Then of course we are making species go extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate because we are contaminating ecosystems, clear-cutting ecosystems and causing ecosystems to collapse by directly influencing climate making it impossible for parts of those ecosystems to survive.
Life is already orders of magnitude 'tougher than the past'.
The planet has never been through warming as rapid as what we are going through in known geological (not human) history. There was a paper hosted and copublished by NASA to that effect in the last month. It's literally unknown how much life can survive the velocity of the change that is in progress.
What "history books" should I read about climate science, too?
The degree of climate change is not just "worse". It's without precedent in geologic history in velocity of change. Our improved ability to fend for ourselves is many orders of magnitude less that the degree of change that is happening.
You can read your history books and multiple it by 100 or 1000.
Period.
Given that, it would be pretty stupid to preemptively quit.
It's easy to construct a value system where my own life and my future child's life are both worth more than 58 t CO2.