The psychology of climate change denial is the study of why people deny climate change, despite the scientific consensus on climate change. A study assessed public perception and action on climate change on grounds of belief systems, and identified seven psychological barriers affecting behavior that otherwise would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental stewardship: cognition, ideological worldviews, comparisons to key people, costs and momentum, disbelief in experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and inadequate behavioral changes. Other factors include distance in time, space, and influence.
Reactions to climate change may include anxiety, depression, despair, dissonance, uncertainty, insecurity, and distress, with one psychologist suggesting that "despair about our changing climate may get in the way of fixing it." The American Psychological Association has urged psychologists and other social scientists to work on psychological barriers to taking action on climate change. The immediacy of a growing number of extreme weather events are thought to motivate people to deal with climate change.
Types of denial Expanding the meaning of "denial"
The idea of "soft" or implicit climate change denial became prominent in the mid-2010s, but variations of the same concept originated earlier. An article published by National Center for Science Education referred to "implicit" denial:
In May 2015, environmentalist Bill McKibben penned an op-ed criticizing Barack Obama's policies of approving petroleum exploration in the Arctic, expanding coal mining, and remaining indecisive on the Keystone XL pipeline. McKibben wrote:
McKibben's use of the word "denial" was an early expansion of the term's meaning in environmental discourse to include "denial of the significance or logical consequences of a fact or problem; in this case, what advocates see as the necessary policies that flow from the dangers of global warming."
Analysis of soft climate change denial Michael Hoexter, a scholar and sustainability advocate, analyzed the phenomenon of "soft climate change denial" in a September 2016 article for the blog New Economic Perspectives and expanded on the idea in a follow-up article published the next month. (the original article); (the follow-up). Despite the term's earlier, informal usage, Hoexter has been credited with formally defining the concept. (crediting Hoexter as the originator of the concept). In Hoexter's terms, "soft" climate denial "means that one acknowledges in some parts of one's life that climate change is real, disastrous and happening now but in most other parts of one's life, one ignores that anthropogenic global warming is, in fact, a real existential emergency and catastrophic." According to Hoexter, "soft climate denial and the thin gruel of climate action policies that accompany it may be functioning as a 'face-saving' device to mask fundamental inertia or a deep manifest preference for inaction while continuing fossil-fueled business as usual."; partially quoted in .
He also applied the term to "more 'radical' groups" that pushed for more responsive measures, but "often either miss the mark in terms of the climate challenge facing us or wrap themselves in communication strategies and 'memes' that limit their potential influence on politics and policy." In Hoexter's view, soft denial can only be escaped through collective action, not individual action or realization.
Soft climate change denial (also called implicit or implicatory climate change denial) is a state of mind acknowledging the existence of global warming in the abstract while remaining, to some extent, in partial psychological or intellectual denialism about its reality or impact. It is contrasted with conventional "hard" climate change denial, which refers to explicit disavowal of the consensus on global warming's existence, causes, or effects (including its effects on human society).
Psychological reasons for denial
Various psychological factors can impact the effectiveness of communication about climate change, driving potential climate change denial. Psychological barriers, such as emotions, opinions and morals refer to the internal beliefs that a person has which stop them from completing a certain action. Psychologist Robert Gifford wrote in 2011 "we are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, also known as dragons of inaction: limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with other key people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discordance toward experts and authorities, perceived risk of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change".
A study published in PLOS One in 2024 found that even a single repetition of a claim was sufficient to increase the perceived truth of both climate science-aligned claims and climate change skeptic/denial claims—"highlighting the insidious effect of repetition". This effect was found even among climate science endorsers.
Polarization in the climate change debate, with skeptics labeling proponents 'catastrophists' and proponents calling skeptics 'deniers,' reflects psychological barriers like in-group/out-group bias and confirmation bias, which entrench denial by reinforcing group identities. Skeptics often exhibit confirmation bias by distrusting climate science, while proponents may show overconfidence in social science predictions, both hindering balanced understanding of climate change.Nicholson 2025 A further cognitive barrier is the assumption that climate change impacts society in a linear, negative way, oversimplifying the complex, pluralistic nature of societal responses and contributing to denialist narratives. For example, the 1970 Ancash Earthquake in Peru, which killed 70,000 due to societal factors like maladaptive building practices, illustrates a cognitive bias where denialists misattribute climate risks to natural causes, ignoring societal influences.
Distance in time, space, and influence Climate change is often portrayed as occurring in the future, whether that be the near or distant future. Many estimations portray climate change effects as occurring by 2050 or 2100, which both seem much more distant in time than they really are, which can create a barrier to acceptance. There is also a barrier created by the distance portrayed in climate change discussions. Effects caused by climate change across the planet do not seem concrete to people living thousands of miles away, especially if they are not experiencing any effects. Climate change is also a complex, abstract concept to many, which can create barriers to understanding. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, and it causes changes in overall average global temperatures, both of which are difficult, if not impossible, for one single person to discern. Due to these distances in time, space, and influence, climate change becomes a far-away, abstract issue that does not demand immediate attention.
Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication said that one "almost couldn't design a worse fit for our underlying psychology or our institutions of decision-making" than dealing with climate change—owing primarily to the short-term focus of humans and their institutions.
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological discomfort arising from holding conflicting beliefs or engaging in actions inconsistent with one’s values. In the context of climate change, individuals often experience dissonance when their acknowledgment of the climate crisis conflicts with their everyday behaviors or perceived self-interest. Because there is little solid action that people can take on a daily basis to combat climate change, then some believe climate change must not be as pressing an issue as it is made out to be. An example of this phenomenon is that most people know smoking cigarettes is not healthy, yet people continue to smoke cigarettes, and so an inner discomfort is elicited by the contradiction in ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. A similar cognitive dissonance is created when people know that things like driving, flying, and eating meat are causing climate change, but the infrastructure is not in place to change those behaviors effectively.
In order to address this dissonance, climate change is rejected or downplayed. This dissonance also fuels denial, wherein people cannot find a solution to an anxiety-inducing problem, and so the problem is denied outright. Creating stories that climate change is actually caused by something out of humans’ control, such as sunspots or natural weather patterns, or suggesting that we must wait until we are certain of all of the facts about climate change before any action be taken, are manifestations of this fear and consequent denial of climate change."It seems as if people stop paying attention to global climate change when they realise that there are no easy solutions for it. Many people instead judge as serious only those problems for which they think action can be found."Individuals are alarmed about the dangerous potential futures resulting from a high-energy world in which climate change was occurring, but simultaneously create denial mechanisms to overcome the dissonance of knowing these futures, yet not wanting to change their convenient lifestyles. These denial mechanisms include things like overestimating the costs of changing their lifestyles, blaming others, including government or corporations, rather than their own inaction, and emphasizing the doubt that individual action could make a difference within a problem so large.
Cognitive barriers
Cognitive barriers to climate change acceptance include:
Limited cognition of the human brain, caused by things like the fact that the human brain has not evolved much in thousands of years, and so has not transitioned to caring about the future rather than immediate danger, ignorance, the idea that environments are composed of more elements than humans can monitor, so we only attend to things causing immediate difficulty, which climate change does not seem to do uncertainty, undervaluing of distant or future risk, optimism bias, the belief that an individual can do nothing against climate change are all cognitive barriers to climate change acceptance.
Conspiratorial beliefs Climate change denial is commonly rooted in a phenomenon commonly known as conspiracy theory, in which people misattribute events to a secret plot or plan by a powerful group of individuals. The development of conspiracy theories is further prompted by the proportionality bias that results from climate change — an event of mass scale and a great deal of significance — being frequently presented as a result of daily small-scale human behavior; often, individuals are less likely to believe large events of this scale can be so easily explained by ordinary details.