If we truly have 17 years to stop our own extinction from happening in 80, then we honestly don’t need to save them, because there’ll be no one to save them for.
Extinction? I don't think most people are arguing that we'll face extinction. Just that it will be really bad, and really destabilizing, and might lead to a lot of deaths for any number of reasons (destabilization might lead to wars, poverty, overcrowding, famine, etc).
Truthfully, that's probably bad enough that the point of your statement still holds.
As I understand it we’ve been ignoring the issue for so long, that we’ve begun talking extinction because all the gases in the permafrost and antics will make it hard to breathe.
I went to a cross european political seminar on this and other global warming effects and generally the answer is that while it might get pretty bad, we are on target for 4 or so degrees of warming if we stopped all our existing climate control measures. However, the effects at this level of warming are very much unknowns and things like the permafrost releasing a terrible exponential effect are theorised possibilities but very much untestable hypothesis. However, we tend to assume this won't happen, for various reasons. It's more of an unlikely worst-case scenario.
I like to think of it as similar to the people who theorised that CERN could produce a black hole or that atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons could cause the entire atmosphere to ignite. They were broadly plausable if a little far fetched, but ultimately the only way to be sure was to test it.
One of the important things to remember is that we have made significant progress towards the 'hole in the ozone layer' to the point where you dont hear about it much anymore because its actually getting better - that is, the hole is closing up. Its possible that a mixure of good science and public policy could deal with this problem as well, although it is closely tied with politics. Especially the fact that the largest polluter in the planet (China) is on track to increase its pollution exponentially. If we can deal with this problem, much of our estimates will be revised down a lot.
I am and have been what might be called a 'climate change alarmist' for decades now. More concretely, I believe that there's a non-trivial chance that the climate will, in the lifetimes of people reading this, become hostile toward our civilization, as it stands today. These considerations have come from deep and wide personal studies on relevant topics.
Human extinction is exceedingly unlikely, even in the worst possible cases. Many deaths (where 'many' means 'substantial percentages of some populations') are possible, though hopefully still unlikely.
Things will change. A lot. Even though who are well read on the topic will find it impossible to characterize those changes.
We are introducing tremendous amounts of additional energy into our climate, which increases variance and especially uncertainty.
But even given all that, extinction is exceedingly unlikely.
> the gases in the permafrost and antics will make it hard to breathe
To my understanding there have been periods within the last few thousand years where it's been hotter for various reasons (but usually in a cyclical way), so I'm not sure why the permafrost wouldn't have melted then and made it harder to breathe.
That said, when searching I'm mostly seeing stuff about the greenhouse gases (methane, CO2) released by these permafrost frozen lakes, not breathing problems. It could be that those are contributors to some of the wild swings we've seen in the past, and if we're already wildly swinging prior to that, it could just make the swings all the more pronounced.
The british isles used to be isthmuses, and then the seas rose.