Global Cooling: It’s hard to believe now, but from 1954 to the mid-1970s, the scientific and media consensus was that global cooling was the big environmental threat and would cause the mass destruction of species, habitat and food supply. According to the Business & Media Institute, the tide changed in 1981, when the New York Times kicked off the current global warming debate by quoting seven scientists who predicted global warming of an “almost unprecedented magnitude.”
Population Bomb: In his best-selling 1968 book, Paul Ehrlich predicted that by the 1980s, overpopulation of the earth would lead to the starvation of millions. The media and some scientists carried water for this theory into the early 1990s, virtually ignoring other scientists who by the late 1980s were predicting a dropping birth rate that would cause economic stagnation. Russia recently began paying women to have additional babies.
Cholesterol and the Evil Egg: Fifteen years ago, researchers and the media demonized cholesterol and scared people out of eating eggs to the point that industry sales plummeted. Now we learn that there are good and bad kinds of cholesterol — and eggs are good for you.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.
