Earth may become uninhabitable in 1By due to increasing brightness of the sun. In 3-4B years it will be too hot for liquid water on the surface.
Even if all industrial activity stopped tomorrow there's now enough CO2 in the system to guarantee a succession of uncomfortable and expensive droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires for thousands of years.
If it doesn't they will become more and more extreme very quickly.
If ocean acidification and warming destroy the foodchain in the seas, collapse on land will happen very quickly.
No, probably very much more different than that, more like rolling back on industrialisation and globalisation. Closer to 500 years than 50, without the same hope of "progress" that we had back then.
> "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species.
Yeah, we all learned about dinosaurs when we were little kids, but if humanity collapses there's no guarantee of anything similar developing after us.
Why wouldn't there be any hope of progress? What is the force that would make this regression permanent? As I understand it, the whole problem with climate change is not the outcome of the climate but the speed of change being too high for plants and animals to adapt, either by migration or evolution.
Maybe once day, aliens will drop by and discover what remains of humanity. And stories will be told of how, when the time came, our species decided to bury its head in the sand and hope the problem would go away. Or maybe that we attempted to create god to come rescue us.
Life imitates art. We refused to listen to the scientists.