Similar with Y2K --- it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."
I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it's halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.
We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven't been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.
Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer
Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
What happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%,l eading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.
Conservatives aren't used to the concept of "Problems go away when you do something about them."
They are stuck in the mindset of "The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don't catch their problem."
Remember when cavemen unga bunga'd about dinosaurs? Whatever happened to those dinosaurs! It's like the Flintstones wasn't actually the ground breaking documentary it was or something!
I've always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There's no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I'm aware of, anyway.