After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.

But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:

-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.

-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).

-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...