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" For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right. Archpessimists are feted, showered with honours and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes. Should you ever listen to pessimists? Certainly. In the case of the ozone layer, a briefly fashionable scare of the early 1990s, the human race probably did itself and its environment a favour by banning chlorofluorocarbons, even though the excess ultraviolet light getting through the ozone layer in the polar regions never even approached one-five-hundredth of the level that is normally experienced by somebody living in the tropics – and even though a new theory suggests that cosmic rays are a bigger cause of the Antarctic ozone hole than chlorine is. Still, I should stop carping: in this case, getting chlorine out of the atmosphere was on balance the wise course of action and the costs to human welfare, though not negligible, were small. "
― Matt Ridley , The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves