I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of declaring over and over again that the massive moral panic over the climate and water impacts of individual chatbot prompts is ridiculous and based on wild simple misunderstandings that take a few minutes of googling to disprove. A few people have commented along the lines of “This makes me wonder what other big widely talked about catastrophes are fake.” I figured it’d be fun to start a public list here. Feel free to message me with any, either here or at AndyMasley@gmail.com.

I want to avoid three categories of fake catastrophe here:

• Things that only fringe people believe are catastrophes, like vaccines being worse than COVID. You should be able to go to a party of educated adults and find at least a few people who believe them, and when they talk about them others just nod along without questioning them.

• Things you can only believe aren’t catastrophes if you have a very specific political or religious outlook. I want to avoid things like “It’s bad that people are less religious now” because that’s too dependent on the values of the person speaking.

• Things without a clear expert consensus. For example, while I enjoyed The Economists’ coverage of the “myth” of the decoupling of wages and productivity, this is actually pretty contentious, and there are a lot of good counter-arguments to how they present it.

I’ll end with some things that I expected to be fake, but when I looked into them turned out to be real

Fake catastrophes

“More people in the US are getting cancer”

The total rate of cancer in the US has increased since the year 2000, but this is just due to the population being older on average now. If you adjust for age, incidents rates of cancer fell by 5.7% between 2000 and 2021.

“Cell phones/5G/Wifi cause cancer”

This one feels like it’s at the edge of being fringe, but I’ve been to multiple parties where educated people bring it up as if it’s real, and others nod along. There are multiple ways to go about showing that it’s wrong:

• As mentioned above, the average US cancer rate has actually dropped once you adjust for age since 2000. In this time, everyone has completely surrounded themselves with cell phones and wifi. It would be weird if every last one of us

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