Are Those "Spreading Awareness" About Climate Change Aware of What Kind of "Awareness" They Are Spreading?

While thinking about the problem of climate change in recent years I have found myself increasingly concerned with the consequences of so many commentators relentlessly promulgating the bleakest possible view of the situation. These think, or at least give the impression of thinking, that they are "promoting awareness" and somehow contributing to resolving the problem. In fact many, maybe most, are simply promoting defeatism and despair.

Why do they do what they do?

I suspect that they don't understand, or don't want to understand, how politics really works, how and why things do and do not get done. Unable to give the public reasons for hope, and so they put all their energy into exercising the other option for moving it, fear. In spite of the ample evidence that the public already knows all about the problem, and has long been anxious for something to be done about it--so anxious that it is literally sick over it--and time and again elects politicians who promise to do something about it (even if those "leaders" break every promise) these tell themselves that there must not be enough fear out there, and keep doing it over and over again expecting a positive result. Encouraging them in this terribly problematic course is the evident, enormous self-satisfaction persons of weak and unserious mind derive from inflicting disaster porn-riddled jeremiads on the public.

Naturally they never think of the possibility that they have exhausted the usefulness of fear, perhaps a very long time ago, and that continuing to use fear, at least in the manner they have been doing, has become counterproductive; that past a certain point fear can simply make people shut down rather than acting; that rather than screaming alarums they now face the more difficult yet totally indispensable task of explaining frankly and seriously why society has so miserably failed to meet the problem and think seriously and frankly of how it can stop failing and lend their voices to whatever proposals might redress the issue; and that if they are not up to the task (as persons of such caliber generally are not) that they are only getting in the way of those who might be.