Is "scale insensitivity" destroying climate activism?

Here's an image you're probably familiar with: it's the BBC News website banner.  The space between "InDepth" and "UK" is reserved for quick links to the most important issues of the day, and right now it reads "Israel-Gaza war | War in Ukraine | Climate".  It's fair to assume that the highest priority issues are closer to the left, based on how frequently these issues end up in the headline article.

So, I wondered, how has the priority - according to the BBC - of the biggest issues changed over time?  I decided to sample the website using the wayback machine, once per year from September 2020 to September 2025, and here's the result:

 

Over these 6 years the BBC News banner has had between 1 and 4 quick links.  And it seems to be a consistent feature that whenever a new story comes along that threatens fewer lives, it takes a higher priority position in the banner.  "Climate" didn't turn up until 2022, and when it did it took the lowest priority position, below "Coronavirus", "War in Ukraine", and eventually "Israel-Gaza war".  In January 2025 the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries produced a report predicting between 1 and 4 billion deaths by 2070 as a result of climate change (depending on whether we reach a little under 2C or over 3C of warming).  This was barely reported, which is shocking but consistent with the priority the BBC give "Climate" in the BBC News banner.

What's going on?

This seems to be an example of Scope Neglect, which is also known as Scale Insensitivity.  People simply do not react in proportion to the amount at stake.  This may be because reactions to worrying issues are driven by emotions which evolved long ago when human communities were small, and these emotions are ill-equipped to grasp when one issue is orders of magnitude more serious than another.

According to the wikipedia article, 

In one study, respondents were asked how much they were willing to pay to prevent migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds by covering the oil ponds with protective nets. Subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were affected annually, for which subjects reported they were willing to pay 80 USD, 78 USD and 88 USD respectively

Essentially the number of zeros made no difference!  What is far more likely to make a difference is the mental availability of evidence of suffering.  Are there a lot of pictures of birds covered in oil?  This seems to be a particular issue for Climate, as the billions of lives lost are mostly future lives.  Even with the current consequences of climate change, there's always something more available and immediate to blame, such as poor infrastructure leading to flooding.

So far, this has all been about the news, but the same scope neglect issue also affects activism.  Climate activism in the UK appears to have almost completely shut down since the start of the Israel-Gaza war.  This is partly because it is more difficult than ever for an action to make it into the news, and it's partly due to the state cracking down more heavily.  But it is also the case that many climate activists have changed their priorities and started campaigning primarily about the war.  Of course it is understandable that activists feel strongly about both.  But does it make sense to abandon an issue that will kill billions of people, and is ignored by the media, to focus on another, many orders of magnitude smaller, which already dominates the news, and which already has a large number of activists?