Last night I started reading The Skeptical Environmentalist by statistician Bjorn Lomborg. He notes that he started out as a typical left-ish Greenpeace supporter who believed that the world is coming to an end because of imminent environmental catastrophe. Then he started looking into the statistics and discovered that, no, the sky is not falling.
So that got me to thinking. As previously mentioned, in America folks on the left think that climate change is the greatest threat to the world, whereas folks on the right think that Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat. But what if the alarmists on both sides are wrong? What if the statistics showed that Islamic terrorism is not a great threat either?
Then this morning, lo and behold Bruce Schneier posts about a book by John Mueller entitled Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. It seems that Mueller may have done for Islamic terrorism what Lomborg has done for climate change: bring the facts to bear and show that doomsday scenarios are simple alarmism. I'll be reading his book soon.
Facts are wonderful things.