Wider perspective: it is well documented (not some tinfoil hat nonsense, but US secret service officials writing op-eds in the mainstream press) that Russia has been playing a divide-and-conquer game via bots and stooges for nearly a decade.

We've been herded into echo chambers where the shoutiest voice wins, with ever shorter and simpler articles appealing to emotion, not reason.

Now most of those articles are written by bots, too.

(Including some of the comments to this piece.)

The growing awareness of short attention spans coincides with a growing awareness of ADHD. Previously, it was thought to affect only rowdy young boys who couldn't sit still for long enough to learn.

Now, it's understood to affect millions of middle-aged managers who have held things together for a lifetime, but find themselves working long into the night because they couldn't focus for long enough to get the job done between nine and five. We used to call these people "high functioning", but it's more like "high coping".

(If you're in a creative industry, like writing, there's a pretty high chance that you're one of them.)

So, yes, clickbait articles is part of it, but only part.

Also the CFC scare is not a fair analogy to our current problems: it was an extinction-level problem that was relatively easy to fix. Governments worldwide could buy into a solution because it didn't cost them very much.

If the US didn't want to be an outsized contributor to climate change, hundreds of millions of people would have to move out of their giant, scattered houses and move into densely-populated walkable cities (that would fix your gun problem, too: in the UK, 71% of 999 calls to the police are answered within 10 seconds, and an officer will be on your doorstep within 15 minutes. When I lived in London, officers aimed to arrive within four minutes: the infrastructure eliminates the need for individuals to worry about home defence).

If I wanted to contribute less to climate change, I would always take the train rather than fly. This is easy enough for London to Paris, but much less feasible for London to Madrid, so it's not so much that we can't focus on the problems - we just put our head in the sand when we don't like our options. There's a learned helplessness here, too: we know that high speed rail links (across the US, Europe and elsewhere) would solve the problem, but we don't like to pay taxes and invest in our countries.

So, yes, the problem is technological, but the root of it is mostly political.