Raising a child in a doomed world

I'm going to admit that more than 10 years ago I wasn't so sure about global warming. Not an outright denier, just slightly sceptical, mainly because I felt there was a bit of mania surrounding it. But at the time I sought out a climate change scientist who sent me a few papers, which I read and was at least sold on the idea of CO2 levels and global temperatures rising, though with little conclusive evidence the two were connected by causation, although that was the most likely scenario.

More than 10 years on, climate change scientist's predictions have turned out to be terrifyingly correct, and I feel embarrassed for my previous naive scepticism. If now I meet a climate change denier/sceptic, I find this XKCD comic [1] is the most convincing way of communicating the problem, addressing both the idea of a recent ice age, and also the rate of change.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1732/

Does the author never ride in a car or shop in a strip mall or box store? Life is much better than it was a hundred years ago, and the author should read some books by Julian Simon.

"looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed."