(continuing my previous comment)
The fact is, the weather has always caused issues. About 100 years ago in the US North East there was massing flooding and great loss of lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_be...California, for another example, seems to flip-flop between big droughts and massive floods every couple hundred years based on slight changes in atmospheric conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California
"Geologic evidence indicates that "megafloods" occurred in the California region in the following years A.D.: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, and 1750. Prior to European settlement, these early floods predominantly affected the indigenous peoples of California."
(And of course then there are West Coast major earthquakes...)
Tens of thousand of years before all that, a mile or two of ice settled over the North East of North America among other other parts and the globe. Imagine the problems of living somewhere the snow stopped melting in summer and just piled up year after year for centuries. Our ancestors somehow made it through that. As well as later catastrophic flooding from breaking ice dams that might have raised sea levels by 10s of meters in a few days wiping out many coastal villages.
Then there were failed harvests from the Little Ice Age. And there was associated social dislocation from other climate change, like the apparent "Sea Peoples" who invaded Egypt and elsewhere.
Back to the present day, we've got all this tech to both reduce emissions (solar etc), and to ameliorate consequences (weather satellites, boats, railroads, 3D printed housing, insulation, LED lights, indoor agriculture, air conditioning, amazing materials, and so on).
As "nucrow" pointed out in a graph they linked to, the annual number of climate-related deaths from 1920-2021 from about 500,000 to about 10,000. Why? Presumably better weather forecasting and improved infrastructure are part of it.
But rather than optimism, some people are forgoing having kids because they are worried about climate change meaning there is no future for the human race. They are spiraling into dysfunctional despair.
I pointed to Reddit "CollapseSupport" previously to be kind because there is a genuine community there of people helping others deal with their fears, and anyone on HN who really is in despair over this climate change topic might find some help there (among other places).
But if you really want to see what ongoing doomsterism and despair looks like, "/r/collapse" is the companion to that other group:
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/
I find it interesting and educational reading -- including about new things to worry about like post-Covid increased violence. There are many anecdotes there about personal despair and local despair. I have to agree many of them are things I share some concern about. The question is, in a world that has invented social media where people can see the worst stories from around the planet due to for-profit algorithms that promote engagement even if it is toxic to the user, do those selected anecdotes add up to an overwhelming trend?
I saw something similar as far as a zeitgeist of worry starting in the 1970s with Peak Oil fears that grew to a crescendo in the early 2000s (e.g. Michael Ruppert, perhaps contributing to his death), and fought against that despair somewhat then in various online discussions. But who really worries about peak oil now with EVs and cheap solar? Yes, it was good to be concerned about the transition, but humanity invented and deployed solutions (in part due to the concern). The USA always had hundred of years of coal supply -- but it would have caused a lot of ecological damage to use it.
In the 1800s, there was a despairing concern about Peak Whale Oil too, presumably, given declining Whale populations from all the harpooning.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From...
I saw another zeitgeist of fear in the 1980s with fear over nuclear war, especially coincidental with the movie "The Day After" and other previous things like the downing of Korean Airlines 007. Sadly, nuclear war is still a very realistic fear, even if such war is ironic, as I suggest in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Odd that the media and most people seem to have mostly stopped worrying about nuclear war over the decades as a day-to-day worry, even though Russia is increasingly rattling the nuclear option a lot.
That is a much more likely apocalypse than climate change, especially since the lives of most US Americans are totally dependent minute-to-minute not so much on the US military's technical prowess as instead on probably-lowly-paid Russian service technicians probably using scrounged parts to maintain a 1970s-era "Dead Hand" computers (which the US tried to sabotage) so they don't launch nuclear missiles accidentally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
I would expect that is the sort of issue that Freeman Dyson too might be more concerned about than rising CO2 levels (including as he wrote a peace-exploring book about the nuclear arms race called "Weapons and Hope").
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope
"In this book, Professor Dyson explores how national decision-makers think about nuclear war, and how this isn't always well-considered or intelligent thought. He also applies the same criticisms to how leaders in various peace and disarmament movements think about nuclear war. The result's an unflinching assessment of how we think about actually using (or defending ourselves from) the world's still-massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons. (Vance Frickey, 2018)"
Of course, there are always other fears like (more?) engineered plagues. Here is a list of my technology-and-society related fears circa 1999: :-) https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
In any case, as linked above at spiked-online, there is a plausible case that rising CO2 is a good thing. And as I previously linked to, it's quite possible that we have already passed the maximum level of atmospheric warming (although there still might be knock-on effects as systems that are reservoirs of "coolth" like the deep oceans continue to absorb heat until some equilibrium point). That means that any effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions and keep CO2 at current levels may be essentially wasted because it won't affect atmospheric warming and it also harms the greening of the planet and the blooming of deserts. So such money would be better spent on either mitigation or other socially beneficial projects (like, for example, eliminating malaria and/or easily curing it?).
In general, these are the sorts of systems effects that Freeman Dyson was concerned might be missing from the models or related policy. He presumably felt some things that should be better understood before making certain broad policy investments. For example, there is an argument that plants growing faster given more CO2 might be weaker or less nutritious (mentioned in part in the article), so another issue to be explored as a system effect.
Personally, I am all for replacing fossil fuels with decentralized renewables like solar and also energy efficiency including passive-solar homes (and maybe someday fusion power, perhaps even via local-scale "Back to the Future" "Mr. Fusion" household systems). Such innovations produce less local air pollution and water pollution than fossil fuels burning does which otherwise harms and even kills a lot of people via health issues (potentially costing in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually plus many lives as an externality of fossil fuel use). Smog and oil slicks are unpleasant to be around and cause a lot of environmental damage to other creatures (including mercury pollution from burning coal which makes many fish unfit to eat much of). Decentralized electrical power sources help shift political power in a more decentralized way too, which can potentially help shift the overly-hierarchical wealth-concentrated society we live in towards a better balance of meshwork/hierarchy (using Manuel De Landa's terms). Such decentralized power systems also tend to be more resilient, with longer time-scales of stand-alone operation, which makes them better to have around in times of most disasters or war. So, we should move away from fossil fuels for those sorts of reasons, not because of potentially-flawed-or-incomplete doomster academic models.
(A supervolcano eruption would definitely be bad for solar though, and we'd be better off with nukes or geothermal or fusion in such circumstances, or even desperately going back to burning fossil fuels for a few years until the air cleared.)