The fact that we’ve worried about both cooling and warming does not mean we should not worry about either. The point is that the media likes to predict impending doom, preferably with a firm date attached. And there is something about human psychology that makes us want to believe it. One of the most striking examples of this apocalyptic tendency came in 1968, when a group of academics, civil servants, and industrialists met in Rome to talk about the seemingly insoluble problems of the modern world. It was a pessimistic age: the techno-optimism of the 1950s and 1960s had given way to concern
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