What a terrific blog post. I am the same age as the author, and he is so spot on I can only wish I had written it myself:

My real problem is simply that in my 48 years I’ve lived through so many pack-panic attacks over nothing that I won’t fall so easily for the next.
Your parents or grandparents may know what I mean. Go ask if they remember all those plagues we were told would surely smite us if we didn’t sign some cheque, praise some god, or vote for some politician.
Ask if they remember scares like the nuclear winter, DDT, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, Repetitive Strain Injury, bird flu, the millennium bug, SARS, toxic PVC, poisonous breast implants, the end of oil, death by fluoride, the Chernobyl doom, the BSE beef that would eat your brains, and other oldies and mouldies.

And here's how the game is played, over and over:

You want to know how they’re tricked up? First, you get a possible problem - preferably with some skerrick of truth.
You then get some expert, or maybe an Al Gore, to make wild assumptions or faulty extrapolations. You know the kind: that if a dodgy levee breaks in New Orleans, the whole world is gonna drown.
And then you whistle for the carpetbaggers—journalists keen to sell a sensation, business keen to sell a cure, and politicians keen to sell themselves as the solution.
And bang, you have a mass panic, with more people gaining from the scare than are game to expose it.

The author goes on to describe all the scares of the last half century: Overpopulation and the inevitable mass starvation, natural resource depletion, DDT, global cooling, acid rain, Chernobyl, Y2K, mad cow disease, bird flu, repetitive stress injury. The only thing left to add is Ebola, which was going to wipe out entire cities as soon as somebody got on a plane in Kinshasha and flew to the west. Ten years later, and we're still waiting.