A collection of thoughts on global warming and the future

I had been led to believe that the current increase in the average temperature due to global warming was unprecedented in history.
I read in the Bill Bryson book - 'A short history of nearly everything' - that dramatic temperature changes in short periods of time are not unprecedented at all (see chapter 27 - 'Ice time' for Bryson's summary), and that history features many unexplained sudden rises in average temperature. These historic rises in temperature are allegedly evidenced by ice core samples. Admittedly, the quality of the data gathered from such samples is not something I can comment on. My whole current philosophy is based on personal experience, research and various 'expert' analyses, so it's clearly exposed to inaccuracies. What I think is for certain: humans are not helping.
I'm not here saying we are nothing to do with the current climate change. I applaud the messages from world governments and high profile individuals and, indeed, the less heard voices which are no less earnest, for us to pull together and to reduce or reverse what we perceive to be our contribution to the climate change. This is all good and fine and I'm all for it. But I think we need to be careful with the premise that we are solely and entirely responsible for the currently changing climate.
I'm going to bandy around some 'facts' here that might not be entirely accurate but which I think are better than ball park.
For starters, I think I heard some projection that we have 40 years to reverse the damage we've done lest we reach a point where the climate becomes irreversibly catastrophic for the environment. That's around 2050 (that's the year, not ten to nine. Don't panic!) I'm sure there are projections which place 'the year of irreversible catastrophe' sooner or later than that. The year is largely irrelevant in this case (unless it's right now, or already gone - in which case it's truly irrelevant and we might as well just crack open the factor 1000, enjoy the summers, and move to higher ground). So, fine. Let's reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and concentrate on green energy sources. We can do that. My point here is that we could spend 40 years doing that and get to 2050 only to find that our contribution to global warming was actually negligible to start with. We could find ourselves sliding towards oblivion regardless of our best efforts to turn things around. I'm not saying we shouldn't try. Let's. But I'm thinking maybe we should also focus our efforts on the "what if?" scenario:
What if we do everything we are capable of in order to fix the climate, and it turns out we were no more capable of reversing it than causing it in the first place. It's just a "what if?". I think we should consider, as a species, methods of surviving the catastrophe should it turn out to be unavoidable. I'm not saying I have the answers, but I do have some of the questions.

I also have a not-entirely-unrelated theory about fossil fuels.
My limited understanding of fossil fuels is as follows:
Millions of years ago, the atmosphere had a very high carbon content and was not particularly accommodating to life. What life there was, consisted of simple single (or not many) cell organisms, the likes of plankton and algae, countless billions of which populated the oceans and which were somewhat partial to carbon. They consumed it from the atmosphere to power their existences, reducing the carbon content of the atmosphere as a result. When these life forms died, they sank to the bottom of the oceans, and tectonic activity folded their remains into the earths crust. Millions of years of the correct circumstances (heat and pressure etc) formed the remains into oil. We drill into the crust, extract oil and process it for various combustion based fuels.
When we burn these fuels, carbon is released again to the atmosphere, and that is observed to be at least partly responsible for the greenhouse effect (trapping heat that should normally escape through the atmosphere) and, thus, global warming. I'm not disputing that this happens. My point is more about that carbon cycle. I note that it's also estimated that we will shortly run out of fossil fuels. It strikes me that this is all happening at about the same time. We are supposedly pumping the atmosphere 'full' of carbon, which was there millions of years ago, and which got 'eaten', then processed by the planet into oil. We don't create or destroy carbon. It's just there...it's in the atmosphere, it's in a plankton, it's in the Earth's crust, it's in a barrel, it's in your fuel tank, it's in the atmosphere again. We don't have millions of years...but the planet does. And so, I assume, will millions of generations of plankton (or similar). I suspect the cycle will continue regardless of us. Had we not extracted the oil and burnt it in our automobiles, what's to say it wouldn't have been pumped into the atmosphere by a volcano? (- this is just flippant conjecture. I don't have an idea of how realistic this is.) The deal is not so much who or what released the carbon into the atmosphere, but that it was released. Anyway, my point is this: we're running out of fossil fuels, seemingly at about the same rate that carbon is becoming dangerously abundant in the atmosphere. Running out of fossil fuels might be the very best thing to happen regarding climate change. The planet has found its way back before, and it'll get there again.
When we talk of the end of the world, really we refer to the end of human civilisation. History indicates that this ole rock will be around for some time longer than our species.

Now, what of ant farts...?

A musing...

Why don't we call birds flies? Or, alternatively, why don't we call flying birding?