If there’s one thing people love more than cuddly cat videos, it’s a good disaster flick.

It’s in our DNA, I guess. Just ask any Hollywood film producer.

Most people love to be scared speechless, whether it’s due to the threat of giant asteroids hurtling toward Earth (Armageddon), melting polar ice caps (Waterworld), a new ice age (The Day After Tomorrow), Ebola (Contagion), or nuclear meltdown (The China Syndrome).

That’s just a short list of nerve-jangling cinematic nasties, of course. Don’t get me started on zombies, terrorists, evil robots, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, aliens or crazed North Korean leaders.

The media-savvy green lobby knows this, of course. It’s no surprise that eco-alarmists like Bill McKibben have recruited Hollywood celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio to hype the threat of global warming, as if it’s an imminent danger to humanity (if not their jet-setting lifestyles).

In reality, no one — not even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — knows precisely what impact rising temperatures will have on the planet, and over what time period. The surprising and unanticipated “hiatus” in rising temperatures since 1998 is a case in point.

Meanwhile, we ignore or underplay other, more pressing threats.

More than half a million people die of malaria — an utterly preventable and treatable disease — each and every year, according to the World Health Organization. That’s not a future threat, it’s happening right now. Most are poor children in Africa.

But on the hype-o-meter scale, malaria barely rates a mention in the mainstream media. A quick search of this newspaper chain’s database shows the term “climate change” popped up more than 4,800 times since Jan. 1.

Malaria? It was mentioned just 239 times. That’s a 20-to-one ratio.

Same story at The Globe and Mail. Over the past couple of years, the newspaper ran 15,635 articles that referenced climate change, more than 12 times the number of stories that mentioned malaria.

Of course, malaria isn’t a threat in Canada, granted. But eco-alarmists often argue that it’s the world’s poorest who will suffer most from climate change. So why such concern about a perceived future threat, and conversely, such a muted response to a current one?

I’m not a “denier.” If most scientists agree that the world is warming rapidly, mainly due to human activities, I take that seriously. It must be addressed in a way that makes economic as well as environmental sense.

But I’m confident it will. Humanity has overcome many serious challenges over the millennia, and I’m sure we’ll find ways to address this one. The options are many, including better building design codes, greater reliance on renewables, more use of mass transit, and adoption of new technologies to cut emissions.

It won’t be fast enough for some, of course. But I have faith in humanity. Perhaps more than Pope Francis, in fact. Of course, that’s a rather boring view. It won’t sell movie tickets, books or even newspapers.

Which is why the perpetually hyperventilating “sky is falling” crowd tend to get a lot more attention than they deserve, whether the subject is climate change, the stock market, house prices or the economy.

Just this week, scientists at Stanford University issued a dire warning that the Earth has already entered its sixth “mass extinction” episode, with animals dying out at 100 times the normal rate.