"No threat of outright extinction within a century or more" shouldn't be that calming. "No outright extinction" doesn't rule out "endangered" or "rare". Also, a century isn't much at the tail end of "110,000 years". Neither does the relative safety of polar bears say much about the overall gravity and complexity of the global climate situation. For example, the polar bears may survive, and the Arctic may even reconstitute to one degree or another, but human beings will nevertheless have felt the impact of rising sea levels, perhaps including more Katrinas or worse.
It seems to me that we humans are shortsighted due to our own brief lifespans, and are all too happy to put off change even though we know our present course is leading to big problems in a decade or two, or even a century. Well, a century will include the lifespans of the grandchildren of those alive today, and they'll have learned from us either to seriously address or to mostly ignore global environmental problems. We knew in the sixties and seventies that pollution was a big problem, and already there were people experiencing its direct, toxic effects. We put band aids on a few of those problems when the media created sufficient pressure. Now, looking at increasingly powerful weather events and the melting of the ice caps, it seems that the next wave of chickens has come home to roost, and the pressure should be vastly increasing to reverse some of the damage we're doing. Indeed, some astronomical event, sometime, may have a much greater impact than we're likely to generate for a few decades or even centuries (sooner or later we'll figure out how to do that, too), even as our own chickens keep getting bigger and uglier. But in the meantime, why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Not only do we put off dealing with predictable problems, but we accept and tolerate newer and bigger problems as they, ironically in the case of melting glaciers, keep snowballing.
I don't mean to whine or complain, only to realistically describe the challenge which is out there to be met.
