> Can you name another time in recent history where the end of the world wasn't near? WW1, Great Depression, WW2, Mutually Assured Destruction, Swine flu, AIDS, Cuban missile crisis, etc, etc.

The key difference is that, with the possible exception of MAD and the Cold War, during all of those crises people were in near-universal agreement that there was a crisis, and were actively working to fix it. Climate change is a unique problem in that a depressingly large percentage of the population believes it is a myth, that there is nothing wrong and no need to do anything.

That's where the despair is coming from. If everyone understood the seriousness of the problem and was determined to fix it, I have no doubt we could do it. We've solved bigger problems in the past. But right now we're not even trying. Even the progress that has been made has mostly been an accidental byproduct of market forces like renewables getting cheaper; the actual amount of deliberate effort to fix climate change is close to zero and seems likely to remain that way.