Is climate change crowding out other environmental causes?

By singing the climate tune so loudly, have environmental groups unwittingly helped to create a situation where climate change is all that politicians and the public hear?

So begins the best part of this long but worthwhile BBC article on whether climate change is crowding out other worthwhile environmental causes. The author is fair-minded and does not exempt his own profession from scrutiny:

Has the media contributed? A couple of years ago I added up the number of articles we had written on the BBC News website within the preceding nine months about various issues.

The scores were four for deforestation, four for desertification, 17 for biodiversity - and on climate change I stopped counting when I reached 1,000.

In large part, what journalists report reflects what is going on in the big world; but have we, too, forgotten the larger messages of the UN Geo-4 report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and other audits of a society whose environmental problems run much wider and deeper than climate change?

I don't really count as media, but a quick scan of my most common labels on the right-hand side of my blog reveals that, despite my goal of being even-handed and treating all environmental and resources challenges with equal seriousness, climate change easily outdistances oil & gas, agriculture, power generation, and China as the most common topic for my posts. I can claim the same excuse - climate change is the hot topic these days - but I am equally guilty.

Ultimately, the limited public attention span makes the question one of relative urgency.

None of the people I interviewed for the programme argue that man-made climate change is not real or not important; there is no suggestion of a swindle here.

Some believe a narrow focus on climate is justified - either because they feel it is so much more serious than every other issue, or because they feel there is real political momentum to solve it now and time enough to deal with everything else once that is done.

But others argue there is no time; that society needs, urgently, to see the wider picture of global decline in all its complexity - and that climate concerns have hijacked the broader agenda, to the detriment of us all.

I believe that climate change is an urgent matter, but this appeal resonates deeply with me. There are other major challenges (e.g. water) that will bite whether or not global warming happens, and someone - maybe not the electorate, but certainly people engaged enough to read this blog - needs to keep them in mind too.