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Because people are afraid of the climate collapsing but they aren't afraid of mice stealing their wallets.

I don't think this is unique to climate research, I can imagine headlines, "Ground shakes beneath Mt. Rainier, alarming scientists," or "Ebola spreads unconstrained in Africa, alarming scientists."

It's fear driven because it might kill people. Unlike something along the lines of, "Mars mission fails as rocket explodes." That's sad but not necessarily causing harm across the population.

How is their research fear driven? They identify real change in the pacific ocean and look at what the consequences of that change could have on the wider system. Reacting with fear to reality is an individual problem, not an issue of science dissemination.

Have you ever considered that the facts might include some end of life as we know it implications? If they did, would you suppose they have a duty to pretend otherwise to protect themselves from naive cries of alarmism from people who literally cannot conceive of existential threats?

What does “fear-driven” mean? I’m sure there are people who go into climate research because they want to help prevent bad things from happening. Just as in medical research, auto safety research, cryptography research, civil engineering, and many other fields. Is that “fear-driven”?

> The discourse would be more effective if we stick to the facts without end-of-world proclamations.

Your complaint is with science journalism, not science. Let’s look at the actual quoted scientists:

“It came as a surprise,” said Ralf Schiebel. . . “We’ve never seen something like this before.”

Andrew Sellers. . . “major repercussions throughout the food web.”

“The climate is warming, that’s putting coral reefs at risk,” said Dr. Aronson. . .

But if [the current] disappears repeatedly, then “it’s cause for grave concern,” Dr. Aronson said.

Dr. Schiebel said. . . “Our fear is now that it would also happen to other upwelling systems,” he said.

With the exception of “grave concern,” these are statements of fact and falsifiable predictions, not “end of the world” prophecies.

As to why the New York Times indulges in such histrionics, well, how else are they going to maintain relevance in the digital era, by which I mean, how else are they to extract value from their advertisers & subscribers? We’ve proven at this point that the only thing people click on en masse is clickbait.

> No other science field does this

The reporting of astronomical objects is very fear/clicks driven when they find something that will come "close" to the earth.

With climate, there are the occasional "not as bad as we thought" articles when we get some new knowledge about a particular system, but the majority of it is fear driven as it's mainly bad news.