Lately I've been wondering if a full-scale thermonuclear exchange might actually save us in the long run. Our endlessly growing industry is going to eventually wipe out much more of our biosphere than even a worst-case nuclear exchange would. Imagine that. It might actually end up dampening our industry and giving us more time. Sure, fallout is a terrible thing--you have a bunch of deadly isotopes hanging over a region with a half-life of 80,000 years or so--but what is the half-life of a Sahara desert? How would most of the world hunker down and survive if nearly all latitudes resembled that for the next few million years? What about when our oceans completely collapse? There's already dead zones the size of entire continents out there. How long will that last when the whole thing is a dead zone and has to start over? If that happens, all large, complex life on land will be 100% fucked. That would last so, so long that even if humankind somehow miraculously managed to survive (fyi: they wouldn't) the survivors would no longer be anatomically modern humans by the end. They would have slowly differentiated and adapted and evolved through several stages of new, distinct species along the way. Our sentence for the crimes we're carrying out today will be that long.
The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful.
The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.