“It does seem a paradox that warming could lead to an ice age.” The report you mentioned seems straight out of that movie, The Day After Tomorrow. I doubt the Gulf Stream is going to simply vanish though. A lot of it’s mechanisms come about due to the Earth’s rotation.

That said, it’s true that discussion on climate change has been focused too much on warming, like the world is suddenly going to become an oven. That’s simply not the case. After all, millions of years ago the Earth hosted a climate much warmer than the one today and life thrived. There were also variations of climate and seasons then. We don’t see species that existed then anymore but they didn’t all fade away into oblivion. Many of them adapted and evolved into new forms. That process would happen again if the problem were simply a warming but relatively stable climate.

But it’s not. We’re facing an extended period of unpredictable shifting between extremes that’s going to be difficult to endure, survive, and adapt to. Clinging to cultures and civilizations that are unwilling to adapt is humanity’s existential threat. We have the capacity to make it through this and save a lot of what we have.

That won’t happen though, because of unwillingness to adapt. We simply have to choose. Survive by adapting to emerging conditions or pretend there’s not a problem and lose everything.

Seeing how we’ve handled Covid…. it seems clear there will be a great dying off of all life. I think that’s what our posterity will be most ashamed of us for. That we had to chance and ability to try to change things and we didn’t even try.