Depends what the certainty of catastrophic global warming actually is. People make decisions every day to ignore possibly horrible future outcomes because they have decided the likelihood makes it not worth it. For instance church and burning in hell. That is as bad of an outcome as you can imagine but many of us just ignore it because lets be honest, it doesn't feel very likely.

Global warming loses some of it's teeth if it doesn't manifest like the more aggressive versions of the models. In my opinion we will hit against either some type of technological transcendence or whatever cause annihilation before the warming becomes an issue. Actual pollution not just CO2 is a different problem.

How we end up handling technology is far more important to me. Society is about to change in a magnitude never seen before. Joblessness, unlocking of biology, the end of most disease and so on. What does a human society that unlocks many of reality's secrets look like? We need to get that right and we should be preparing for that now.

It is like worrying about making rent at the end of the month when you have an intruder in your living room.