[polyfractal]

There is a real difference between a singular event like an asteroid, and a slowly boiling frog like climate change.

You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." I'd like to think we could collectively get our shit together and find a way to fix that.

But climate change is more insidious because it's so slow. It's in every nations best (short term) interest to ignore climate change. And there are zero short-term consequences to politicians because the average person probably won't measurably see an effect in their lifetime. Sure, summers might get a bit hotter and have worse floods, winters get a bit colder. New pests will pop up, species might start to die. But there's not a galvanizing event to really scare the shit out of people. Even if people believe climate change, they'll shrug, tsk tsk a little (like I'm doing!), maybe stop using plastic bags or install solar on their house or something. But it's negligible, and they know it's a meaningless gesture because everyone else has to make the same gesture for it to work.

Eventually it'll get bad enough -- widespread fires, droughts, rampant pest or diseases, all the pollinators die out, whatever -- that people really start to take things seriously. But by that time we might have 20 billion humans on the brink of starvation and it'll be a bit late to do much more than try to survive.

I doubt humans will ever go extinct completely. We're pretty hardy primates. But it's very possible we get knocked back to hunter/gather tribes (probably with some neat technology!) scraping a living in some kind of post-apocalyptic industrial nightmare.

[entropea]

>You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet."

How do you get people to believe it up until the day it gets close enough to make out with the human eye that it's approaching the planet? It's too late at that point. How many people have a telescope with that type of resolution, cameras that can pull out something likely low magnitude? We present scientific evidence to the public on Climate Change and many just don't care enough to actually do anything, why wouldn't the same happen with an Asteroid?

[polyfractal]

Because enough people will believe it when they see an asteroid looming towards them on CNN, Fox, whatever. There are plenty of people that deny climate change because it's convenient, either politically or economically. There are considerably fewer people that think the moon landing was faked, or the earth is flat, or pluto and mars and jupiter are actually jewels hanging from threads in a crystal sphere.

An asteroid is a sufficiently "concrete" science that the average person would believe if they see it. You can't "see" climate change, which is part of the issue.