Same issue occurred with Y2K. Dire threats, nothing occurred on actual date. Fact is there was an immense effort to update millions of lines of code throughout our infrastructure -- apparently successfully. Do recall several cases of old systems being kept running "to see what would happen" and they did demonstrate the failure.

Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.

Let me tell you about the five major car accidents I narrowly avoided on the way to work this morning. They didn't happen but they would have!

Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.

It's like the Y2K bug. People still act like it was made-up. We can't prove the bug would have caused all the predicted problems because we fixed the bug. All we know is we got a lot of updated, modern systems and huge R&D budgets from all the money that flooded into fixing it. How much of the tech we take for granted today is because of all that investment?

We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.

We can try again on January 19th 2038 if we're inclined when the unix 32-bit timestamp runs out.