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Originally Posted by YeOldeCurmudgeon
Have you read through the thread? It certainly doesn't appear that you have based on this post. There are some excellent posts in it, and I'm not including any of mine in this assessment.
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There are indeed. As well as some--well--antagonistic posts. But my compliments to the Thought Police. They've allowed this discussion to take place even though there appeared to be some justifiable reasons not to do so.
But let's take another tack here--not to try to predict the dangers (or not) that lie ahead, but to look back on how far we've come. In 1960 I was 12 years old, just entering Junior High. The total population of the Earth in 1960 was 3,034,949,748 persons. I remember the discussions in school at the time: about how horribly overcrowded the Earth had become; that in a very few years, maybe 30 at most, the earth would not be able to sustain such a population and the calamitous days ahead were going see mass starvation on a scale never before seen, and wars fought for the sole purpose of obtaining the food supplies of other nations. That was 1960, and the rate of population growth was over 2% per year. Today, the Earth supports a population of just a shade under EIGHT billion people, getting close to three times as many as there were in 1960 (with the rate of growth slowing to less than 1% per year), and I'd venture to guess that, per capita, there are far fewer people starving in the world today than in 1960. Huge advances in farming knowledge and technology, better land management, more efficient shipping and storage, etc. have all contributed. We learned and adapted.
One post mentioned the pollution in Los Angeles during the mid-20th century. I remember those days. Not just Los Angeles but many other cities had the same problem. The technology of the day was dirty--no doubt about it. But the Clean Air Act of 1963 set in motion a series of reforms and technological improvements particularly in manufacturing (emission scrubbers, better disposal of pollutants, catalytic converters, etc.) that has made a world of difference from then to now. Look at pictures of major American cities of the early 1960s compared to pictures of today and you will see this. We learned and adapted.
Finally, energy. Back in 1980 the world was thought to have 642.160000253469 billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 2015, that number had exploded to 1615.40000067651 billion barrels--well over twice as much as was known in 1980. (index mundi website). And in a turn of events that can only be described as ironic--the known oil reserves of the Arctic grow by leaps and bounds year by year, and with the north polar ice cap receding, that oil becomes more and more recoverable. Not only that, but our methods of recovery, transportation and refining become cleaner and more efficient year by year. We learned and adapted.
Those of us blessed with long lives know far better than anyone else A) just how the naysayers dominate the news; and B) just how often those naysayers are proven wrong. Books like "Earth In The Balance", once the Bible of the doom-and-gloomers, are today far more noteworthy of the horrendous Inaccuracy of their predictions than for anything else. Bad news sells, after all. But looking to the past gives us, in my opinion, a far more accurate barometer of how the future will be going than any doom-and-gloom predictions can. We get it right. Not nearly as fast as many think we should, but we do.