Previous research has sought to explain public perception of climate change science in terms of individuals' "prior commitment" to such ideological stances as just-world belief, system justification, and liberalism/conservatism. One type of prior commitment that has received little formal attention in the literature is narratives of the moral trajectory of society. A theory of climate science uptake based on beliefs in societal progress or decline is more easily portable to non-Western settings; in a case study of global warming attitudes in the Marshall Islands, trajectory narratives indeed account for public belief, concern, blame, and response more aptly than existing theories, and accord well with qualitative analysis of Marshallese climate change discourse. In Western settings, progress/decline narratives may explain much of the variation in climate change attitudes previously accounted for by other ideological variables, promising a more penetrating explanation for the divergence of climate change attitudes within and between societies.