[Metdevil]

The problem with issues like this is that the facts get drowned out by politically motivated 'predictions'. Accelerated climate change caused by human-contributed global warming is an indisputable fact, the problem comes when, as we've seen in this thread, politicians and media warp research findings to push an agenda and we wind up with articles like "50% of Europe under water by August".

If we could do away with the scare tactics and political speeches, maybe we'd actually be getting somewhere with this...

Possibly the worst culprit in the way of this kind of progress is the media misconstruing research in order to make a more catchy headline. My favourite example was a lab researching using tobacco leaves as a medium for growing vaccines which could prevent certain types of cancer, so naturally the headlines read "Tobacco cures cancer". And of course, the journalists writing the articles, not being entirely clued up on the research put the explanation down to 'a trait of the tobacco plant'.
Obviously, this was interpreted as a benefit to smoking tobacco, but the 'traits' the article was referring to were things useful only to the researchers, how easy it was to grow, how broad the leaves were, and how well they hosted particular viruses.

In the end, the media coverage only negatively impacted the lab, there was local pushback to have their funding pulled, people protested that it was 'inethical', conspiracies about 'big tobacco' funding the research as a marketing campaign, and the lab had to do a lot of unnecessary PR work to have these articles corrected.

It's clear that the media is less interested in getting a story across than are in just getting a story out...