There are people who profit from selling this doom. Buy less of it.
I'm not a binary thinker, so just because I'm saying "don't feel quite so doomed" does not mean I'm advocating for the polar opposite blindly sunny disposition either. I said "buy less of it" rather than "stop buying it" quite deliberately. But doom has been "real soon now!" for, like, 60+ years, and it's an important perspective to keep that in mind when you hear today's confident doom-mongers promising immanent doom Real Soon Now (TM). (More than 60 years, really, you can find people complaining about how society is going downhill in antiquity. But the modern brand is about 50-60 years old.)
This one happened in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
The difference now is that we feel potentially doomed by inaction as opposed to reckless action, even though one could think of our environmental damage as the result of many compounded actions without awareness of their result.
And your comparison to the 1980s is even more nonsensical considering we came very close to doom a number of times in the 50-60 years you cite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
I would consider this support for my point, not contradiction.
Before replying, please do me the courtesy of at least trying to imagine how I might consider that the case.
I also reiterate my point about this not being a binary situation, because I can't help but think you did indeed, despite my explicit discussion, interpret it as a claim you shouldn't be worried about anything.
I imagine a lot of people thought things were going to be fine too as the Roman Empire collapsed. Or at the start of the Dark Ages. Or when the Black Plague began. Or when the 1929 market crash that kicked off the Great Depression. Or on the eve of both of the World Wars.
The point being: yes, most of the time, humanity muddles its way through its crises successfully. Until one day, it doesn't...
For example, the fall of Rome did not involve a decrease of average living standards. Rather it is the opposite that is the case as it happened at roughly the same time as the abolition of slavery in Europe.
You should not conflate crises that affect only the ruling classes with crises for humanity.
Now you're right that it wasn't exactly a "crisis for humanity" because it only affected one part of the world--western Europe (the eastern Roman Empire continued), and also didn't involve a massive die-off, just a regression of civilization in that one area.
There has certainly been lots of doom and gloom in the past, with some (not all) of it quite justified - look how close we came to nuclear annihilation multiple times during the cold war. It was only cool headed individuals that kept all of humanity from a tragic end. Those fears were well justified, and we're getting to a similar situation right now, so close that William J. Perry thinks we're at the highest likelihood of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis.
Those war-based risks are of a very different (political) nature however, one that doesn't persist after the war pressures subside. With climate change, we're in a much different situation, and one that I'm actually not sure we're up to solving. If we look at progress so far, I don't think it looks good.
It's a shame it's being converted into a political and tribal game. We're talking about the survival of an advanced species here (hell, it might be the only one). There is literally nothing more important than that.
No we're not. That's not the risk of global warming. Such false extremist ideas are part of the tribalism you mention and make it worse.
Humanity would have survived, lots of people would Die, but not everyone
Just because people don't cooperate to do the thing that you personally want them to do doesn't make them selfish. They are still cooperating doing something else which may turn out to be even more valuable - improving technology and helping each other with real, and possibly even more serious problems like disease and happiness. You can't judge that that they're working towards the wrong goal, it's just different to your personal goal.
What I'd like to know, is: "Is democracy suited to solving issues like climate change" ? It seems to me, that, solutions to climate change mostly mean a reduction in consumption & energy use (at least in the interim), and, what politicians will be voted in on those policies?
Noam Chomsky gave a talk[1] about a month ago about that question, but his version substitutes intelligence for democracy. Species that are successful at maintaining their niche over evolutionary time spans are not selecting for intelligence. Survivability of a species, population size, and speciation rate generally decrease as intelligence rises.
I might believe we have a chance as a species if we were doing anything even remotely realistic to address our actual long-term threats, but we aren't. Instead, the actual actions being taken seem to be almost unanimous trying to accelerate us into disaster.
How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_h...
According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a population of 4,000 humans living in Tasmania were cutoff from contact with the mainland after the Bass Straight flooded 10,000 years ago.
In this extreme isolation, they regressed beyond even stone-age technology, including losing knowledge of how to catch fish or start fires.
https://books.google.com/books?id=PWnWRFEGoeUC&pg=PA312&lpg=...
https://youtu.be/ZmHY9DkD1Hw http://www.mikeswindmillshop.com/instructional-lessons/mikes... http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm