Psychology of Climate Change Denial

I have been going through the "Denial101x - Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  It is available for free on the edx platform and you can also see a reference to it at https://skepticalscience.com/denial101x-videos-and-references.html. I just watched two extended video interviews that relate to the "psychology of denial".  I think you should take a look at them.  The first one is the interview with Stephan Lewandowsky who is at the University of Bristol in the UK.  His main point seems to be that for the most part the deniers have political issues related to accepting the evidence.  He says that over two thirds of the variance in acceptance can be accounted for by a person's worldview.  So the denial is not based on the science

• "When it comes to the drivers of belief or acceptance of scientific findings, in particular, climate change, then what we find is that one of the most important factors is a person’s worldview or you can call it a political ideology, their belief in things such as the free market. It turns out, in particular in the case of climate change, that people who are very enthusiastic about free markets and who think that government should not interfere with free markets, that they tend to reject the findings from climate change, climate science based on that ideology.  It’s a very strong effect. It’s a huge effect. In some of my data, it explains two-thirds of the variance. Now what that means is that if I know somebody’s belief about the free markets, I can reduce my uncertainty about what their climate change attitude is by two-thirds. There’s a huge correlation there between those two variables and that is one of the main drivers." 

Watch the entire video:

 

 The other interview is with Larry Hamilton from the University of New Hampshire:

Ex-Fox anchor explains how to start deprogramming your Fox-brainwashed friends and relatives, Part 1 on Front Page Live

Ex-Fox anchor explains how to start deprogramming your Fox-brainwashed friends and relatives, Part 1 on Front Page Live: Fox News' slanted coverage, climate change denial, and now the Australian fires have caused a huge split in the Murdoch family.