QC

Because if we can't trust science or God to tell us what's true, then what can we trust? One of the big questions we need to hold globally. No easy answers, and lots of people are clinging onto or grasping for easy answers.

At a different narrative level, climate change tells a horrifying story, about a really awful thing that's going to happen and that it doesn't obviously seem like we can do anything about. You need proper "bedside manner" to give people diagnoses like this.

(This would predict that belief in climate change is correlated with techno-optimism and -utopianism; easier to accept climate change narratively / emotionally if you're also optimistic about technology dealing with it.)

Climate change tells a story of literally Biblical proportions - a slow, inexorable apocalypse, all of the elements turning against us. And in response you want people to... vote for carbon taxes? It doesn't feel like enough emotionally. Easy to feel powerless, then dismissive.

There is, for lack of a better word, a spiritual dimension to accepting climate change, similar to the spiritual dimension of accepting death (a kind of grieving), and I haven't seen any science journalism come close to tackling this.

I actually don't go for the "people just don't understand the science" take. We know from surveys that level of education & science knowledge doesn't correlate with acceptance of vaccines, climate change, etc. Tribalism probably does explain a lot of the missing variance.