I had a book when I was a kid that talked about global warming with a very 1990s distant future point of view on the situation but it did discuss how it would play out, what would happen first, what would be the point of no return that kind of stuff.
Everything that it talked about happening in a hundred years has already happened.
The melting of the permafrost in Siberia was one of the books examples of a world ending highly unlikely/near impossible scenario - of course that's also happening rn.
I can't recall the name of the book for the life of me but the reality is that my entire life the people that run the world have known about this problem and only made it worse.
Folks with the right combination of money and luck will weather a 3C rise just fine. It's not the end for humanity, hopefully it'll be a reminder to the survivors not to shit where you eat.
The proliferation of plastic throughout all locations and scales of the biosphere scares me more than climate change. It's inescapable, even Jeff Bezos has plastic in his brain.
Reports like these scare the crap out of me every time, and they tend to cause apathy since attacking the causes of the problem seems nigh impossible at an individual level. It's hard to keep up hope for a non-catastrophic outcome to the point I resort to nihilism. Maybe humanity just isn't meant to make it past this great filter.
Humanity isn't to blame for this - this isn't a problem that came into existence on its own. The world was made this way exactly by people who put themselves in their positions - be it a CEO, Board Member, Politician - there are people who literally decided to go down this path.
There are not enough of these decision makers to fault all of us. We are talking about less than .001% of people whose actions and choices have made a victim of our species.
Humanity is the earth's highest form of life - we are more important than the planet itself. If you think the earth like a Mother - when are the offspring not more important to a Mother than herself? It's the same for us. This isn't a natural filter, not a true one and not one that we couldn't have overcome already had we started long ago.
We are not expendable. We don't kno that we are not the first life in the universe to attain this level of intelligence, we don't know that there are others, we don't for certain that life will always produce intelligence so we don't even kno that there will certainly be something like us in the future - all information that we have gathered has shown us that we are alone.
This makes us the most important thing that we are aware of. You can be nihilistic if you'd like but that will generate more apathy, which brings us full circle to the people that run the world while we work our lives away.
We should all just stop - pandemic style, do nothing until our survival is our highest priority. That would be better for us all.
I disagree with the premise that humanity is important, that's a matter of opinion espoused by humanity itself. Of course we're going to find ourselves important. You're free to ascribe value to that opinion, but I'd bet if squids, penguins or lions could talk they'd have the same opinion about themselves. We are not the apex of evolution (we're killing ourselves, right?) or the end goal. We've just found ourselves on Earth like we suddenly woke up here and realised survival requires balance on a knife's edge. We very much are expendable as evidenced by the almost inevitable fact that we are expending ourselves.
It's ironic, humanity needed the energy and resources to progress to the point we realise we're killing ourselves to do it.
That said, there's a ton of things we could do collectively to fix these problems but individual action requires realising there are problems (or believing they exist if you will) and then taking enormous personal risk to fix them. Take your example: Do you propose to strike? To stop generating an income? I just don't see that happening since survival at an individual level on a worldwide scale will likely take precedence until it's too late.