Beware of trendy "truths".(Bird's Eye)(Editorial)

We know from our mail and our surveys (latest example on facing page) that readers of The American Enterprise tend to be independent folks who resist intellectual fashions, and like to make up their own minds. A big reason they subscribe is because they want clear, evidence-based articles that ignore (and, when appropriate, puncture) the conventional wisdom.

Plenty of puncturing takes place in this issue. Progressive Americans may think they "know" that world population is mushrooming dangerously, that nuclear power is risky, that suburban sprawl is paving over paradise, that global warming is today's most urgent crisis. But in the pages that follow we show that each of those common claims falls somewhere between misleading and plain wrong.

Humans are pack animals. And the media that feed us our mental images are even more herd-like than other parts of our society. So a trendy consensus will often evolve without solid foundation.

When I was in high school, the big environmental panic was "a looming ice age." Consider this excerpt from "The Cooling World" in the April 28, 1975 edition of Newsweek:

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically.... The evidence has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up.... Meteorologists are almost unanimous [that] the resulting famines could be catastrophic.... A survey completed last year reveals a drop in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere.... The present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.... Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate, [like] melting the Arctic ice cap by ...