You announce a set of boundaries, imply that crossing them shifts the system to some new, disastrous attractor state, and get a lot of media and donor attention

You announce a set of boundaries, imply that crossing them shifts the system to some new, disastrous attractor state, and get a lot of media and donor attention. For a couple years you get lots of mileage out of it, until you need to come up with a new set, except this time it's For Real. Repeat. It's counterproductive: once people see small violations of the boundaries result in only small changes, they start to tune them out. And, with global warming, the accumulated small changes will ultimately result in significant harm, so there's no need to invent fake boundaries.