I'd also argue (with no real basis of course) that the type of dread that climate change and mass extinction invokes is possibly of a different kind than most of the crises that you listed.

Here are some things I remember from that time off the top of my head:

We were on the brink of environmental collapse as CFCs were destroying the ozone layer

Acid rain was going to destroy lakes, trees, rivers, eventually killing us all

HIV was not well understood and very very scary

Waco/Branch Davidians siege

The Oklahoma City bombing

The Unabomber

Desert Storm

The Bosnian War

of course, 9/11

> It seemed like the adults generally knew what they were doing, and could be counted on the to the right thing.

I wager that's an artifact of youth, it seems to me we all think the times when we grew up were easy to understand, everything's going great, etc.

It's that we aren't making any progress, and generally are moving the wrong way.

There will never be a lack of issues to tackle. It's "how" we tackle them that defines our era. And as far as I've seen, we do a lot more arguing and debating about what we're talking about than we do fixing problems in the real world, myself included.

At that time, we had a functioning government that (relatively) promptly intervened to implement a cap and trade policy on sulfur emissions.

I'd probably be ridiculed by most of the younger crowd here for my views on global warming, I mean climate change, but as someone who distinctly remembers the nonstop warnings of the Ozone Layer - we're all gonna die - I just don't put much energy into worrying about the latest issues related to the environment.

Part of me knows that I'm probably underestimating the actual problem, but I've been hearing warnings for years that never amounted to anything.

I wonder if this is why the boomers, who were literally practicing nuclear bomb safety in school (much like school shootings now) and have had another few decades of dire warnings that never materialized, are even more unlikely to care about the environment or much else about which the younger generations are so fearful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Listening to the cultural zeitgeist is one thing, but actually listening to the scientists who are doing these studies or people who are summarizing their findings is another. I really recommend reading through the NCA summary https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ and sitting with the data and what it says.

The short answer is that you are vastly underestimating the problem

In the case of CFCs, we know that a global response largely solved the problem. In the case of global warming, where a trillion dollar industry has been pumping out spin since they first realized global warming was really happening in the 1970s, we have not see the same response and we’re right on the trajectory predicted by reports in the 1990s — only now it’ll be much harder to do anything:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

When all you've heard for the past 40 years is the end of the world is around the corner, and that doesn't turn out to be true, you start to tune it out.

CFCs and the ozone layer are a good example: there was a wolf, there was decisive action because people listened to the warnings, and we managed to beat the wolf.

Carbon emissions are an entirely different scale of problem though because so much of our economies is built on them.

The key difference is that, with the possible exception of MAD and the Cold War, during all of those crises people were in near-universal agreement that there was a crisis, and were actively working to fix it. Climate change is a unique problem in that a depressingly large percentage of the population believes it is a myth, that there is nothing wrong and no need to do anything.

That's where the despair is coming from. If everyone understood the seriousness of the problem and was determined to fix it, I have no doubt we could do it. We've solved bigger problems in the past. But right now we're not even trying. Even the progress that has been made has mostly been an accidental byproduct of market forces like renewables getting cheaper; the actual amount of deliberate effort to fix climate change is close to zero and seems likely to remain that way.

I don't think that's accurate. Take AIDS for example, there were plenty of arguments over the right approach, with very little consensus. Even with WW2, there were plenty who said "America needs to stay out of this war" and "We shouldn't have used atomic weapons".

But we aren't, not even close

I agree there have always/frequently been dire challenges facing us, but that is no logical foundation for arguing "it worked out ok before, it'll work out OK this time"

The fact that our society is dependent on destroying the environment and all of the related politics is a much more difficult set problems to solve than a overblown disease scare, war, or geopolitical struggle.

But the difference is that all of those required affirmative action to cause a global catastrophe, someone had to reach out and press a metaphorical button. With global warming the status quo will get us all killed.