the things are happening though.
e.g. if you read a headline in the 70s that said something like "ski seasons will shorten by an average of 1 day per year, leading to only 5 inches of snow water equivalent in Colorado resorts by 2026, and eliminating the economic viability of skiing in the northeast by 2060" that would have been completely correct.
That's what the headlines said the last 49 times. Why should the average person care now? What are they supposed to do?
Al Gore got on a scissor lift and showed the hockey stick graph. Millions of people saw it. Then the data was bad. Then the average person didn't see anything happen that they could point to and be like "That's what Al Gore warned us about". What you're asking for already happened, over and over. It's useless now.
If you lived under a big precarious rock and people always talked about the big rock falling on you would you ignore the big rock because the big rock people keep crying wolf?
This is honestly the most baffling worldview.
You are constantly seeing all manner of predictions. When someone makes a wrong prediction that is not a indicator that the thing will never happen. Otherwise I would bet that I will suffer no problematic effects if I stop paying a mortgage.
The "quality" headlines aren't the one the average person is reading. It's even worse in climate discussions. Fuck "An Inconvenient Truth" was probably the largest exposure to climate issues for my generation and is STILL a problem because a some claims were made that, oops, even then were called vast exaggerations by the IPCCS. No snow on Fuji within a decade comes to mind, which basically nothing but the most extreme models predicted. Well it's a decade later and to the layman, there's still snow on the mountain. It's at some of it's worst levels EVER, but when you make bold and verifiable claims and then go "oh well you see actually..." you lose people.
Even worse are the "THIS TERRIBLE THING WILL HAPPEN!...in 100 years". That's still fucking awful, but when the layman has been reading the first part for over a decade now, or ever hears the second part, it often just loses their attention entirely. Climate science trying to get real change needs to manage expectations, but media is mostly about grabbing attention. It's obvious how at odds those goals are.
My point is that this kind of headline doesn’t help the cause. It’s hyperbolic nonsense to laypeople, though they may use the more colloquial term “bullshit”. Getting people to pay attention is really, really hard given the tremendous volume of hyperbole they see every day.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I know this kind of headline works against it.
