What you've done here is retreat from a motte (I couldn't even name two people who disagree) to a much stronger bailey (OK maybe they exist but they're only in

What you've done here is retreat from a motte (I couldn't even name two people who disagree) to a much stronger bailey (OK maybe they exist but they're only in a minority). But how do you know if there's a consensus or not? How do you know they're a minority? Did some journalist tell you that? Or a scientist who has taken the doomer position? Nobody is really trying to properly measure this and it'd be meaningless to do so because we see what happens to scientists who disagree with end-of-the-world claims - they mysteriously can't get papers published anymore whilst counterclaims sail through peer review and straight into the front pages of national news. Academia doesn't have the systems needed to do something as hard as establishing the truth of things. That's why there's so many nonsensical or fraudulent papers out there. So people don't take it seriously for a whole lot of reasons: 1. There's no penalty associated with making end-of-the-world predictions that turn out to be wrong, not even in the short term. We saw this with COVID. Scientists made predictions that were totally invalidated just weeks later, repeatedly, with no visible consequences or even any admission that anything had gone wrong. Indeed they routinely lied about their own predictions that were made in writing, and got away with it! 2. This is 100x more true in the long term. Climate predictions have a long history of being wrong. One dramatic example is Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich who in 1969 was saying we'd all "disappear in a cloud of blue steam" within 20 years. He predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. He said "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". He was claiming the threat was global cooling before switching to claiming the opposite. What happens to people who make such expensive claims (for society) and yet turn out to be wrong? Nothing - they pretend they were right all along and the parts of our society most dependent or in hock to academia goes along with the fraud rather than call it out (which is anyway pointless because universities are basically impervious to accountability for their output). But people see it, they remember, and they tune it out. I think this is why skepticism is more common amongst the elderly population. They're old enough to remember the long history of bad claims. They see that getting it wrong never matters, that wrongness is rewarded. And they stop believing. The young haven't seen that so swallow it all. 3. Scientists who predict doom often don't act like they believe it. The famous discovery that climatologists attend more foreign conferences than many other types of scientists, the way Prof Ferguson insisted lockdown was impossible to avoid and then broke his own rules to see his married lover, etc. These people invariably claim everyone must submit to terrible hardship that mysteriously vanishes the moment it might get in the way of something they want. And so on.