Is it still ok to have kids in face of climate change?

This is /r/im14andthisisdeep material. Life is inherently joyful, especially for children, even under challenging circumstances. The net happiness rating in Bangladesh is +74%--i.e. 74% more people report themselves happy than report themselves unhappy: https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-polling-which-nations-a.... Decreasing human population decreases the aggregate net happiness experienced by the world.

Also, almost nobody believes it would be better to not exist than to exist in challenging circumstances. That's why cancer patients fight through incredibly painful chemotherapy to get a few extra years of life. If you were offered a painless, consequence free death, would you take up that offer to avoid facing the upcoming uncertainties of climate change? Almost nobody would. Why do you think your potential kids would feel differently?

It's also the educated, motivated kids in the developed world that have the greatest chance of averting or remediating climate change.

Many countries, especially in the West, are not reproducing at replacement rate.

Also, there may be a scientific consensus about climate change, but that does not carry into economic predictions of collapse. Economic predictions are not the same thing as physical ones.

It's always been the case that the kids are responsible for what they do when it's their turn. Regardless of how hopeless it looked.

The admittedly rather silly way I've framed this in my own mind is to ask if it was ok for, say, people living in Rome during the fall of the Roman Empire to have kids, living as they were through the total collapse of their civilization.

In retrospect it seems more silly (to me, anyway) to suggest that they shouldn't have had children because the children and their descendants would have had a hard time living through the collapse and ensuing "Dark Ages."

Their very distant descendants would have gone on to live through the most prosperous period in human history, which certainly wasn't foreseeable to the people living through the bad times.

Before anyone says that it's not comparable because the Roman Empire was just a small part of the world, and that we're destroying the whole world through climate change, I would suggest that for people living in Rome back then, Rome would have felt like the whole world and the vast majority of people were unlikely to uproot and move more than a few tens of miles, nevertheless, the population of Rome declined by, what, 99%?

In addition, most of the worst case scenarios for climate change seem to indicate the displacement of a few billion people at most, which would be terrible, to be sure. But the mere migration of a few billion people will probably be insignificant on the timescale of a thousand years.

More permanent destructive changes to the environment could cause massive human death, but I personally haven't seen predictions on the order of 99% of people dying (or anything remotely near that) and it seems like there's a pretty good chance that a new equilibrium would be reached at some point and the population of the Earth would surge again. Even the worst predictions seem like they could end up being inconsequential on long enough timescales.

And this doesn't even address the whole Idiocracy situation where arguably the best way to combat a dire future could be to raise kind, compassionate, conscientious children that will go on to steward the world onto a better path.

Needless to say at this point, I'm not convinced that it's remotely unethical to bring children into a difficult world. That's been the state of the world for basically all of human history.

So the key is giving more kids those opportunities. Not just some kids.