Analyzing Climate Denial

A reader requested comments on his query at the left.

This isn’t a yes-or-no question; in other words, yes, I would think this is one of the many mechanisms that lies behind climate denialism.  Here are a few others:

The oil companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year, deliberately confusing the public and their elected officials about fossil fuel emissions and climate change, and these lies can be found in everything from advertisements to public relations campaigns to our schools’ text books.  In combination with their lobbying efforts and the enormous campaign contributions they make to our representatives in Congress, they’ve been quite successful in keeping our business-as-usual approach in place.  This doesn’t require a psychological mechanism per se; it’s simply the infusion of larger amounts of false data.

Climate change is a long-term issue, and human beings, Americans in particular, lack the capacity to stay effectively focused on problems of this nature.

Mitigating climate change means making sacrifices for the common good, and we’re particularly bad at this.  Given that we’re having trouble getting people to wear masks in public, does it seem likely that we can get them to change their behavior on behalf of eight billion other strangers?

In the United States, climate change is a political issue, just like abortion and Meals on Wheels.  The rest of the world, of course, finds this astounding; how can a matter of science be even remotely political?  They us ask us quizzically: what do Republicans believe about calculus and inorganic chemistry?  Yet it’s true: part of the Republican dogma is that climate change mitigation is anti-capitalist, and that our participating in the global trend to clean energy will cost jobs.  The fact that there is not a single objectively conducted study that supports this, and there are mountains of evidence to the contrary, is immaterial.