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by StargazyPi 3387 days ago
It was on the cover of the New Scientist 14 years ago! https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2378%20/
2 comments

I remember getting that issue years ago, it seemed like over-hyped fear mongering then just as much does today.
They said it 'could be gone within 10 years' 14 years ago, and (I'm not an economist, I could be thinking of this wrong) yet bananas are cheaper than ever before when accounting for inflation. Not only that, the relative price of bananas have held steady for 5 yrs now. These sorts of articles should include a subtitle stating "... if nothing else is allowed to adapt or react except for the threat mentioned in the article"

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&mon...

Pretty sure Sea Ice is the same, it was supposed to be gone a long time ago (at least during the summer months). If you say anything about it though people collectively lose their shit.
Not saying it isn't. Just that it was supposed to be gone, and it's still closer to the levels in the late 70s than it is to gone even at it's lowest.
Frankly, I think it's a good thing if an article saying "X is doomed within ten years" keeps resurfacing year after year, long after its own deadline has passed. Maybe people will notice that that sort of reporting tends to be nonsense.
It is weak thinking to state that rare high risk events that haven't occurred no longer require risk mitigation.
You may have drawn a different lesson from "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" than everybody else.
It is quite strange that you are comparing a biosecurity threat to a fairy tale. There is actual scientific evidence of a pathogen that eliminated a banana type and caused massive economic loss, and you pretend that there isn't. We have biosecurity alerts regularly and some times quarantine procedures fail, e.g. http://www.outbreak.gov.au/current-responses-to-outbreaks/wh....

It is the same sort of self serving delusion that leads to climate change denialism.