[glenra]

In my more cynical moments I think there is some sort of Conservation of Worry law. Human society is designed by evolution to be worried about stuff. If you render irrelevant all the more traditional threats such as starving or getting eaten by a lion, people just focus the same amount of worry on ever-smaller threats.

From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.

It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.