I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.
There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.
Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.
I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.
I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.
Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway
Is it? We are not talking about screwing the climate for the people who will come in 200 years, right? In the last decades we have been saying "if we don't change the trend, your children will most likely die because of the climate change".
Is it rational to be 30 and not care about the fact that we will be screwed long before we reach the age of retirement?
Setting aside the fact that even if I was so selfish to care about my personal legacy, I'd want the world around long enough to learn about it...
there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades
I don't think the ask here is so unreasonable. It's disingenuous to frame it this way.