Dire messaging about climate change may be counterproductive, suggest Feinberg M and Willer R in their paper, "Apocalypse Soon? : Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just-World" Psychological Science 22: 34, 2011.
This paper argues that since people basically view the world as just and ordered, information about climate change that presents its impacts as dire and catastrophic are likely to actually increase sceptism - since they contradict people's sense of what the world is like. NB this is a US based study. Other countries (as this paper notes) might see things differently, particularly right now.
Though scientific evidence for the existence of global warming continues to mount, in the United States and other countries belief in global warming has stagnated or even decreased in recent years. One possible explanation for this pattern is that information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable.
Individuals overcome this threat by denying or discounting the existence of global warming, and this process ultimately results in decreased willingness to counteract climate change. Two experiments provide support for this explanation of the dynamics of belief in global warming, suggesting that less dire messaging could be more effective for promoting public understanding of climate-change research.
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