attacks the media for exaggerating the threat of global warming, the GOP continues to pursue its election strategy of making terrorism and the memory of 9/11 the defining criteria for voters come November. John Mueller, political scientist at The Ohio State University, makes a strong case in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs that the terrorism threat has been overblown and exaggerated by the government and the media. Comparing terrorism to global warming makes for an interesting risk assessment exercise.
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Humans are strange animals. We have such a deep need for social order that, when that order is threatened, we'll do irrelevant things in an effort to preserve it.
The Scientific Misconduct blog has identified a case of censorship based on fear:
Thanks for posting this vital article. Another devastating, empirical attack by John Meuller (and his son, then a professor at the Air War College, Maxwell AFB) on the self-serving neocon doggy "sky is falling" propaganda demonstrated that the number of deaths resulting from the sanctions (comprehensive blockade) on Iraq resulted in more deaths than were produced by the combination of all the standard WMDs in world history. Will be happy to supply the full cite if you wish.
Alas, Homeland Security continues to ratchet up what in the sociological literature is called "a moral crisis" by participating ( and co-sponsoring?) science-light conferences on such lofty topics as "faith based" methods to deal with anxiety arising from terror ("theirs" not ours, of course). A recent instance was on 3/23/10 at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, Bethesda, MD. Evidently in an effort to put a benign gloss on this malicious foolishness, the speaker from Homeland Security claimed to be a Menonite pastor. Who knows, perhaps he was what he claimed to be, but it struck me as about as likely as a serving 4-star general keynoting a meeting of the War Resistors League...
I fear that such events constitute the sort of abuse of framing and "expert" dogma or received truth or conventional "wisdom" which renders intelligent discussion of vital issues like global warming more difficult by raising skepticism of all government sponsored speakers and conferences, including legitimate ones which adhere to the highest standards of the scientific method and which meticulously provide the best estimates of levels of uncertainty and which afford audiences adequate opportunity for participation such as q. and a.
Tom