With CO2 emissions we face with a situation of, "We won't stop and if we did it wouldn't help anyway."
This looks to be much the same in other areas of the ecological calamity as well - the water and soil depletion, the destruction of natural habitat and ensuing extinctions, the spreading pollution of various commons across the globe, the over-fishing, the trampling of genetic diversity and the mangling of the genomes themselves - none of it looks like it's controllable.
The same can be said of the spreading cultural blight - the growing income and power disparities, the financial and economic instabilities, the spreading disregard for human rights, the loss of the idea that a human life is intrinsically valuable, let alone the life of a non-human being.
Then there's the ever-growing human population, that is subject to divergent pressures - both from those who would see it increase even faster (or at least not slow down so their retirement funds will remain secure) and those well-meaning souls who would force fertility reductions on an otherwise unwilling populace, and in the process deprive them of the right to make their own decisions.
It's a mess. But what a glorious, fermenting, active turmoil of a mess! It's Life at its most raw and visible - warts, halos and all. We seem to be approaching some kind of a breaking/tipping/transition/transformation point beyond which all bets are off, all predictions vacated, all expectations set aside.
Collapse? Perhaps, but what might come after that point? We have no way of knowing whether it will be a descent to 50,000 barbarians with flint knives and a taste for human flesh or a new-agey "human ascension" to some quasi-divine state. The spectrum of possibility out past the approaching singularity is completely open, and our eventual path through that landscape is utterly unknowable. And anyone who tells you different is simply putting words to their own personal hopes and fears.
All we do know for sure is what is happening right now. We each get to make our own choice about what to believe regarding our future trajectory, and how to respond to the present conditions in light of those beliefs.
My choice is to let it all simply unfold as it will, and to celebrate the incredible transformative event that all of us - all 100+ billion humans who have ever lived - have cooperated to create. I have no wish to change a single thread in the tapestry. Rock on, world.
Hey, is it getting warm in here, or is it just me?
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