I think that it's the predictions of doom that call attention to the risk, and allow us (or have done so far) to avert the crisis just in time.

because of massive political/economic/agricultural/etc shifts to avoid those outcomes.

if nobody ever made an issue about banning CFCs do you think the ozone would be better off today?

It is. Elrich's population bomb was an earlier example that has been wrong so far. I recently re-read Whitley Strieber's Nature's End, published in 87. Although a fictional account of the future similar to the Blade Runner movies (in terms of environmental impact), it embodied the idea at the time that the Earth couldn't support several billion humans. Set in the mid 2020s, the northern forests were dead from acid rain, the Midwest was a desert and the Amazon had mostly burned down. 7 billion humans had completely decimated the biosphere.

So I'm a little skeptical whenever the latest doomsday predictions roll around.