Last week, New York magazine published a riveting and frightening look at the future of the planet we call home. Now that global warming is well underway, we are in for an apocalyptic awakening, and “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” the writer, David Wallace-Wells, argues.

The article captured the public’s attention, quickly becoming the most-read piece in the magazine’s history. But many critics, including several climate scientists, argued that it was flawed because Mr. Wallace-Wells focused on the worst-case scenario, a pessimist’s take. Why feed the public a too-bleak picture of the future? Why frighten people into action, rather than inspire them?

Because sometimes, the worst case is the only thing that prompts us to get anything done. I know this because I’ve studied the last time that governments, businesses and ordinary citizens joined together to combat a complex, man-made problem that threatened to wreak global havoc in the distant future.

It was a problem that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, whose technical basis was not immediately obvious to most non-specialists and which some even doubted was real at all. It was also a fight that we won — and that we ought to be proud of winning, since it offers a blueprint for combating the many catastrophes that may arise from the technologies underpinning civilization, including a warming planet.