Why be burdened by highly publicized fears that decades later did not turn out to be true?

Michael Crighton writes about scaring ourselves:

It may be mostly forgotten now, but back then many climate scientists shared his concern: Temperatures around the world had fallen steadily for 30 years, dropping half a degree in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. Pack ice was increasing. Glaciers were advancing. Growing seasons had shortened by two weeks in only a few years.

At this time we wasn’t concerned about global warming, we worried about global cooling and the coming ice age. Within a decade, scientists would be decrying a global warming trend that threatened to raise temperatures as much as 30 degrees in the 21st century. Such predictions implied palm trees in Montana, and they have since been revised downward. By 1995, the UN midrange estimates were about 4 degrees over the next 100 years. Although concern about warming remains, the prospect of catastrophic change seems increasingly unlikely.

He mention more scary stories like machines are taking over (it never happened, instead we are regarded as overworked, overstressed and sleepless), people fearing cancer from power lines (they shown to be false?) and now people velcome magnets as healthful (superstition?), nowadays people are afraid of saccharin, cyclamates, deodorants, cell phones and the list goes on an on. And the magnificent Y2K, experts predicted collapse in computers.

Human beings never get tired of discussing the latest report that tells us the end is near, it's only convincing me that we might regard each new claim with skepticism, search information and make our own mind up.

As I didn't knew Michael Crighton, I made a search on google.

He denies the global warming, he argues that scientific evidence for global warming is weak. Crichton rejects many of the conclusions reached by the National Academy of Sciences and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—for example, he does not believe that global temperature increases in recent decades are most likely the result of human activities.

Right now earth is clearly getting warmer, but I believe that the jury is still out. I am somewhat skeptical of global warming.

Some few links about global warming and Michael Crighton:

Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion
Real Climate
Bad Science, Bad Fiction:
In Michael Crichton's work, the two are intimately connected.
Michael Crichton Takes on Global Warming in Latest Work