I suppose that's the thing though, in a week when the UN report came out, the sense of urgency about the need for change is accelerating, and change will come because the generation('s) following behind us lead it and shame us in to doing something. We can point the finger at other groups, producers of waste and pollution, and countries, and say that my change won't help until they do something, but the thing about leadership is that someone has to do the right thing first.
I wouldn't have thought Ireland would have been mentioned in that context, and I fear that our track record to date may show the words to be worthless when the difference between the words and our deeds is massive, but we do need to put our shoulders to the wheel.
So, lets look at how we can get cows to fart less, and lets look at what global population growth has contributed to the situation (people breath, producing CO2, and they eat, requiring the clearing of massive land masses to produce food) and how we can reduce the impact, and maybe fly and drive a little less.
One way that things have changed in recent decades is how we deal with disease and natural disasters. These things, through the millenia, have kept populations in check and ensured that massive centres of population don't survive in unsuitable or unsustainable locations, but we've gotten (too) clever (we think) as a human race to overcome these natural checks on sustainability and figured out ways to protect from these natural deterrents, but generally at a high cost to the planet when all rolled up to the global level.
I suspect that Mother Nature will fight back though, and probably win by brute force. Antibiotic resistant diseases and illnesses and new strains of things will probably achieve what the Spanish Flu did after WW1, etc. A couple of new world wars could help too and we (humans) haven't been clever enough to not elect or inherit nuts with their fingers on the nuclear buttons, so I'd say Darwin will be proven right about natural selection in the end. A good nuclear war would sort out a lot of the population sustainability issues we face. The main risk for those that survive is that nuclear poisoning means each has two mouths to feed instead of the one we have today.