David Ropeik
Retired Harvard Instructor, Author
David Ropeik is an award-winning broadcast journalist, a Harvard instructor, and an international consultant in risk communication and risk perception. He’s also the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.
Dear CEO The vote in Washington requiring labels for foods with GMO ingredients is coming up. You’ll lose. Even if you win the vote, you will lose the war…because […]
It is so easy now to mock the millions who freaked out at the “War of the Worlds”, the Halloween radio play 75 years ago this week about an […]
PIPELINES!!!!! Evil! Dangerous! Huge threats to the environment! MUST BE OPPOSED! Could there be a clearer example of how naïve and simplistic we’ve become about the harms of modern […]
The most puzzling thing about the madness of the arch conservatives who have taken America hostage is, how can they be so deep inside their own extremist ideological worldview […]
What a golden age these past few decades have been for learning about how human cognition works. And what a humbling age, as we discover the truth that satirist […]
Have you seen the Chipotle Grill animated video “The Scarecrow”? More than four million people have, since it was first published last week. It’s a cry against unsustainable industrial […]
This is just despicable. Reprehensible. Maria Rodale, the CEO of Rodale, Inc., has likened the purposeful murder of more than 1,400 people in Syria by sarin gas to the […]
Numerous online tools are available to help you figure out your risk of a wide range of health outcomes; diabetes, stroke, heart disease, various kinds of cancer, (see Your […]
If a doctor looked at you or me thoroughly enough, with all the diagnostic tools now at her disposal, she could almost certainly find something wrong. A spot here, […]
We hear the admonishments all the time; smoking ___ cigarettes a day will take ___ years off your life, drinking ___ glasses of alcohol a day will take […]
Ideology often drives people to madness. History is full of frightening examples. The most recent may be California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House Science Committee, which […]
Jim Morrison and The Doors sang “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” Sorry, that’s not enough. In order to reduce your risk of being […]
A group of experts advising the U.S. National Institutes of Health has added their voice to a rising chorus calling for a War on Cancer…Phobia. They have suggested […]
We sometimes get risk wrong. We fear some things more than the evidence says we need to, and some things less than the evidence says we should. […]
You know those nature documentaries, the ones where hungry polar bears risk their lives attacking dangerous walruses, or starving lions put their lives on the line attacking fierce horned cape […]
As extreme weather events seem to be increasing around the world, changes consistent with the kinds of things climate change is predicted to cause, many people are realizing something […]
Control. Without a sense of control, we feel less safe. With a sense of control – whether we actually have that control or not – we feel safer. A […]
It’s been a bad few weeks for RadioPhobia, the powerful fear of radiation that far exceeds the actual risk. From three different places come new examples of this version […]
It is impossible to overstate how important this is. On Tuesday, President Obama will lay out a plan for dealing with climate change, and reports indicate it will include regulation […]
A recent decision regarding genetically modified food by an appeals court in the Phillipines was a dramatic victory for the emotional appeals of environmentalists, and an ominous defeat for […]
In their continuing efforts to warn us of the threats of climate change, researchers regularly note new harms being produced by a rapidly changing biosphere. Sometimes the threats are […]
This blog often talks about risks that we fret over too much. Time to talk about one we worry about too little; the air we breath…indoors. For a number […]
I remember wondering that day as I was getting ready to go to work if I should pack a toothbrush. A Superior Court judge was set to rule on […]
The most revealing and important line in Angelina Jolie’s OpEd in the New York Times today is not the one in which she reveals she has had her breasts removed […]
The Dow Jones Average is about to break 15,000. Any day now the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will break 400 parts per million. Think there’s a connection? A couple other […]
The idea of Big Brother government snooping on us, listening in on our phone calls, intercepting our e mails, watching us with all kinds of surveillance devices, offends most […]
Last week taught us some important lessons about fear. One is that fear is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we let fear affect us. It spurred racism […]
What a revealing real-time lesson we are living through right now in how humans respond to risk. More than a million people in Boston and several large surrounding cities […]
So how terrorized will we be this time? Maybe terrorized is too strong a word. But how much more worried will we be, how much more uneasy, how much […]
You know how sometimes when you put your foot in your mouth and say something really stupid, you try to recover but only stammer out something even dumber and […]