Climate change can be mitigated by technological solutions. Sure, you also need political action, but it's a marathon, not a sprint: a chain of bad decisions will make matters worse, but you'll still have a chance to recover. During the cold war, a chain of bad decisions could have led to immediate, full-scale disaster. That you had to depend on "some luck" to prevent the collapse of civilization as we know is terrifying.
The thing about climate change is that it is 100% avoidable yet nothing is being done. Everyone just says "we can fix it afterwards with twice the effort".