- worst pesticides (DDT)
- sulfate aerosols from coal
- CFCs
- chloride based plastics
- asbestos and dust
- leaded gasoline
- heavy metals
- nuclear non-proliferation
We have also made strides in monitoring our environment.
So it might look like lots of doomsday predictions, but the reason why these didn't pan out was that humans actually put the work in to prevent that from happening.
You've got to remember, the Hole in the Ozone Layer was just as threatening at the time as Climate Change. It was literally going to fry us all within a decade because of extreme UV. We'd be living in underground bunkers by now. And then we stopped using CFC's and it stopped growing, and we're all good now, thanks. Except the next disaster that was going to kill us all came along...
We're probably already past the event horizon on that issue. At this point, there's probably no way to make it happen that doesn't involved laws.
There's no way any of us can change the situation individually. We're past the event horizon; nuclear war/catastrophic climate change is a certainty, and we're all going to die. Some brave individuals are protesting against it, and some people are preparing for it. But for most of us, it's a done deal.
I have a theory that it actually allows people to stop worrying about the future, and therefore we don't have to make long-term decisions. It's actually comforting in a "what's the point of saving money, we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust/climate heatwave anyway. Might as well spend it down the pub now..." way.
So you get us in the middle who just ignore it all because after hearing both extremes for so long you again get desensitized to it all.
I liked what Arnold Schwarzenegger said "I don't give a if we agree about climate change.". We should just work to reduce our emmisions anyway and make everything cleaner.
I do know people tend to be more receptive to slow change. You take their SUV's away in 5 years, there will be issues. You start slowly phasing them out, it will probably work better. Also efficeint cars seem to expensive. You can buy a used car that will last 5 years for $3000 that gets crappy gas milage, or a new hybrid car for $20,000. one can argue about saving movey on gas, but you will never save $10k worth of money and for people with little money that is what they need to get by.
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 > June 30, 1989
Articles in a similar vain are trotted out constantly, they just change the timespan and a few details. See recent example from FT:
https://biggerpicture.ft.com/global-risks/video/global-sea-l...
It's clear from the article's text that the statement was not that the predicted problems would occur by 2000, since "UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990" would give an absurdly short timeline.
It says "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown."
Conveniently, that was 30 years ago. I went to https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ . In 1989 the temperature anomaly was about +0.25°C. It's currently +0.82°C. A change of 0.57°C is just over 1°F. As predicted by the most conservative estimate.
I have been unable to find the report. The only people who talk about that newspaper article appear to be climate change denialists, who don't link to the actual report, and misread the article to believe that there's a prediction of a 3 foot sea rise by 2000.
The late 1980s is when the majority of scientists - and associated people like Isaac Asimov, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfB7Hzb7G2Q - were convinced of the evidence of global warming and its potential problems.
That built upon earlier work. Eg, "In 1982, Exxon's environmental affairs office circulated an internal report to Exxon's management which said that the consequences of climate change could be catastrophic, and that a significant reduction in fossil fuel consumption would be necessary to curtail future climate change. It also said that "there is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
There's no way you can claim that this is vindication of that prediction.
Without knowing the original article context, it's really hard to know what the exact prediction is. It seems clear from looking around that most people who reference the article are global-denialists as I haven't found anyone verify that the newspaper reporter was accurate in the report.
So, I looked for the report. I believe it's "The State of the World Environment 1989 - UNEP/GC.15/7/Add.2" dated April 1989 at https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/28295/... . The prediction on p23./paragraph 68 is:
> Even then, estimates of temperature increase vary widely—from 0.7°C to 9.6°C. Recent studies agree, however, that doubling the carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial level of 270 ppmv will probably increase global mean temperature by 1.5°C to 4.5°C (47, 48, 49)—but most likely by 2°C.
+0.82°C is larger than 0.7°C, so well within that predicted range - certainly on the low-end, but not enough to be rejected as "shit" given how the report explicitly states the uncertainty.
The 1 degree could have been 0.82°C rounded (up) to the nearest degree, or 1.476°F rounded (down) to the nearest degree.
I don't see an estimate of when, but figure 5 shows an estimate of 3°C rise by 2050, of which about 0.8°C come from CFC - CFCs weren't yet banned at that time. Which means Brown's prediction in the news article likely included a CFC component that didn't happen.
Thanks for the link to the original paper, I've never seen it myself either
The shit is now starting to hit the fan.
The predictions are that there's going to be a lot more shit hitting the fan, and these predictions are constantly being checked and re-checked.
The news reports first that the shit bombardment is coming, and now it's here.
And you complain about those news reports, and not those actually shitting on the planet?
You know the metaphor "bikeshedding", yes? The idea that there can be a lot of vigorous arguments over the materials, paint color, etc. to use for a bike shed?
The flip side of that metaphor, which I'll coin "atomicpowerplanting", is that few want to dig into the details to make a good decision. Going back to the original bikeshed email:
> an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far.
So, starting 40 years ago people started talking about the problems in graphite atomic piles, and made vague mentions of the Wigner effect, but the atomic power plant is important for national security and so it is built and put into operation.
This goes on for years. People point out some of the problems, and its knowledge is suppressed.
More years pass. And then the Windscale fire happens.
Perhaps the warnings are really important, but so complex that it's easy to atomicpowerplant?
I'm trying to point out that "shit bombardment" might be appropriate, if everything is going to shit.
Do you think there is substantial global warming caused by humans?
Do you think it's serious enough that we need to take drastic measures to reduce CO2 emissions?
Do you think the evidence was strong enough in the 1980s that they were right to be concerned about the future?
Do you think their claims - bearing in mind the range of the predictions as in the 1989 document I found - been shown to be substantially correct?
You haven't committed either which way, only to say that you've been bombarded by shit by the news. The 1989 article you pointed to, however, doesn't seem like shit. Why do you think it is?
- Nuclear war. This was the biggy. I remember at 25 I honestly didn't expect to live to 40. We regularly asked each other what we will do when (not if) the alarm goes off and we have 15 minutes to do something before being simultaneously cooked and blown apart in the shockwave.
- AIDS. When the AIDS epidemic broke, there were TV adverts with tombstones on them basically saying "stop having sex, it'll kill you". There were scientific articles explaining how the spread of AIDS was unstoppable and would destroy Western Civilisation within a decade.
- The Hole in The Ozone Layer. This was going to fry us all and we'd be living in underground bunkers by 2020.
- Y2K. Mass Media made a lot of this, painting pictures of planes falling out of the sky and distribution networks failing. It was very, very, anticlimactic (thankfully, and I played my part in that).
- Peak Oil. There was a fairly popular sentiment in the 00's that the oil was going to dry up before we were ready for it to. It turned out that fracking could alleviate that concern, and then they found a ton of new oil fields. But again, you can find media articles explaining how Western Civilisation was going to be destroyed by Peak Oil, and preppers getting themselves ready to survive it.
- Acid Rain. Less catastrophic, but still up there. I remember articles explaining how the delicate ecosystem of the English countryside was being destroyed by acid rain, and it would never recover, leading to the collapse of Western Civilisation.
There's probably more. The common thread is always "if this continues at its current pace (and it will because we have no way of stopping it), X will happen and that will destroy Western Civilisation". Sound familiar?
Red Scare (first and second), Communist takeover, "better dead than red".
Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicting world-wide famine by the 1980s, followed by the Zero Population Growth movement.
The destruction of the ozone hole.
For the more Biblical prophecy oriented, "The Late, Great Planet Earth", predicting the end of the earth by the 1980s or 1990s, sold 28M copies.
I could probably come up with more with a bit of research.
Perhaps if we'd never worried so much about the ozone hole, it'd be a lot bigger now. (it's still there by the way, just smaller)
Unless there was something else to stop the emission of CFCs, it would be huge by now, no question!
If anyone wants to know about the current state of the ozone hole, here's the newest report:
https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/SAP-2018-...
I like the plots on ES.24 that show the effect the regulations have on global warming (the older replacement coolants were powerful greenhouse gases). See that curve? It's going down. If the regulations are followed (and we have good precedent that they will be) we've been spared several centi-degree in warming by 2100.
This is the only really positive news I've heard so far in the context.
Some of these were/are real concerns. Certainly the threat of nuclear war was a real concern, as were CFCs leading to the ozone hole, and the threat of mass starvation. These changes were based on the realistic fear that millions or more might die.
(Continued illegal use of CFCs is not helping, btw.)
Some were/are not. Biblical predictions of the end of the world come up every few decades, and have for over 1000 years.
But aren't they all examples of being told by mass media that we're going "to die at any moment"? I can empathize that hearing about these for many decades can cause people to become inured.
Climate Change being real or not is not the point here. The point is that we have yet another generation of people believing that we're all screwed before we get old. Maybe that's it: it's actually easier for young people to believe that they don't have to make long-term decisions because they won't live that long.