Normally, I don't mix psychology in with blog entries on scientific subjects unless the discipline involved is one of the psychological or psychomedical fields. I also can't stand the use of "denial" as a buzzword to cover everything from the psychology of addictions to "You don't agree with me, so I'm going to say you're in deep denial, so there!" However, what follows, taken from mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (http://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/142620213X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219895347&sr=1-2), it is appropriate in every sense of the word, because it concerns the various ways we humans deal with issues such as climate change or anything else that provokes alarm. I'm also sick and tired of idiots posting anonymous comments on my blog entries about global warming and climate change, which they really don't like discussed by anyone, let alone a mere chick like me (not to mention the ones who had a strong need to kick the cat -- or their children, or their wives, or whoever -- right about then, but didn't have them handy (or were afraid of what might happen to them if they did), and ran across my blog, and figured I'd do as a target of their adrenaline-fueled rage of the moment). Okay, you want a fight? Here's a great one. Have a nice day, adrenaline freaks . . .

From Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas:

Energy realities are not the only reason why our response to global warming has hitherto been so halfhearted. Our evolutionary psychology preconditions us not to respond to threats that can be postponed until later. We are good at mobilizing for immediate battles, less good at heading off challenges that still lie far in the future. Hence the most appropriate term to describe both individual and societal responses so far is probably "denial." This thinking is the same mental faculty that smokers use to pretend to themselves that they won't die early, or that mountain climbers scaling Everest use to imagine themselves invulnerable even as they pass the frozen bodies of previous mountaineers who have died on the very same path.

This denial is complex, involving a variety of defensive responses from the familiar "climate change is a myth" to the more understandable (but ultimately no more useful) "but I need my car for my job." It is, of course, no coincidence that the same people who are deeply wedded to high fossil-fuel use -- oilmen, for example -- are the ones most likely to deny the reality of climate change. . . . [There] is nothing so difficult as trying to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. This is classic denial: No one wants to hold a mental image of themselves as bad or evil, so immoral acts are necessarily dressed up in a cloak of intellectual self-justification.

According to psychologists, denial is a way for people to resolve the dissonance caused by new information that may challenge deeply held views or cherished patterns of behavior. Motorists, therefore, may not be willing to absorb information that challenges their perceived need to use their cars; nor are tourists likely to be eager to think too much about global warming as they board their flights to Thailand. This denial response has important implications for campaigners and educators. It means that simply giving people more facts about climate change may not necessarily make them determined to act against it in any straightforward cause-and-effect way.

So why is denial easier for people than being more honest and changing their behavior? Part of the problem is societal: We are confronted with daily social pressure to conform to a high-fossil-fuel-consuming lifestyle, so personal behavioral change in reality requires a lot of courage. Those who make the effort are frequently dismissed as "tree huggers" by the mainstream. A high-energy-consumption lifestyle is often seen as a badge of social success. TV and cinema ads seek to establish high-performance cars as status symbols, for example, while professional people may boast about how much international travel they do. We all need validation from our peers, and if our peer group behaves in a way that undermines our beliefs about climate change, this conflict might lead to feelings of alienation rather than satisfaction.

Given that resolving dissonance is difficult and that denying it is dishonest, many people choose another way out of the dilemma: displacement. In short, they blame someone else. For an ordinary person displacement might mean singling out someone whose behavior is worse -- the Mini Cooper driver pointing to the Hummer driver, for example. For policymakers, displacement might mean blaming entire countries. The Byrd-Hagel Resolution in the U.S. Senate refused to countenance any change to American lifestyles unless developing countries also cut back their emissions. . . . Even environmentalists can be tempted by displacement. The vilification of George W. Bush -- indefensible though his stance might be* -- is easier for most of us than facing trickier challenges closer to home.

Climate change is a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem 9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus), where behavior that makes sense at an individual level ultimately proves disastrous to society when repeated by everyone. . . .

One intriguing study on this issue used random-sample focus groups in Switzerland to investigate attitudes to climate change among the general public. Its results showed clearly how the tragedy of the commons is reflected in people's belief "in the insignificance of individual action to change the order of things," with the result that perceived "costs to the self are greater than benefits to others. However, the researchers found that the most powerful motivator of denial was more straightforwardly selfish -- an unwillingness to abandon personal comforts and consumption patterns. People complain that public transport is late, dirty, and overcrowded, therefore they "need" their cars. Or they might argue that their lives are busy and difficult, so they "need" foreign holidays for a couple of weeks a year. All these excuses seek to justify continued behavior that is, when expressed in collective terms, highly destructive.

The study reports on a variety of other ways that denial occurs. There is the "metaphor of displaced commitment" ("I protect the environment in other ways, like recycling"); denial of responsibility ("I am not the main cause of the problem"); condemning the accuser ("You have no right to challenge me"); rejection of blame ("I've done nothing wrong"); ignorance ("I don't know the consequences of my actions"); powerlessness ("Nothing I do makes much difference"); comfort ("It is too difficult for me to change my behavior"); and "fabricated constraints" ("There are too many impediments"). It is quite a list, and probably a familiar one to anyone who has discussed climate change with other people. I have heard all of these objections, in different ways, probably hundreds of times.

Perhaps the most pervasive and enduring form of denial is what the Swiss researchers call "the faith in some form of managerial fix," in particular the belief that the white knight of technology will come riding to the rescue. Like other forms of denial, the faith in a "techno-fix" evades the need for any serious behavioral change.** . . . Most people believe that tackling climate change is simply a case of building enough wind turbines, fitting solar panels to enough roofs, or recycling more of their glass bottles. Yet the calculations of Jeffrey Dukes (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/uou-bm9102603.php, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s979662.htm, etc.), highlighting the raw figures of energy use, indicate that the reality is somewhat different.

In a wider sense, one could argue that the whole economic system of modern Western society is founded on denial, in particular the denial of resource limitations. Schoolchildren are taught -- and Nobel Prize-winning economics professors apparently still believe -- that Earth-provided resources, from iron ore to fisheries, come into the category of "free goods," appearing as if by magic at the start of the economic process. These free goods, which include all the ecosystem services that support the human species, are considered financially valueless and left out of conventional economic accounting. The standard gross domestic product (GDP) measuring stick of national economic success totals up the value of production and consumption without considering the sustainability of the process. In a masterstroke of creative accounting, conventional economic theory counts the depletion of resources as an accumulation of wealth. This logic is analogous to individuals spending all of the money in their current account and counting it as income -- an absurdity, but one that underpins our entire economy.

Bearing this societal dysfunction in mind, it is perhaps rather unfair to blame individuals for not facing up to climate change when the whole weight of economy and society effectively prevents them from doing so. . . . [We are all] pawns in the game of global warming. But we are not entirely powerless, nor entirely blameless. The collective hand that moves these plans is our own.†

Ibid., pp. 286-290

*Nota bene by this blogger: (BTW, for the Greens, whose favorite target of hatred is President George W Bush, and the far right, who hew to the line that global warming is "only a liberal conspiracy to dupe the public," President Bush recently made public the fact that he no longer believes that global warming and climate change aren't real and in progress. I'm sure Mark Lynas does not like President Bush -- and his own denial about this aspect of the President that doesn't fit his preconceptions about the man could mean that Lynas will be unable to use the very real benefits of having President Bush on his side. As to why President Bush hadn't changed his mind about climate change before now, he's an intelligent man, who weighs evidence and makes decisions based on the best evidence, and climate science is a hard subject to absorb, even for altogether too many scientists. Denial, children, is everywhere, even in you and me. -- Yrs Truly

**It may indeed come to pass that ultimately technology, above all space-based technology, may provide an escape from the high-energy lifestyles based on consumption of carbon compounds which most of us have been enjoying all these years. But simply assuming that that will happen, and then doing nothing whatsoever to help assist that process and speed it along, is definitely a form of denial, a viciously dangerous one. -- Yrs Truly

†If this be fighting dirty, well, a bunch of anonymous commenters on this blog started it. The only way to win a war entails having the better weapons, tactics, and strategies, i.e., fighting dirty. As General George S. Patton said, "Rather than dying for your country, make sure that that poor, sad sonofabitch on the other side who's shooting at you dies for his country!" I'm not out to kill -- just demonstrate that the Geneva Conventions are worth hewing to, even for debate over matters like this. -- Yrs Truly