There are so many problems to solve that the totality of them becomes overwhelming. Unfortunately, rather than trying to be a positive point of change in even one of those things, the totality is disregarded for the sake of personal comfort and entertainment. (Not ALL are this way, but I am speaking in a societal context).

If your fantasy requires a billion children to die in terror and agony, then no, yours would not be the truly moral position.

And still, in spite of having the goddamn Laws of Thermodynamics in their favour, the doom-peddlers still manage to be wrong every. single. time. And if some day, years, kiloyears or megayears down the line they turn out to finally get it right? Well, they will be as fucked as the rest of us, so it’s not like they are going to have the last laugh.

If you want to talk about “human beings as a species” we have 300,000 years behind us.  If you want to talk about “us as a civilization” we have about 10,000 years behind us.  That’s being generous considering the number of human civilizations that have already peaked and subsequently declined.

We know failure is possible.  We do not know whether it is inevitable.  Concluding the apocalypse won’t occur because it hasn’t yet occurred is not a logically valid inference.

Edit: Alternatively, if you want to use the 4.6 billion years of earth’s existence as evidence against apocalypse, certainly it’s fair for me to cite exinction events as direct evidence for apocalypse. There approximately one every 100 million years on average and the last one was 75 million years ago. The fact that humans have been around for 300,000 years without major incident is not particularly impressive.

I’ve seen people drag food from trash cans, including young children and teens.

I see this daily in the USA, recession or no.

Look at the theory of global warming: It is premised almost entirely upon the notion that the Earth’s temperature *should* remain stable.  Um … Why should it?!

No, it’s premised on the fact that CO2 is opaque to infrared radiation but transparent to visible radiation.

The desire to do something about global warming is premised upon the notion that the Earth’s temperature should remain stable.  This premise is the result of a simple observation: human civilization has only ever existed during a period of apparently unprecedented climactic stability.  This probably has to do with the fact that high-yield agriculture requires knowledge of local climate which in turn requires local climate to be roughly the same from year to year.

That is, it’s not for the Earth’s sake that we might want to do something about global warming but our own.  George Carlin said it best: the planet ain’t going anywhere — we’re the ones who are going to get screwed.

That’s the thing about history: you have to do it after the fact.

So, while it is true that the Dutch, Germans, Swedish, etc are not seeing apocalyptic levels of poverty, that is not the case in many places around Europe. Yes, the Eurocrisis is actually killing some people (including elderly who can no longer afford to buy medicine, in countries forced by the EU to cut healthcare budgets and introducing copays in already decimated households).