I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid e

I would make a cash bet with anyone who wants it that by, say, 2050, barring some major singular catastrophe like a nuclear war, a supervolcano or an asteroid event, the metrics of environmental and human well-being globally will be better than they are today, and that we also adapt with only modest, possibly even minimal suffering (demonstrable by solid evidence of a causal chain) from the warming we've already caused and likely will continue to cause in the intervening decades. Climate change has its dangers, but it's not and need to be an extinction level catastrophe on the scale that much of the hive-minded preening, fetishism and virtue signalling here likes to claim in the comments. It's largely a gradual process that our extremely adaptive and innovative species will adjust to, just as it has to many other changes in history with far fewer technological and social resources at its disposal. Also, the arguments about individual people feeling guilty for not doing their small part to effect global change on greenhouse gas output are idiotic. They're a misguided deviation of blame against those who it's easiest to browbeat for the sake of feeling morally superior (one's neighbors, friends, family and so forth) with no realistic mechanism for turning such brow-beating into a meaningful global change. Historically, the big sea changes in social habits have been brought about by specific, personally and measurably visible incentives to adapt those changes, either positive or negative. If people and their societies will behave differently for the sake of mitigating global warming, they'd need the same sort of incentive structure, or a personally beneficial willingness to wide adaption of real, beneficial innovations which reduce some aspect of our environmental impact. Urbanization and industrialized agriculture are two imperfect but usable examples of this. Both reduce our destructive footprint to smaller percentages of the world's surface, and both happen because concrete self-interest, measurable on an individual level, drives them.