IWF’s event for Christopher Booker and Richard North’s fabulous book, Scared to Death, is just one week away! Here are the vitals:
Date: April 16th
Time: reception at 5pm, book discussion at 5:30pm
Location: Heldreth Building in Washington, DC
More details and RSVP information available here.
If you are curious about the event, I’d recommend checking out Carrie Lukas’ review of the book in yesterday’s Washington Times. Here is a snippet:
As Christopher Booker and Richard North detail in Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth, recent decades have witnessed a flurry of scares that have gripped the public. These scares exact high costs: Wrong-headed policies are put in place that make us more vulnerable instead of less; costly measures are taken that disrupt economies and the public needlessly worries and changes their lives to response to the latest media bogeyman.
Mr. Booker and Mr. North identify a dynamic through which a marginal public concern mushrooms into a full-blown scare – from salmonella and mad cow disease to DDT and asbestos, and focus on what may be the greatest, most costly scare of all: Global warming.
Competing factions drive a scare’s progress. There are pushers “whose interest is to promote the scare and to talk it up, such as scientists for whom it provides the promising of winning public attention or further funding,” and blockers whose interest is to downplay it. The lay reader is unlikely to be surprised at the role that the media and politicians play in sensationalizing a threat.
More jarring is the role that the scientific community plays. As the authors write: “At the heart of every scare we have looked at has been a group of scientists or technical experts making a wrong or exaggerated guess on the basis of what eventually turns out to be inadequate data.”
Read more here.