Personally, I'm not worried about climate change right now so much as I am the fall of industrial civilisation as we are now more or less at the precipice of net energy.
What do I mean by that?
Well, the run up to modern day has included the exponential increases in use of fossil energy and other resources to the point that we in 2022 live much better lives than most kings and emperors did in antiquity. You can see from the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750 or so, that we have been on this binge of stored sunlight from the ground like a crack addict in a CIA backed crack den. All that cheap, abundant energy just waiting to be utilised.
Then we discovered oil and then gas for use, and that made things kick up a notch after coal.
But now, we don't get 100 barrels of oil for every one barrel we use to prospect. We are now tapping source rock with fracking, which is the definition of wringing a sponge out for the dregs.
The energy returns for solar and wind, the two major renewables, are nowhere near the massive returns we got from anthracite coal, light sweet West Texas crude, or the earliest gas fields inland. Those days are over, so we can only go for the expensive to find and hard to extract sludge that was never favoured first.
All the nice and cheap, easy stuff is gone.
This means that energy will rise inexorably from here on out. Forever. Solar and wind and batteries and hydrogen do not change this. All of them are, energetically, way less prosperous than even the poorest fossil fuel.
Which, it then follows, means that the amount of leftover energy profit from industry will dwindle. That means less energy goes to everything else that makes our economy, from art and culture to education and care. If you have a salary, and all your utility bills go up, then you can have less money to spend on everything else, or you cut back on the utilities and freeze or sit in the dark or drive fewer miles. You can't have both.
It's that, but at a civilisational level. And no human alive has ever seen this set of circumstances come about. It's literally never happened, just as the windfall from using fossil fuels to create an industrial civ from otherwise agrarian roots, has never happened before. And won't ever again.
For that reason, you could perhaps see some cause for optimism regarding climate change. After all, if we're now at peak coal, oil and soon, gas, then that means emissions will peak. True, there may not be enough cheap fossil fuels around now to break the RCP8.5 pathways the IPCC project as worst case (even if we're trending that way currently). However, this doesn't help us given we still have catastrophic increases baked in already, and there are runaway effects such as the Amazon becoming a net emitter of carbon instead of sink, or the methane hydrates in the Arctic being released en masse which could keep climate change going for far worse records than we could do by ourselves.
And of course, no one here has ever lived in a period where global prosperity goes down, and continues to go down, every year. We've only ever known continued growth, or lately, a bumpy plateaux of wealth.