No they are pretty equal. 

My dad tell me of the half dozen times that he has been told the world will be ending due to situations.

Hell, he said it was a huge deal when Jimmy Carter came and addressed the nation about the world running out of oil and it will be completely gone by X date. Don't recall date, but the date has passed.

My dad said he was told California was supposed to be under water by now.

Many other things.

So call me skeptical when scientists and politicians constantly bemoan about the end of days. They are becoming a bigger joke than sci fi movies made in the 80's depicting the world in 2000.

Climate change and extinction events are, by definition, slow-motion catastrophes, while we are nearsighted apes who will take the short road to material reward when given the chance to do so. Even the worst extinction event ever, the Permian-Triassic, took place over thousands of years. We are, though, on our way there: background extinction rates are many, many times above their pre-civilization values. Defaunation, that is, the disappearance of animal and insect population on wild areas or those on the fringes of human activities, is a very real phenomenon attested for decades, and a large part of it.

Besides, the discredit of fringe or alarmist claims isn't an argument against scientific consensus, that's basically a straw man fallacy.  This is more a case of Cassandra complex than "the boy who cried wolf" right there. Not to mention it is a specific political group who is running against all known science and social indicators claiming something like "Oh, no! Society is falling apart! Crime is rampant! Whites are disappearing! We need to make our nation great again!"... and that's not environmentalists.

Also: you might want to find a little bit of context to what Jimmy Carter said and the crisis the US was facing on energy and oil in the late 70s, and the positive long-term implications of his measures dealing with fuel and energetic efficiency etc. not to mention that would probably be *Florida, instead of California. Which indeed is going underwater as the centuries go by, both naturally (as the north american continent isostatically rebounds from the ice age) and with a little help from its human friends, as well.

So can we classify ourselves now as the source of the 6th mass extinction?