I've heard this tune before

When I was a little kid attending public school in Berkeley California in the late Sixties I was convinced by my teachers that because of the population explosion the whole world would starve and I would not survive to the age of 21. People in India were having too many babies. Bangladesh. I remember population curves that were exponential. Food could not be grown fast enough to feed us all. I was truly affected by this. What happened? Now I hear that the population will top out in the next 50 years and start to decline. The European birthrate is substantially below 2.0 in many places. "Not enough white people are breeding!" is the sinister undercurrent. "Too many old people!" is the cry in Japan. This will apparently cause the collapse of the world economy. We're not starving. The opposite is true: everyone seems to be fat all over the world including the very poorest countries. Funny how it has all proven wrong in 30 years.

Now I hear all about global warming. We are all going to die, I hear. The ocean is acidifying (kind of like acid rain...what happened to that?) and that the corals are dying and the ice caps are melting and we are all going to die. While I don't want to discount the evidence for global warming, the evidence in 1969 for population explosion was also irrefutable. Somehow I can't get too excited about global warming because I lived through the population explosion scare. Herpes was going to kill us all. Acid rain. Killer bees. AIDS was going to wipe out the planet. None of this crap has happened. I contribute this to the ingenuity of mankind. Does this make me an optimist?