Neither of these worst-case-scenarios were avoided by chance. They were avoided by the hard work of decades of politicians and scientists.
The world was a single soldier executing a single order away from a superpower-scale nuclear launch at least one time (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831).
Farming process improvement nearly tripled the yield of existing land in the past half-century (https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-land-spared-as-a-r...).
We do people a disservice to assume that just because we didn't personally solve a problem, the problem either didn't need to be solved or wasn't solved by human effort.
It's also wrong to assume that improvements only happened because of dire threats. It's not like we haven't been trying to increase agricultural yields for thousands of years.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-gl...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-t...
>A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then.
I'm pretty sure I did. No amount of quoting political activist sites or popsci journalism sites is going to change what I experienced.
My experience of the 1960s was we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or be drafted and sent to "conventional" war. I didn't even live in a country with mandatory military service, but was subject to the cultural hegemony of one that did.
My experience of the 1970s was we would all die of a nuclear holocaust, freeze to death in the coming ice age, or starve and freeze because we ran out of oil.
My experience of the 1980s was that we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or subsist in a wasteland caused by no ozone layer and acid rain everywhere.
My experience of the 1990s is limited: I had small children and a mortgage. Nothing existed outside of that for me. It's surprising how little you care about nuclear holocaust when you're chronically sleep deprived for months at a time and are concerned about making sure you have food clothing and shelter for a bunch of dependents.
The last 20 years we're doomed by terrorists or maybe the reactionary governments that respond to terrorism, global warming, and possible nuclear holocaust.
I'm not impressed by post-hoc studies with cherry-picked data used to assert a political position. All those publications are going to roast in the coming nuclear holocaust anyway.
As a elementary school kid in the late 80's early 90's our school had everything from guest speaks, to posters, to t-shirts for everything from:
-hold in the o-zone layer -D.A.R.E. -AIDs -nuclear bomb test drills
It seemed one day over night the O-zone layer posters went away and now it was global warming. And sure all of that may make sense in terms of maybe a science class, but this was more of a general lets not teach and indoctrinate. Plus the AIDs stuff always seemed weird, teaching about sex/needles to kids as young as 6. I wouldn't be surprised if that all went away as well for the new topic de jure. I think DARE was also finally pulled from schools and had all kinds of other scandals surrounding the programs that were exposed.
There were much bigger fires past due to lack of fire supplies. What's your point?
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/149434/2020/Historical-Weather-...
https://weatherspark.com/h/y/149434/1960/Historical-Weather-...
Hottest year on record for Australia was 2019 (just ended).
Almost 3 degrees F over average.
High temperatures dry things out and make them easier to burn
2019 was Australia's hottest year on record.