Poor analogy. 23° C global average temperature increase, even slowly, will end a lot of life if nothing is done to address impacts. The rate of change isn't what causes those deaths; for 23° C warming, the terminal metric is indeed itself what kills, not the rate of change getting there.

That said, another section I've largely left out above is that it's effectively impossible to coordinate global action to meaningfully reduce human emissions from current levels. Europe and the US have actually already had declining emissions levels for decades now. This isn't a philosophy problem that you can talk your way to a solution on, it's a human psychology and game theory problem.

Trying to voluntarily convince global south nations to not adopt carbon-positive energy sources that solve real problems in the third world, and instead telling them to exclusively adopt your preferred alternatives (which do come with tradeoffs, be them in cost, complexity, availability/reliability) to appease what people facing food scarcity due to a lack of refrigeration due to a lack of electricity would consider "first world concerns" is an exercise in futility, and has some thematic emotional rhymes with colonial pasts where wealthy westerners demanded sacrifice from the global poor for the comfort of the wealthy westerners. It's a very tone-deaf plea.