Are climate skeptics nuts?

Psychologists are overwhelmingly Left-leaning so you might expect that claim. In fact, Leftist psychologists have been trying hard to medicalize non-Leftist thinking for around 70 years, with a big push under Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno in 1950. So the propaganda below was to be expected. I call it propaganda advisedly because it mentions not one climate fact. It is all based on appeals to authority, one of the informal fallacies of logic.

And there is absolutely not one clinical interview with any skeptic reported .  There is NO evidence given that even one denier has psychological problems.  It is all just assertions.  The pattern of their argumentation is simply that climate change is a big threat so therefore anybody who disagrees with that must be either a dupe or psychologically awry. That there might be ample evidence for it not being a threat at all is ignored.  It is a statement of faith. It is in no way a scientific treatise

Adorno and friends did better in 1950.  At least they tried to provide clinical and survey evidence for their claims. There is nothing like that below. Below I give just excerpts.  I have left out the repetitious bits.  But read the arrogant whole if you have the stomach for it.  I give the link

 A lot has been written about climate change denial and there are clearly many explanations for it. For one thing, an enormous amount of money is being spent encouraging us to ignore climate change. Corporations, especially the fossil fuel industry, have spent huge sums attempting to obfuscate the reality of climate change. We are constantly told by them that “more data are needed” because “climate scientists don’t agree.” While no scientist would ever disagree with a call for more research—that line is, after all, found near the end of almost every scientific paper ever written—it just is not true that scientists don’t agree that climate change is real. To some extent, then, we are the victims of a well-funded and sophisticated misinformation campaign that attempts to keep us in the dark about climate change.

But studies persistently show us that simply providing people with the facts about climate [When has any Warmist done that? They occasionally offer some facts but regularly ignore others] does not reliably change minds. The science that proves the earth is warming is very technical and difficult for most of us to grasp. “Humans aren’t well wired to act on complex statistical risks,” according to a Brookings Institute report. Even when the evidence about climate change is relayed in very clear terms with lots of compelling graphics, many people either don’t believe it or shrug it off. Hence, the problem of climate change denial is not simply a matter of an information gap.

Climate change denial is in some ways a new mental process for psychologists to understand. Of course, the concept of denial itself is well understood. Psychologists consider denial—the refusal to accept facts in order to protect us from uncomfortable truths—to be a primitive defense mechanism.

But despite the fact that psychologists know a lot about denial, they have never had to face denial on this scale before. Millions of people share the phenomenon of climate denial. This is clearly not something that is amenable to individual or even group psychotherapy.

Nevertheless, there are at least two psychological reasons that encouraging people to adopt climate protecting activities in their daily lives may help promote action on the larger scale needed. First, denial is a response to something we fear, and we know from animal and human studies that fear induces freezing and passivity. But studies also demonstrate that giving a fearful animal or human a task that even symbolically addresses what is feared can minimize freezing and promote action. Thus, recommending tasks that we can perform in our daily lives may help us overcome our feeling that mitigating climate change is a hopeless enterprise and motivate us join the voices insisting on ending burning fossil fuels.

Second, these quotidian activities can be the basis for the formation of committees and communities that bring people together with the common goal of addressing climate change. Being part of a group with a common goal may help people overcome denial and have the courage to face the realities of climate change, however grim they may be. It may be easier and more effective for groups of people to demand that countries impose carbon taxes and spend heavily on sustainable energy than it is for individuals.

Mental health professionals are increasingly recognizing the critical role they play in combating climate change. Data suggest that rising temperatures are linked to increases in multiple psychiatric disorders and suicide rates. In an excellent review of the mental health aspects of climate change, a group from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto comment that “The overarching threats of a changing climate, can also incite despair and hopelessness as actions to address the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change seem intangible or insignificant in comparison to the scale and magnitude of the threats."

Organizations like Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance have been formed not only to point out the severe consequences of climate change for emotional and behavioral health but also to lend expertise in determining how best to overcome climate change denial. For these and similar organizations, climate change denial constitutes an emergency that demands immediate attention. We need urgent attention to developing and implementing the best practices for overcoming public despair and inaction and increasing the motivation to demand large-scale climate change mitigation action.

SOURCE