The most expensive scare, which became a scam, was the campaign against asbestos. In this case, a genuine source of harm from amphiboles (which had been tackled long ago) was confused with the harmless ‘white’ asbestos which formed 90 per cent of all asbestos-containing materials. Neither the media nor the law-makers armed themselves with the facts to resist the combined pressures from interest groups, lawyers seeking personal injury fees and contractors earning inflated sums to remove the innocent fire-resistant material. In Britain and America, bankrupting litigation was brought against companies dealing with the innocuous substance. Juries began awarding $25 million each to plaintiffs who showed no symptoms of ill health. A collective madness took hold. Lloyds of London was brought to the brink of ruin, a fate passed on to many of its names.

Booker and North take these and other telling examples not just to highlight past folly but to warn about the future. In particular, they relate them to the global warming debate. Scientific experts (many of whom, on closer inspection, transpire not to be climatologists at all) who assert rising temperatures are largely man-made have so collared governments, research funding, hearts, minds and the ‘factual’ output of the BBC that to express contrary evidence is to be equated with engaging in Holocaust Denial. Western governments are committing themselves to the sort of emission-cutting targets that are either unsustainable or economically ruinous. But what if this latest weather cycle, like so many in the past, is as much or more to do with natural variations in the sun’s activity?

Only time will tell whether a measure of scepticism towards the most alarmist climate claims is well founded. In the meantime, the similarities in method between those pushing the man-made global warming agenda and the various blinkered boobies and charlatans responsible for the catastrophes dissected in Scared to Death demands a more pluralistic response than almost anyone in our public life is prepared to countenance. That alone, should worry us.

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