It's honestly not that there are issues, as you have mentioned, there have always been. In fact we're a lot better off on almost all fronts than hundreds of years ago.
It's that we aren't making any progress, and generally are moving the wrong way.
There will never be a lack of issues to tackle. It's "how" we tackle them that defines our era. And as far as I've seen, we do a lot more arguing and debating about what we're talking about than we do fixing problems in the real world, myself included.
All of this pales in comparison to the coming devastation of climate change and the global pollution crisis, which actually should be included in that 90's list as well - and the 80's, and 70's...
I remember talking to my fundamentalist Christian friend in high school who literally said his last goodbyes to his friends. The next time I saw him was awkward.
> We were on the brink of environmental collapse as CFCs were destroying the ozone layer
I'd probably be ridiculed by most of the younger crowd here for my views on global warming, I mean climate change, but as someone who distinctly remembers the nonstop warnings of the Ozone Layer - we're all gonna die - I just don't put much energy into worrying about the latest issues related to the environment.
Part of me knows that I'm probably underestimating the actual problem, but I've been hearing warnings for years that never amounted to anything.
I wonder if this is why the boomers, who were literally practicing nuclear bomb safety in school (much like school shootings now) and have had another few decades of dire warnings that never materialized, are even more unlikely to care about the environment or much else about which the younger generations are so fearful.
Listening to the cultural zeitgeist is one thing, but actually listening to the scientists who are doing these studies or people who are summarizing their findings is another. I really recommend reading through the NCA summary https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/ and sitting with the data and what it says.
The short answer is that you are vastly underestimating the problem
You need to look at what was done in response to those warnings before you can say whether they were wrong — otherwise you’re like the people who say Y2K was a waste of money because they didn’t see the bugs which were fixed.
In the case of CFCs, we know that a global response largely solved the problem. In the case of global warming, where a trillion dollar industry has been pumping out spin since they first realized global warming was really happening in the 1970s, we have not see the same response and we’re right on the trajectory predicted by reports in the 1990s — only now it’ll be much harder to do anything:
The nonstop warnings of the Ozone layer were probably among the reasons for the quite decisive switch away from CFCs, preventing the problem from getting truly bad. It's an interesting balance: you need to push it through to people that something needs to be taken care of, it's mostly successful and everyone is annoyed that it wasn't so bad after all, why the panic? (I wonder if Y2K is a good IT equivalent: Not much happened, because people were worried before and stuff got fixed, but the worry jumped over into mainstream not seeing that distinction)
When all you've heard for the past 40 years is the end of the world is around the corner, and that doesn't turn out to be true, you start to tune it out.
Yup, I’m over 40 and there’s definitely a “Boy who cried wolf” effect in play here. I’m tired of having to be constantly outraged about the latest environment disaster that’s sure to kill us all this time!
Except that unlike in the story, there really were wolves, and we managed to take them down.
CFCs and the ozone layer are a good example: there was a wolf, there was decisive action because people listened to the warnings, and we managed to beat the wolf.
Carbon emissions are an entirely different scale of problem though because so much of our economies is built on them.
Here are some things I remember from that time off the top of my head:
We were on the brink of environmental collapse as CFCs were destroying the ozone layer
Acid rain was going to destroy lakes, trees, rivers, eventually killing us all
HIV was not well understood and very very scary
Waco/Branch Davidians siege
The Oklahoma City bombing
The Unabomber
Desert Storm
The Bosnian War
of course, 9/11
> It seemed like the adults generally knew what they were doing, and could be counted on the to the right thing.
I wager that's an artifact of youth, it seems to me we all think the times when we grew up were easy to understand, everything's going great, etc.