Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

There is some interesting insight to be gained from the elites vs masses psychology here. However I'm very skeptical of looking at history to try to predict the future of our civilization. Population and resource utilization as a percentage of total available on our planet have never been anywhere near what they are today. If civilization is to survive we somehow need to transition work environmental and total resource externalities into our capitalist model—in other words we need deeply embrace sustainability as a fundamental cultural value. Currently no one is thinking beyond the length of a human lifetime; that coupled with an axiomatic need for infinite economic growth is guaranteed to fuck ourselves over sooner than later.

Guy McPherson has a disturbingly well sourced and pessimistic summary of how climate change will affect humanity in the next few decades. In his view it's too late to stop it and we're finished:

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-u...

The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in the arctic and easter island.

The only collapse theorist that I know of who's developed a collapse theory that avoids ideology is Joseph Taintor. Probably because he is not an economist but a professor of archeology.

NASA is an acronym, yet most British publications stylize it as a word - Nasa.