Unbelievable. In an interview with The Atlantic, Noble Prize winner Thomas Schelling (like Paul Krugman, in economics) let loose this bomb on how to convince Americans that global warming is a threat (emphasis mine at the end, question in bold at the beginning):

I wanted to ask one more question, to go back to the moral issue here. It does seem to me that the strongest case for mitigating the effects of global climate change is a moral one. It is based not on our own interest but on the interests of people in the developing world who don’t yet exist. But it also seems to me that — while I don’t know much about game theory — collective bargaining theories generally assume the participants are rational and self-interested. So how does one go about making sense of an arrangement where we must set our self-interest aside? How does one make the moral case in a situation like this? Or is my description of collective bargaining just totally idiotic? Well, I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they’re misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I’m always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they’re worried about the polar bears.
And one thing that I think ought to help but doesn’t is that — and my impression is that maybe this is slightly changing — the organized churches in American don’t take seriously preserving the heritage that God gave us. I’ve heard congressmen confess to being devote Episcopalians say that what god gave us ought to be preserved. But I get no impression that Protestants and Catholics are sermonizing on the importance of preserving the bounty of the earth, the richness of the species, or preserving the planet as we would like to know it. And I think that if someone could mobilize the church to be interested…
I spent a long time concerned with smoking behavior. And when I was a boy the churches were very adamant about smoking. And my grandfather, who was sort of devout, he wouldn’t hire a boy to mow the lawn if he knew the boy smoked. And we know how potent the churches can be, because nobody smokes on campus at the University of Utah. And nobody smokes among the Seventh-Day Adventists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the Mormons aren’t supposed to drink coke and coffee, let alone smoke.
And I think the churches don’t realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of god’s legacy — in terms of flora and fauna — be destroyed by climate change.
But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I guess the people who die in these disasters are planetary martyrs.