> Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.
How do you know it didn't work, unless you think the only way it could be evaluated as having "worked" is if there were zero extra-marital sex and children born out of wedlock? My sense is that this was at least partially effective in discouraging the behaviors you describe.
> What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.
We don't have the necessary magical science. We cannot continue behaving the way we are and expect to reach a point where we can realistically develop it, we will die or decline significantly as a species well before then. Yes, we can feed more people now, but a big part of what's driving climate change is emissions and other side effects from that. Our current behaviors are killing us.
> The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong.
This is a non-sequitur. If you are injured or ill and taken to an emergency room, most effective treatments will not automatically make you worse if the diagnosis is incorrect. In some extreme cases this is true, but taking your line of reasoning would mean that only in such cases would the situation be considered an emergency. We have many, many tools available to us to slow the problem at least and allow ourselves additional time to prepare and react, the problem is that we are not doing them.
My sense is that we will not really be able to address this as a species until we hit some of the disaster points described in the article. When 50k+ people in the US die several summers in a row simply from heat (expect that within a decade), then perhaps we'll take it more seriously. Unfortunately, it might legitimately be too late at that point to even adjust quickly enough.