Global Warming Denial

Back in the 80s when I was a college student who, on at least one occasion, wore a pink Day-Glo shirt paired with acid washed jeans to a fraternity party, I enrolled in Psychology 101 for science credit. It was a fun, easy A class where we learned about penis envy, the subconscious, anal retentiveness, projection, and the whole Super Ego/Id dichotomy.

What I remember most was a film we watched about the media campaign started by the government and the American Lung Association to educate the public about the dangers of smoking. This was in the early 70s when the medical establishment had finally come to the rather obvious conclusion that cigarettes kill. The earliest public service announcements were graphic and disturbing, showing the blackened lungs of lifelong smokers and interviewing people on respirators gasping for air.

It was pretty blunt information that one would think would have been very effective. But what the government and the ALA soon found out was that smokers, rather than being frightened into abstinence, had a very different reaction. They simply tuned out and dismissed the public service announcements. If they didn’t simply hit the remote to escape the horrifying images, they outright denied what they were seeing and rationalized that the images were somehow not real. They just waved it off.

Crazy, but that’s the power of denial for you. If something’s so disturbing and you don’t want to know, then you will yourself into disbelief. So I can’t help but wonder if global warming deniers are doing the same thing. Few things could be as disturbing as finding out our very lifestyle is causing catastrophic, irreversible damage to the planet. The mind starts to search desperately for whatever pathetic rationalization it can find to disprove it.