Alarmism
Alarmism is the production of needless warnings. Naturally, use of the word implies that one does not share the concerns of the person giving the warnings, and that the anticipated danger is overstated.
Some areas where warnings have been called alarmist include:
- The threat of terrorism, nuclear or biochemical attack, etc.
- The possibility of an oil crash in the near future.
- The possibility of an economic depression or Stock Market crash (similar to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 or the "Black Monday" in 1987 Stock Market crashes).
- The economic damage that was supposed to occur because of the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion.
- The possibility of global warming, and other environmental dangers.
- The prediction of end times events from the Bible.
- The alleged erosion of civil liberties.
- The perceived tendency toward more economic and political globalism and away from nationalism.
- The 2002-2003 SARS incident (Though a large number of people did die, many claimed that SARS would become a global catastrophe, claiming the lives of tens of millions).
- Possibility of a bird flu epidemic, killing hundreds of millions.
- Mutual assured destruction was the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war, causing mass extinction.
- Nuclear meltdown scenarios on a larger scale than the Three Mile Island incident or the Chernobyl disaster (see The China Syndrome).
- The population bomb, or Malthusian catastrophe, to cause mass starvation.
- The possibility of an asteroid collision with the Earth, causing mass extinctions.
- Y2K bug causing breakdown of the world's computer systems.
- Transhumanism as the world's most dangerous idea.
The accusation of alarmism is not always correct; if one had said in 1933 that Adolf Hitler posed a threat to all of Europe, one might have been accused of alarmism. The accusation is proven false if the warning comes true.