In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith mourns the loss of proper seasons due to climate change. She says we are planting the seeds of our own destruction, and that we have a perverse attraction to apocalypse.
Sing an elegy for the washed away! For the cycles of life, for the saltwater marshes, the houses, the humans—whole islands of humans. Going, going, gone! But not quite yet. The apocalypse is always usefully cast into the future—unless you happen to live in Mauritius, or Jamaica, or the many other perilous spots. According to recent reports, “if emissions of global greenhouse gases remain unchanged,” things could begin to get truly serious around 2050, just in time for the seventh birthday party of my granddaughter. (The grandchildren of the future are frequently evoked in elegies of this kind.) Sometimes the global, repetitive nature of this elegy is so exhaustively sad—and so divorced from any attempts at meaningful action—that you can’t fail to detect in the elegists a fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when you get right down to it, as much of a perverse desire for the apocalypse as the evangelicals we supposedly scorn.
Apt. 11d 
Another take on the same subject, potentially less poetic, but more data-based, by weather blogger Cliff Mass:
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/03/moses-versus-joseph-biblical-lesson-in.html
“And I noticed something else: the audience’s eyes glazed over as the endless list of disasters were described. And the climate policy advocates provided extraordinarily specific predictions–such as the snow pack being reduced by 35% by a certain year. Such extreme precision regarding events later in the century caused such substantial rolling of some eyeballs that I worried that some might fall out their sockets.”
Mass goes on to make a analogy to the stories of Moses and Joseph, and whose predictions were more effective at changing government policy:
“(1) Moses-like descriptions of endless catastrophes not only seem unrealistic but cause audiences to disengage.
(2) Providing highly detailed and specific predictions suggesting precise predictions for decades hence undermines credibility, since most folks intuitively understand there is uncertainty in predictions later in the century.
(3) Credibility is gained by a series of successful predictions well into the future,; Joseph was a proven prognosticator. Currently, atmospheric sciences does not have a very good track record in decadal prediction and we have yet to demonstrate forecasts over longer periods. Remember, climatologists in the 60s and 70s were forecasting future cooling, and no one predicted the “pause” in warming before it happened. Similarly, forecasts for snow pack in the Cascades made a decade ago for today are failing.
(4) Keeping forecasts and warnings focused and promoting specific ways to ameliorate the damage (as done by Joseph) are far more effective than broad catastrophic warnings coupled with unrealistic demands (like moving to a system of cap and trade or heavy taxation of carbon fuels).
(5) Most groups are unwilling to make major sacrifices now for the prevention of unproven predictions of future calamities. Moses is a good example of this. But modest investments for the future are feasible.
(6) Harping on extreme events that could have natural causes is not an effective tool for securing converts to one’s point of view.”
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Walter Russell Mead is on the same theme: http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/18/climate-skepticism-on-the-rise/ “But the green movement has made a habit—and for some a living—of exaggerating the dangers of climate change to justify unworkable policies. In the past this probably produced some short-term payoff in terms of public support, but over time it has weakened the credibility of not just the environmental movement but the scientific understanding that these greens claim to be advancing. This recent Gallup poll reflects a damning fact for today’s greens: Climate alarmism tops “big oil” money as the leading cause of climate skepticism.”
I’d also suggest that people are not likely to climb on board to make big – or even medium-sized – sacrifices if the result is simply that the same oil/coal which we don’t burn gets burned by China at a bargain rate.
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