In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
I agree entirely, which I guess brings both of us back to the original OP in that people succumb to apathy and helplessness when dealing with climate change. The great unwashed masses will never agree to policies which curtail their economic prosperity or inconvenience them, and capitalism will never agree to anything which halts its self-serving pursuit of profits. So it’s Waterworld or bust, and I’ll end up as that old dude inside the bowels of the oil tanker.