The Psychopathology of Climate Denial

Psychological studies and their insights into the political and pseudo-scientific attacks on climate science and climate

scientists

“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating

whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation” –

Albert Einstein, circa 1918

• Insane indeed. You probably didn’t know that General Relativity is actually a LIBERAL PLOT! … according to this Conserv-a-pedia entry which is full of pseudo-scientific sounding nonsense.

Yet, belief in the reality of climate change (whether or not human-caused) has turned sharply upwards this Fall

2015, even among average on-the-street Republicans

…In Stark Contrast to the Republicans who Run Congress and Create our Laws…

• “Last year PolitiFact could find only eight Republicans in Congress, out of 278 in the caucus, who had made on-the-record comments accepting the reality of man-made global warming. And most of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are solidly in the anti-science camp.”

• I remind you that anti-science is anti-evidence. Anti-reason. Anti-reality. It is a psychopathology.

Reminder: The Scientific Conviction

Contrast that with Readers of the blogsite of Fox TV Weatherman Anthony Watts

“Watts Up with That?” (WUWT)• This is arguably the most popular and highly

visited sites of the climate denial blog-o-sphere

The Two Primary Groups behind Climate Denialism

• 1. Rightwing political ideologues• 2. Fossil Fuel business interests

• These two groups have a substantial overlap, but the motivations, psychological and otherwise, can be quite different

Right Wing Ideologues…• The governing psychopathology here is based on fear• Fear of? Of change. Of government stomping on their supposed

freedoms. Of the hated Liberals getting their way. And unacknowledged fear that they may be wrong about climate and the future is indeed in deep peril…. There can be many others

• And deeper – fear that they are mentally/psychologically unfit for this challenge

• Fear is our organism’s signal that we are in danger. • That we are out of control. That our contact with reality is not adequate to the

challenges perceived.• Of course there are healthy examples of proper fear, but fear is also a nameless

constant state of those who feel a deep lack of confidence in the primary means by which we achieve control over our lives – our mind’s ability to think, to acquire needed knowledge, and to cope

• Since the mind is our fundamental means of dealing with the World, the source of this kind of FEAR is the unacknowledged suspicion of one’s inadequacy to be able to think through challenges

Studies show political conservatism is linked with low intelligence and low self-confidence

in the ability to cope…

• Low IQ in childhood is predictive of conservative attitudes, and racism later as adults (Hodson and Busseri 2012) and relevant quote “…those who lack a cognitive ability to grasp complexities of our world, strict-right wing ideologies may be more appealing.”

• Republican states have lower high school graduation rates

• College students are increasingly liberal but also increasingly despairing of political involvement (which is a reasonable reaction, given Gilens and Page 2014)

A Study from Dickinson University finds watching arch-conservative Fox News makes one even less

informed than those who watch no news at all

The Problem of Media-Promoted Ignorance is Profound

• We are social animals, and all except the most independent thinkers will tend to take their cues of what is alarming from those immediately around them

• Hear “Fire!” yelled in a crowded theater, and if no one else reacts, you’ll probably not react either – fire or no fire.

• Enemies of climate science know this. A powerful way to dumb down the populace in democracies (where brute popularity is what installs politicians), is to first dumb down the media.

• Consider the results of this poll on belief in the reality of human-caused climate change (from 2014 poll by Ipsos)…

The U.S. leads the world in climate denial. And the 3 worst climate-denying countries (bottom 3) have something in common – Rupert Murdoch-controlled media dominance

Dogmatic hatred of government influences Republican acceptance of climate science (Campbell and Kay 2014, discussed here): Republicans rejected climate science if told government regulation is required to solve climate change, but much less so if told there were free market solutions. Rejecting reasoned evidence because one doesn’t

like the required solution, exhibits psychopathology.

Low-Effort thought promotes political Conservatism (Eidelman et al. 2014)

• Below is the paper’s abstract…• “The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes

political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases”

The connection between chronic fear and political conservatism is backed up

by brain studies

• Kanai et al. 2011, in their paper “Political Orientations are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults”, find that conservatives show larger brain mass in the right amygdala which is primarily involved in the emotion of fear, while conversely, the anterior cingulate cortex of liberal students had more gray matter than their conservative counterparts. The anterior cingulate cortex is most active in coping with complexity, and especially in error-detection

The Abstract section from Kanai et al. 2011…

• “Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [ 1 ]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [ 2, 3 ]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [ 4 ]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [ 4 ] and recognition of emotional faces [ 5 ] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [ 4, 6 ] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.”

A Failure of the Normal Maturity Path• As an infant, we see Mother as the source of all satisfactions. If we are unhappy,

we cry and she’ll make it better somehow• As a child, we begin learning our own capabilities and that there’s a larger world• As a teenager, we begin to think conceptually, project a future, and begin to

understand the power of principles and ideas. One of the key ideas we learn, is that the World does not owe us a living, that nature has laws which the evidence shows are unchanging across all space and all time, regardless of temper tantrums

• As an adult, we learn that our task as humans is to master the understanding of those laws, and the laws of human psychology and biology, as part of the fundamental requirements for finding a path to a happy life

• But some people refuse to grow up, refuse to accept that their wishes are not all-powerful, and that life requires effortful thought. Perhaps over-indulgent parents dis-incentivize the normal maturity path, or perhaps its simply their choice.

• Whatever the reason, personal growth is stunted until this failure is corrected. The Campbell and Kay study on slide 13 is a dramatic example of this failure by Republicans – Refusal to accept reason and evidence simply because you do not like the consequences, is a severe dysfunction

Reason and Self Esteem• It’s widely found and widely accepted in psychological studies that humans have a

strong need for self-respect• If self-respect early on is earned genuinely by exercising mental clarity and a

commitment to honoring evidence and truth (see Chapter 0), fear tends to play a minor and appropriate role in life, and the psychic rewards of thinking clearly tend to send one into a positive reinforcing cycle of clarity.

• But caving in to fear, and giving up on thinking when it is not always immediately successful, can set up a vicious cycle in which cognition is further limited to avoid painful awareness of real or imagined inadequacy. Fear (unconscious and conscious) becomes the ruling emotion.

• When genuine self esteem is not there, people often seek it by attaching to a group or ideology which promises “rightness” with only minimal effort – often nothing more than blind faith. But going this route amplifies the negative spiral, as reasoned thought further retreats, and fear becomes even more pervasive when one thereby develops a now well-earned judgment of intellectual inadequacy.

• Does this cycle explain the larger amygdala in Conservatives, or were they born that way? How much is in-born, how much is from personal choices? It’s not clear from these past studies.

All These Findings Bring up Disturbing Questions

• Certainly most people (myself included) can attest to the frustration of trying to reason with Conservatives on climate. It goes nowhere.

• Cause and effect are not clear from these studies – are Conservatives born with brain abnormalities and/or mental handicaps and cannot be expected to ever change?

• Or instead, does their continual awareness-avoidance promote fear and low self-esteem, and they find similar political conservatives safe company and perhaps a source of positive regard, substituting for their low self-esteem, and then brain structure follows along after their poor decision-making?

• Or is it a mixture of both?• What do the answers to these question imply about how willing we will be

to make the wrenching changes necessary to halt climate change? • Or, as increasing evidence points towards - how do the answers to these

questions explain why we failed to act back when there was still time to halt it at all?

But More Disturbing…• … as climate change continues to accelerate in a worsening direction, there is

the very real possibility of societal breakdown in vulnerable places• We’re already seeing significant climate-related refugee crises in Europe and

the Middle East, even at this very early stage • We’ve shown the climate consequences to come, in earlier Presentations…• All of these are likely to promote MORE fear, and MORE clinging attachment to

dysfunctional politics, and further fleeing from reason if it requires tough-minded solutions which are psychologically distressing in the present.

• The risk is, they retreat to a fear/hate based bunker-mentality.• How to deal with the amazing level of dogmatic refusal to confront reason and

evidence…?• It’s a very tough problem. Looking tougher every time I look deeper. In personal

psychological growth, a person has to WANT to grow and change before it can happen. That key element, so far, seems utterly lacking.

Fossil Fuel Business Interests

• This is the second major group involved in attacking climate science and climate scientists

• Members of this group, at least the members who are distinct from the Rightwing political faction described earlier, are increasingly seen to be not so much in outright denial as compared to the average Conservative on the street.

• Example: Exxon-Mobil’s own scientists were doing good climate science and advising corporate headquarters of the severe climate consequences of their business as early as the 1970’s.

• Exxon-Mobil’s reaction? Fund groups attacking climate scientists and climate science. Fund “Doubt is our Product” purveyors. While they claim they don’t fund climate denial groups now…

From the Sept ‘15 Interview by NPR’s Bob Garfield of “On the Media”

• “BOB GARFIELD: [Y]ou're kind of changing the subject. This reporting by InsideClimate News doesn't really concern itself with what ExxonMobil has done lately (RN- but see next slide), it's concerning itself with the very sharp change in corporate behavior and apparently strategy 25 years ago. Namely, that you dismantled some significant percentage of this [climate change] research program, and, beginning in about 1989, started pouring millions and millions of dollars in the funding of three dozen organizations, some of which were transparently industry front groups, and some which were right-wing economics advocacy groups, that themselves spent decades in various degrees of climate denial.”

Increasingly, money to fund climate denial groups is being laundered through the anonymity of Donor’s Trust. See links

to understand how the red curve rises while the Koch and Exxon curves fell in the past decade

Exxon Knew• It is difficult to get a high-level decision-

making job in a tough competitive business in America unless you have an above average IQ, and can think clearly in areas which needs clear thinking in order to make profits

• So the earlier discussion about the intellectual deficiencies of Conservatives may not be as relevant here

• Instead, the psychopathology seems to be the repression of, or vacancy of, a moral compass.

Fossil Fuel corporations fund attacks on climate scientists because it is in their

financial interest to do so…

• …not because they think it’s morally correct to do so• Yes, this is obvious. So the question is – why do amoral

people capable of this level of sociopathic betrayal get chosen for such high positions?

• “Natural selection”… it seems.• It appears to be more profitable to choose CEO’s who

will not let morality interfere unduly with the single-minded goal of modern capitalism – accruing money to the corporation and its stockholders

And Yet: Genuine self esteem is the most valuable achievement there is, and amorality

will not take you there• Why did these people default on their own intelligence and take this sociopathic

route?• Denial is still involved. One cannot keep any semblance of fully conscious genuine

self respect and at the same time face the true magnitude of one’s betrayal to all future generations and other species on this planet entailed in funding climate denialism, especially during these very last years when it was possible to halt climate change

• It’s a slippery slope from white lies to self, to gray lies of convenience…. to worse, as the motivation to preserve genuine self esteem wanes, much like the urge to keep a new car shiny and spotless wanes after 10 years of dings and stains and road insults and failures of maintenance

• Psychological repression must be involved• In the same way that it would have been pointless to try to get Joseph Stalin to

acknowledge his atrocities as a step in his therapy, it may well be futile in this case as well. Beyond a certain point, one simply cannot face the magnitude of what one has done and yet still preserve some feeling of the value of your own life

Psychological Repression

• When our attention encounters a fact which, if fully let into awareness, will cause a very painful realization about one’s own sense of worth, we can feel the urge to quickly shift our attention elsewhere

• If we give in to this urge, and if we do this repeatedly and consistently over time…

• …with repetition it becomes automated, and sinks beneath conscious awareness; a habit, and no longer requires constant energy from the conscious mind. Our brain is trying to save biological energy in making habits, but in this case, it’s cementing in a pathological response that will require hard work to undo.

Sharp, Motivated, Sociopathic CEO’s?

• If we show high competence in areas not touching on this repressed area, we can convince ourselves that our self-value is ALL about that narrow competence, and this can make the repression all the harder to unseat.

• The (pseudo) reward is (pseudo) self-esteem, blunting the pain mechanism which would normally alert us to our psychopathology and motivate us to heal ourselves.

Pseudo-Self Esteem Based on Competitive Success is Costly

• Surrounding yourself with “yes” men, or sycophants in general, will make it all the easier to avoid awareness of our betrayals

• But there is a cost… it becomes impossible to emotionally connect with innocence, with perhaps one’s own children, or wife

• To repress the pain of the betrayals also cuts one off from the full experience of the pleasures that can only come from emotional open-ness.

• It’s difficult for me to imagine that Lee Raymond, Rex Tillerson, or David or Charles Koch… for example, could possibly fully enjoy talking about the future with 5 year old children who love playing in the fields and seeing the wild things there. There must be a betrayed child inside themselves somewhere, struggling to find expression in such moments. I imagine this would provide powerful motivation to avoid such encounters.

Money and Envy as Substitutes for Self-Value

• A society such as America makes it easy to attempt to substitute financial wealth for genuine self respect.

• If one doesn’t have genuine self-respect all the way through, as Oil execs who fund climate denialism cannot, then one can feel driven to go after its substitute – envy from others

• Earning lots of money honestly by creating genuine value to the World is of course nothing to be ashamed of. But money as substitute for a self-esteem one does not have, becomes a driving never-satisfied obsession to fill a hole in one’s soul that can never be filled with money

• When one doesn’t truly believe one’s own moral worth, one can feel driven for status and accolades from others, however such can be commandeered. The never-ending quest to convince oneself… “See? I MUST be a good person after all, or so many people wouldn’t admire and envy me”

Charity as Compensation• Earning vast sums as an Oil exec, and then dealing

with one’s nagging conscience by giving much to charities, even to a PBS Science Program (which then does not create and does not broadcast programs on human-caused climate change), will not fill that hole either

• This problem of conscience is not in being rich, the problem is the self-delusions involved in lying to yourself, and then others, about the motives you have in attacking science and scientists, and in avoiding awareness of what your business is doing to everyone’s future

Facing and overcoming these mental handicaps will already be tough. Clearly the

first step is still in the future, for our Republican Congress…

• But it will get even tougher for a very cruel reason… • New studies are showing that our decision-making

ability drops by a strikingly large 21% when CO2 levels double. Before the end of this century, on trend CO2 levels will be double the pre-industrial levels, and rising further

• This mental handicap will affect all of us, not just Republicans (although with their, on average, lower starting level, they can afford it least)

Beyond the Thermodynamics of Civilization - The Reasons Why Global Warming is so Dangerously Unlikely to be Controlled

• 1. The human mind can make ‘light bulb’ connections in a very short time – given the Will to Clarity; the DESIRE for genuine honest understanding. But society does not have the intimate and rapid neuron/dendrite connections like the cells of the brain. Communication is a million times slower.

• Teaching, especially against psychological resistance is just plain slow. I can vouch for this!

2. The Emotional Progression of the Resistant Mind

• These are the likely stages a world society will go through in confronting Climate Change. Individuals can go through these at very different speeds, or detour altogether in a better direction, depending on their COMMITMENT to AWARENESS and to what extent they have the mental frame “I Just Want to Know the Truth” (review Chapter 0)

• A. Apathy: “I’m too busy, don’t bother me about global warming”• B. Denial: “I refuse to accept this. It just can’t be right, that’s horrific”• C. Skepticism: “In my opinion, you’re wrong, and even if you’re right, it won’t be so bad as you say” • D. Anger : “Science is saying WHAT? I demand FAIRNESS in life, I don’t DESERVE this kind of thing.

You’ve GOT to be all wrong!”• E. Feeble Token Efforts: “OK, we need to do something, let’s put solar on our roofs (now that it’s

cheap), and a bucket in the shower stall. But you have no RIGHT to expect huge sacrifices to my LIFESTYLE! It wasn’t MY fault!”

• F. Fear, Panic: “My God, food prices are skyrocketing, insurance is unaffordable, mega storms and mega-droughts, resource wars breaking out, it’s hot and muggy all the time now, and coastal cities are starting to drown. It’s so hot and stuffy I can’t think straight. I don’t know what to do!!”

• G. Despair: “The time to act was the late 20th century, and it’s now well into the 21st, and physics time scales are acting as you said. Adopt fetal position/thumb-in-mouth. “Bunker mentality” to life in a stuffy, chaotic, expensive, overcrowded, overheated, claustrophobic world.

And Finally…H. Acceptance. Get back up, resolve to save what we can of the future, for our children and

other species

• -- We either realize the world will pull together across national boundaries, or sink together individually

• -- Stiff carbon taxes, some of this money diverted to funding research and deployment of massive atmospheric CO2 removal installations, beyond ending CO2 emissions.

• -- Commit to lowering global temperatures to halt permafrost carbon feedback, re-freeze the Arctic Ocean, thicken and re-ground thinning polar ice-shelves.

• -- Stop whining that it’s getting colder or you feel poorer, while we do this. • -- Strong population control measures• -- Re-think the notion that Bling=Wealth, Meat=Status... Learn the joys of giving

to future generations, instead of taking• -- Contract global civilization in as controlled and humane a way as possible,

until we are within sustainable boundaries which also end the 6th Great Global Extinction Event already well underway.

• Re-think as a value to pursue, the Libertarian/Objectivist mindset of Homo Sapien’s manifest destiny to completely dominate the planet

Where are we today?

• We’re somewhere between “B. Denial” and “C. Skepticism”, with some at “E. Token efforts”.

• It will take an individual of rare maturity and discipline to reach all the way to Stage H.

• Can a sufficient number get there, to actually change civilization before chaos sets in?

• I fear Nolthenius’ First Law will rule once again. And by then, chaos may already have arrived.

• Where are you on this list, personally?

3. Individual Carbon Footprint: Personal Utility=High; Climate Impact=Zero

• Our individual carbon footprints are so microscopic as to be negligible for climate

• Yet our felt utility in engaging carbon-generating activities is very high. Drive to the store for a weekly food shopping, buy ‘fridge and washing machine/dryer to allow time to spend loving your children, etc.

• It’s the clearly well-motivated thing to do, to burn that carbon for the benefit of your personal life. That’s the energy infrastructure we inherited

• This is entirely rational, and it would be pointless and counterproductive for me or anyone to guilt-trip you about your personal carbon choices. All that would do is motivate further head-in-sand avoidance of critically needed conscious awareness of the climate issue, at least for most of us

• It is the rationally irrational thing to do! A psychopathology that is not a psychopathology, but instead a failure of the “group selection” genetic programming of humans (see E. O. Wilson)

• So what to do? See the “policy” PowerPoint!

4. Physics Time Scales…• …For big things are long. This allows the non-scientist to

indulge the false belief that since things haven’t changed much yet, they never will, and things won’t be so bad, or else they’d be bad already .

• This is a tough one. The logic is just not compelling enough for average people to appreciate. It’s hard to gut-level convince them about physics time scales. At best they take it on faith, until they see the “bill”, that is.

• It’s just too wonky, especially for the mentally challenged Conservatives, to motivate the level of dramatic, emergency action actually required

• The truth is, we don’t have that time. It is more and more apparent that the time to avoid a seriously crippled future has already passed

5. Recency Bias• We tend to accommodate to what we’ve experienced recently• You - my students - may not miss the frogs which I loved to hear in my

younger days, and the pollywogs I loved to watch in even the urban creeks of my youth. You’ve perhaps not experienced them, and so won’t miss them as much

• You may not miss all the many songbirds, which now are rare. I used to hear them all the time, almost every day as a youngster. I do miss them.

• People of the next generation may accommodate to the world of that time, because they won’t remember the wonders of Venice before it went underwater, or the beauty of coral reefs before they disintegrated, or the beauty of icy mountains and quiet back-country skiing, when mountains had snow, and hard-driving snowmobilers hadn’t ruined what little there is.

• And if they don’t miss them, we will continue sliding into quiet negligence, doing nothing about their loss

• And the children of these children will unconsciously slip into lower and even lower expectations….

They’ll have a much different world… and not complain too much, all because of recency bias.

(Hopefully not THIS grim)

Thelma and Louise weren’t doomed when they sailed over the cliff

They were doomed 300 feet before the cliff, when they FAILED to slam on the brakes and yank the wheel hard, sending the car into a fish-tail spin.

They…. are us.

Key Points – K40b: Psychopathogies of Climate Denialism

• Low IQ when young is correlated with political conservatism as one grows up

• Republicans deny the reality of climate science because they abhor government, which must be strongly involved in solutions to global commons problems like climate

• Amplifying feedback loop: low self-respect leads to temptation to lower awareness, thus lowering self-esteem further, even poorer decision-making, lowering self esteem further

• Fundamental motivation for attacking climate scientists is fear, growing out of (well-founded) fear of mental inadequacy

• Doubling CO2 levels reduces decision-making abilities by 21% for all humans

• Personal carbon sacrifices make no difference to climate, so are inadequately motivated to succeed