When good guys lie: misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place - baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Glenn Hodges

What the Post did not report was that NHTSA was not the only one to have put PR concerns ahead of public safety. When NHTSA finally proposed its rule requiring warning stickers on automobile visors in 1993, a number of auto safety advocates (all strong air bag proponents) pushed for mild warnings to avoid alarming the public. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety argued that "the proposed warning could mislead the public by implying that air bags can cause fatal or serious injuries that would not have occurred in a comparable vehicle without an air bag," even though that was exactly the case. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety actually said there wasn't a need for a permanent label, that a warning in the owner's manual would suffice. "It would be counterproductive to present this information by way of unnecessarily alarming statements," AHAS argued.

Not surprisingly, opponents of mandatory air bag laws are seizing upon this affair as ammunition. It's too late for them to derail the federal mandate, but look for this story to become part of the permanent lexicon of anti-regulatory crusaders. It would be a shame if this were to tip the balance against a valuable safety mandate down the road. Federally mandated seatbelts have saved countless lives, and air bags are credited with preventing roughly 1,100 deaths to date.

Aiding and Abetting

Crusaders who withhold the whole truth, mislead, lead exaggerate often unwittingly strengthen their opposition and weaken their own cause, especially when they're claiming the moral high ground. No one seems more prone to this than environmentalists, and it's on the biggest and most contentious issues that the problem is most pronounced. The worst-case scenarios for global warming and overpopulation, for instance, foretell changes so catastrophic that most other concerns would be rendered virtually moot. Some people, looking at those high stakes, throw caution to the wind and use everything in their arsenal, no matter how loosely tethered to scientific data, to get people's attention and force action.

On a 99-degree day in June 1988, as the nation sweltered through the latest hot, dry summer in a decade of record high-temperature years, climatologist James Hansen appeared before Congress and proclaimed that he was 99 percent certain the earth was in the midst of man-induced global warming. "It's time to stop waffling so much and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now," Hansen told reporters that day. Newspapers had a field day, and Hansen's colleagues had conniptions. After all, concern over global warming was barely a decade in the making, and 10 years of high temperatures do not a climate change make. "The variability of climate from decade to decade is monstrous," oceanographer Tim Barnett told Science in 1989. "To say that we've seen the greenhouse signal is ridiculous "

Most climatologists believed there just wasn't enough data to make a conclusive judgment. Only a decade earlier, after 30 years of relatively cool temperatures, climatologists feared we might be entering a new ice age. Though there was certainly reason to believe in 1988 that global warming was a real possibility, even a probability - atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, had increased 25 percent since the 19th century - there was no way of knowing yet whether the higher temperatures of the '80s were a trend or a statistical blip.