Sadly I agree. Humans have gotten by doing things the same old way because the Earth was vast and resources plenty. But now resources are being depleted and what remains will lead to conflict. Lack of water and migration from inhabitable hot zones will be terrible stressors. We will fight rather than share. It's what we do. It how conflicts between nations are resolved. We can go to war over diminishing resources, but we can't go to war over climate change, because the enemy is our way of life. We consume more that the planet can replenish, and we emit more pollutants than the ecosystem can cleanse.
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You mention desalination of sea water. We had a perfect working water purification system on place. But for years we've dumped pollutants and sewage into our rivers and streams and ruined a magnificent water works.
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Sure we can desalinate sea water, but it's nothing like the original system. Desalination removes the salt, but then we dump the salty brine back into the ocean, all in one spot, where ever the discharge pipe tails off, resulting in a salty dead zone. The original system evaporated water off the ocean leaving the salt evenly disbursed, then delivered the pure water via clouds all over the planet. Pretty cool!
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Just ponder it for a moment. We drink the very same water that the dinosaurs frolicked in, that's how good our natural water filtration system worked. But we fucked it up!
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We won't survive anywhere near 10,000 years unless we change our ways.
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https://medium.com/politically-speaking/sparkling-clean-4-5-billion-year-old-water-7560473a97e4