[margalabargala]

I have the sense that people back in the 60-80s had a bit of an innate trust for scientists born out of the rapid technological progress that preceded that time period, but that has since gone away.

Things like CFCs were taken seriously. Things like radiation were taken seriously (for better or worse, yielding our insane regulatory landscape around building new nuclear power plants).

The last major thing that scientists warned about that was really taken seriously (in the sense that something was done about it before it had/would have had massive negative effects) was world overpopulation, with the publication of things like "The Population Bomb" and China's one-child policy, etc.

Unfortunately, that one was gotten wrong; we now know that without any intervention, world population will tend to moderate itself and we won't actually see mass starvation due purely to too many people. I think that error was the first major blow resulting in people no longer really trusting catastrophic predictions.

I wonder what the world would be like if instead climate change was put forth as a catastrophic issue with the same fervor back then.