10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List

The media is full of scare stories, but everything is relative. The New York Times give you the lowdown on ten things that you shouldn't bother worrying abut on your vacation.
Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things:

I just got home from my vacation, and I forgot the sunscreen, ate a hot dog, and drove around with the windows down AND the A/C on! Link -Thanks, Duke!

(image credit: Viktor Koen)

Update 7/30/08 by Alex: Treehugger has a "rebuttal" of this John Tierney article: Link - Thanks Chris!

FYI, John Tierney is a right-wing shill who shouldn't be trusted when it comes to scientific studies that bother conservatives and libertarians (e.g. global warming, health risks from chemicals, etc.).
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Hmm..true. These things may not kill you, but that doesn't mean that they are harmful to you. The whole plastics thing really got me...there have been a lot of studies on the negative effects of bisphenol-a, like in Japan there was a study liking high levels of BPA to infertility. Just like how lead in old paint & in old pipes doesn't kill you, but can negatively effect your health. BLah blah blah....just had to say something about how much I didn't like the list.
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Re: hot dogs, a friend of mine saw a small boy choke on a hot dog and die. Apparently, because of the size of the hot dog, it is impossible to extract a choking piece from a young child's airway without specialized tools - and in many cases, kids don't survive the trip to the emergency room.

Hot dog is the one thing I won't feed my children without cutting the meat into very small pieces.
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Didn't George Carlin point out that the whole purpose of human existence was to design and manufacture plastic for mother nature? That mother nature NEEDED plastics so she's allowed us to inhabit just long enough get the plastic production up to speed just before we annihilate ourselves? He's got a video on this somewhere on youtube.com -- oh yeah, here it is -- about 5 min 18 sec. into this video Carlin lectures on the importance of "plastic" :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw&feature=related
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"[Plastic bags] take up much less space in landfills [than paper bags]."
How can you take up less space than 0? Paper bags rot and turn into compost, which is not something plastic is known for.
His whole list reads like a really, really stupid person refuting ecological talking points: polar ice melting? It's not record-breaking this year, so we're safe for all eternity! Poison in your food? Well, if you didn't consume so much you wouldn't get ill! He has never encountered a worm hole in person, so we can stop worrying about climate change, poisonous chemicals and climate change (his _actual_ argument)! Laugh, it's funny!
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I think the entire "Global Warming caused by Man" thing should be added to the list.

The Earth has been warming and cooling regularly over it's entire life history. Change is the only constant. I'm glad we are in a warming trend now, because in the last ice age, the area I live in was deeply covered by glaciers. That would have made it difficult for me to get to and from work each day. :)
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Sammy, I sure hope you don't live near the sea because death by drowning would also prevent you from getting to work each day.

Just because global warming doesn't affect /you/ badly, doesn't mean it won't affect others.

(Sorry for off topic, but self-centered comments like that get to me).
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Brachinus: Maybe that's another thing you should scratch from your worry list. Right-wingers aren't as bad as you've been led to believe.

Kirkburn: Perhaps you should visit a seashore sometime and look for evidence of how the sea levels have varied over time.
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Despite all the worry about plastic vs paper bags, "global warming" (soon to be followed by worry about "global cooling"), phthalates in toys, or any others of the myriad of things to worry about, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!
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Alex,

Thanks for sharing our piece: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/29/10-things-to-scratch-from-your-worry-list/

We think we have some decent points regarding a couple of the issues. We don't touch on the hot dog, worm holes or sharks, but a few of his points were so far from accurate that we had to address them.

Thanks,
Chris
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Evil Pundit: you mean 1998 was a huge spike? Sure. That doesn't mean there's been a 10-year cooling trend since then.

Dave: I spend way too much time arguing politics on a forum where half of the righties still think Obama's a Muslim, so don't tell me I'm out of touch with how not-bad they are. And BTW, maybe try visiting a climatologist (not a chemist or TV weatherman) and asking about global climate change, what's almost certainly causing it and what's probably going to happen as a result. The answer won't be as reassuring as the industry shills you've been hearing from.
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They debunked the myth of driving with your windows uses more gas versus using a/c on MythBusters. The truck driving with the a/c on ran out of gas much more quickly than the truck driving with the windows down. Both of my cars go quite a bit farther on a tank when I don't use a/c as well so I don't think their experiment was a fluke.
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