The Prairie Dog Blog linked to an excellent article in The Stranger last year. It lays out humanity’s future, based on the status quo.
[W]hether you can pin it precisely on global warming or not, the ocean of wilting grain that fills the middle of our country after this hottest of summers is just a dress rehearsal. Sure, this summer was a freak of probability, more to do with the randomness of weather than the slow processes that are heating up the only world we can inhabit, but still, it was a chance to see how we might adapt to what will slowly become the norm as the planet heats. And how did we do? We failed. For now, we’ll pay more for food and eat our stored grain. In not too many more decades, we’ll starve.
This was the vision in my head as I rode my bike home. What are now the richest farmlands will become endless dust bowls. Increasingly desperate, hungry, and thirsty, we tear ourselves apart. Humanity dies. Much of the complex life that makes our world interesting and beautiful dies. It’s a hideous, vapid, lonely, and entirely predictable existence.
There’s a problem preventing us from fixing the problem of Climate Change: “the dimwitted, frightened, angry, corrupt and complicit villainy of the sort of fools and tools who insist there’s nothing wrong when evidence clearly contradicts that.”
The “fools and tools” didn’t all arrive at the wrong conclusions by the same means. Some, most I would argue, were boiled like frogs. They were slowly fed misinformation over decades, leading them to confirm one lie with another convenient one to arrive in the nick of time, just as the earlier lie became unbelievable. Yet they are in large part the hindrance humanity faces to get to work with the business of saving the world from humanity. People are the problem, and are also part of the solution. If we are not part of the solution, well, that’s a bleak future for billions of us, but I’d rather we collectively learn to live within the means of the Earth to provide for us than to wait for mass extinctions to knock us down to size.
Should we attempt to save 1/8th of all bird species that are likely to die off in our lifetimes if we do not change our collective actions? Of course! Can we manage to? Not if we let naysayers and the plain ignorant guide our political systems.
https://twitter.com/smirking_guy/status/347738010667855872
It’s okay, we don’t have to be concerned. Some guy on the Internet named Roberto told us there’s no real problem.
https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/347740299881226240
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/06/19/pol-one-in-eight-birds-threatened-with-extinction.html
“Purely hypothetical”, my aching backside.
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Consider an Ivanpah power station might inadvertently kill 1 to 28 thousand birds a year, while house and feral cats kill 200 million birds a year in Canada.