The Industrial Revolution is merely a barely-remembered memory of an instant in time in the total life of this planet.
There is nothing we can do, short of nuclear winter, deliberately causing volcanoes around the world to erupt, or deliberately drilling holes into the crust and dropping atomic weapons down and detonating them, that will cause this planet to become unstable for us. We could continue to eject spent fossil fuels into the atmosphere for thousands of years at an ever-increasing rate, and the change will be minimal.
Besides, we can’t stop natural disasters anyway, so if the worlds wants to reclaim land, we can’t do anything about it.
My view is similar to yours. I don’t think we could do any lasting harm to the planet if we tried. Further, whenever I see ‘scientists’ in the lead of a story I tend to wonder who got the grant for the research and what were the motives.