I work for an NGO that works on very different issues, and it's clearly important and valuable to us that our supporters agree that the threats we try to mitigate are serious and important. Otherwise, they wouldn't want to pay for our work.
You could also think of medical researchers in a similar way: there is such a thing as a career in medical research because they think both that some diseases are terrible and that there's some possibility that understanding them will be helpful. Apparently this is usually true (e.g., antibiotics, vaccines, medical diagnostics, transplants, ...) but there are presumably some areas that don't make progress and there could be a sociological, economic, or ethical debate about how well researchers can identify when they're not on a fruitful path. I heard some depressing contrarian suggestions that current cancer research may never find a "cure for cancer" because each cancer may, for some purposes, be effectively a distinct disease from each other cancer.
A lot of people in our society have gone pretty far down some rabbit hole or other developing specialized skills and knowledge that aim at saving people from different kinds of urgent problems. An optimistic view of science, or of our society in general, says that typically those skills actually exist and can actually be acquired and practiced; a pessimistic view fears that many of them are, maybe unintentionally, forms of quackery.