Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

I was surprised to find this article on the global warming debate in the NYTimes. If you skim, careful to not make the mistake of assuming the article is denying global warming. It is not. The argument is that GM is being oversold not fabricated.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

But perhaps playing to public fear is justified if the threat is great enough and not accurately understood. When (if ever) is it okay to intentionally inflate risk or dramatize consequences to encourage certain favorable behavior? I can think of a couple examples of this in practice:

1. The sex education I am familiar with in public schools appears to try to scare students into abstinence and safe sex.
2. Terrorist threat and existence of WMDs to gain support for war in Iraq.
3. ???

Any others? And if you endorse any, do you have to endorse all "availability cascades." If not, what rationale is there for selectively supporting only those you agree with? It seems to me that this position requires a pretty arbitrary argument against honesty.

HT: Cafe Hayek