It's a bit of a reductionist and humorous argument here but they weighed "Stopping the Industrial Revolution" against "Certain Death", and decided that maybe the people of the future would be wiser than they were and invent a solution to the problem, similar to how they invented the steam engine to solve the issue of manual and animal labor.

Obviously that didn't really work out, because the people of the future did in fact, invent a solution, but it was completely ignored in lieu of profit-seeking.

Somehow the problem invented was technological, spanned into the natural, but the solution pending was sociopolitical.

Homo sapiens is a rare breed.

Greed. It will fuck us all over, even if it is not our greed.

In an 1827 paper, Joseph Fourier stated:

The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature.

The problem is the scientists didn't warn us!

If only they had protested and lit themselves on fire and tried to tell me my Hummer H2 was bad!

Well, whatever. Time for me to drive my Hummer to church so I can get another hit of truth.

If the science was already as clear in 19th century as it is today, climate action advocacy would be much harsher. I assume that it even would have dampened the 1950s effect.