How did your line of thinking go from "scientists find trace amounts of plastics in snow" to "the planet will soon be uninhabitable"? What makes this sort of apocalyptic thinking any more rational than a doomsday cult?
We're either accelerating, or just continuing, our polluting processes year on year.
The result of that can be that one decade, everything looks sort of fine, and then the next, oops - it's all fucked.
Anything we do that results in visibiity at a global environmental level requires caution, because whilst we can change it inadvertently over a period of mere decades, restoration may require millenia.
Who's we? The west has been scaling back polluting processes year after year. The vast majority of plastic in the ocean comes from Asia and Africa, and the west is talking about eliminating plastic straws. The west is talking about eliminating coal power plants and many Asian coal plants don't even scrub the exhaust adequately.
Why are we worried about trivial things which we can barely detect when there are places like Haiti where people, right now, live in squalor? Again, you're worried about something you don't understand and can't actually predict when there are real things that we know about but won't do anything about.
The result of that can be that one decade, everything looks sort of fine, and then the next, oops - it's all fucked.
Anything we do that results in visibiity at a global environmental level requires caution, because whilst we can change it inadvertently over a period of mere decades, restoration may require millenia.