maybe you're too young, I've heard the doom and gloom sine the 80s and those older than me have heard it since the 70's. If you look out across a sea of people there will always be a group of people holding a sign reading "Repent sinners, for the end is near".
Hearing doom and gloom since the 80s is consistent with the scientific evidence. It was in 1988 that James Hansen spoke before a U.S. Senate committee about human caused global warming. And it's not as though things have been getting better. They're getting worse, and at a faster than expected rate.
Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age, and it was also the "population bomb." If neither of those happened, we were going to have a global thermonuclear war. Doom-and-gloomers will always find reasons to preach doom and gloom.
> Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age,
No. That was an artifact of hype in the mainstream press. If you look at the research being published at the time, the consensus was fairly consistently for warming scenarios (by a factor of 2:1 during the most cooling-friendly years):
