Different perspectives
An interesting combination of shows to watch on the same day is An inconvenient truth and Walking with Monsters.
The former explains how if we don’t stop pumping carbon dioxide into the air, the amount in the atomosphere will increase by something like 5-10 times, and the temperature will increase and the polar ice caps will melt and so much biodiversity will be destroyed and so on.
Then the latter tells, among other things, just how much the earth’s atomophere and climate has varied over its lifetime. Figures were given for the oxygen content of the atmosphere, from about 30% below to 40% above current levels. Carbon dioxide leverls varied even more - at one point they were 12 times as high as today. Average temperatures reached as much as 50 degrees above modern levels, which of course meant no ice caps. And through all this, life, in some form, thrived in those conditions. New species were born, others died because they failed to adapt.
I find that very reassuring. In the big scheme of things there’s actually very little we can do to destroy the cycle of life. At some point, millions of years from now, new life will evolve to adapt to the Earh’s environment, whatever it may be at the time. And it looks like it will be vastly different then to what it is now, regardless of our actions.
Of course there is still the issue of what we will do to the planet in the meantime, and thus what we will have to live with until we evolve to adapt.