Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jan 03/00) - The results are in and the Y2K scare tops the list as the "Most Dubious News Story of the Year."

Business and science writer and founder of the National Anxiety Centre in Maplewood, New Jersey, Alan Caruba has been handing out the awards for the past nine years for the most alarming news stories of the year.

Caruba said the Y2K problem was voted as this year's biggest non-event due to some planning and preparation, but the whole thing was just over-blown.

"The whole thing was looked after with a little preparation and some good old fashioned Yankee know-how," Caruba said.

Behind Y2K, Caruba said global warming finished a distant second, but feels the issue is even further from reality.

"Global warming has become one of the most sensational hoaxes ever perpetrated," he said. "Freon, in layman's terms is a heavy chemical, that simply cannot and does not reach the ozone layer."

Caruba said other headlines making the list were food scares arising from genetically-modified crops, the Greenpeace campaign against plastics and chlorine and the freon and pesticides ban.

Caruba said people just don't have enough information to make informed decisions, so they tend to err to the side of caution, which, in turn, often leads to a flood of misinformation.

"Most people simply don't have the scientific knowledge to make a judgement to dismiss these claims," Caruba said.

The fear of the unknown is nothing new, with people resisting science throughout the ages.

"Historically, science has had to struggle against every advance in science we take for granted today," he said. "Galileo was told to knock it off and was put under house arrest for the later part of his life for saying, 'Hey, the earth circles the sun, not the other way around.'"

"The church told him no, it doesn't jibe with the plan."

Despite the gains in science, Caruba said many are still oblivious to the ways of the world.

"One out of five Americans still thinks the sun goes around the earth," he said. "Most people don't have a clue of what goes on past the simple act of turning on a light."

The "Chicken Little" syndrome is something that can only be overcome through education, Caruba said.

"It's fear of the unknown," he said. "It's part of human nature to want to believe in ghosts and demons; supernatural things and the human race has to get beyond that."