I'm not denying that there are ongoing environmental issues that need to be dealt with. This is about doomsday predictions which have (so far) failed to come to pass.

I grew up in the 80s in the USA, where apocalyptic scenarios in religion, foreign affairs, the environment and science fiction were common. I recently went back and reread a book called Nature's End published in 1986. It's a fictional novel set in the mid 2020s where the Earth's population has had such a devastating effect on the environment, that a popular movement to implement a death lotto of 1/3 of the world's population is gaining serious momentum.

This book painted a pretty grim picture of what is now our very near future. And the population that was overwhelming the planet was 7 billion. It's 2018 and we're around 7.6 headed to over 8 by the mid 2020s. And yet it's not had near the same catastrophic impact that plenty of people thought it would back in the 80s.

Paul Ehrlich wrote the famous Population Bomb in the late 60s, predicting large scale famines in the 70s and 80s, and a need to implement policies to encourage reducing the growth rate to zero to avoid catastrophe. He has been wrong so far. At one point a popular estimate for the carrying capacity of the Earth was around 4 billion max. Now it's at 10 billion, with larger estimates based on future advances in technology (which is controversial and the range varies a great deal depending on how advanced and efficient future tech gets).

I also recall worries in the 80s about the rate of deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest. There were estimates that the rate at which it was being cutdown would lead to it all being gone by the late 90s. And yet, the majority of the Amazon remains. I'm not saying there aren't issues with deforestation of rainforests, but we haven't come close to cutting it all down yet.

And finally, there is global warming, now called climate change. Again, I'm not denying this is an issue we have to deal with, but I've heard my share of apocalyptic visions of drastic environmental changes due to having so much CO2 in the atmosphere.

I was listening to an recent audio book from a paleontologist who studies dinosaurs. He mentioned that the CO2 in the atmosphere when the dinosaurs first evolved was six times what it is now (2500 ppm).
This was leftover from several million years of active volcanoes in Siberia that had cause a 90% mass extinction a few million years earlier.

Yet despite a hot Earth, Life still flourished. Granted, he does mention extremes in weather due to the much hotter climate, and vast inland deserts. But some of that had to do with the geography of Pangea (one super continent with one super ocean).

There are more examples (peak oil, massive ocean garbage patches), but the effect of hearing that the sky is falling over and over is that I become a bit skeptical after a while. Maybe the really bad stuff has just been delayed (predictions are off by a few decades to a century). Or maybe the really bad scenarios are what the media likes to report on, even though they're outliers, and perhaps some environmentalists figured that alarming the public was a good way to curb worrisome behaviors.

I still see claims of environmental doom, and have read a couple recent fictional books similar to Nature's End. Also, the two Blade Runner movies present a similarly bleak environmental future. I am aware that a certain strain of libertarian and conservative politics strongly believes that human ingenuity overcomes all problems, and that environmental alarmism is dangerous, because it can result in policies that hold progress back. According to them, the Earth is not a limited resource for us (we can get energy from the sun, grow meat in labs, have engineered microbes eat pollution, etc.)

What do you think?