Hyperbole tends to push people away. I was quite active in climate causes about 20 years ago, in large part because I was young and felt that without imminent action the world would face catastrophic damage. This [1] article is just one countless of the time. It was reporting on a Pentagon climate report that the White House was trying to 'keep the public from seeing.' At the top, in bright yellow, the Guardian is reminding viewers that "This article is more than 19 years old." And the lede is "Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years."
Other claims include that "by 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war.' It's further suggested that this will also come with "widespread crop failure, famine, disease, and mass migration of populations..." And that's just from "my" era. As you go further back, you will find similar reports. Here's [2] one I dug up from 1982: "Monstafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United States environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century "an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust."
If I could go back 80 years into the past and try to optimize the world for climate action I would make sure that any and all predictions made appealed not to the drama of the high end outliers in order to try to spur on immediate action, but instead did the exact opposite and assumed the low end outliers - so that people would have decades of evidence of my predictions not only coming true, but being far greater in impact. At least in my case, you can thank hyperbolic messaging for the reason I've gone from 'active advocate' to 'meh, I'm somewhat more concerned about nuclear war tbh.'
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
[2] - https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1982.j...