When I was a kid climatologists thought an ice age was imminent. The logic was that there were so many pollutants in the air that more sunlight was being reflected than ever before. The earth's temperature has dropped from the 1940's to the 1970's and boy, were we in trouble. It never came.
(NOTE: Global warming will end up the same way).
Like JR is saying, we have a tendency to extrapolate the very recent into a long term patterns and this is accented by popular books predicting things like Y2k, Global Warming, Global Cooling, The Coming Recession, the end of the world, another World War. The press spoke of "another Vietnam in Afghanistan", "another Vietnam in Iraq (1990)".
This is the first thing I thought of when I read "It is happening everywhere."
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