A fellow activist (aka a sane person) sent me this: 'From Rebecca Huntley’s book on how to talk about climate change.... she writes about climate denial:

"Fear in response to climate change is a universal and understandable reaction. Something more than just fear must be at work when we deny climate change. ‘When we negate, ignore, or otherwise avoid acknowledging the unsettling facts about climate change, we find refuge from fear and guilt’. This is the case with passive denial in particular, and we all engage in this from time to time.

But something else is happening when we engage in outspoken denial and mockery of climate science – in other words active denial. Active denial allows us to defend ourselves against those we feel are criticising our lifestyle, who believe they have the right to tell us how to live. Here we can see denial not as a lack of information or intelligence but ‘self-protection’.

This is the most important aspect of denial to grasp when struggling to understand the phenomenon. People who deny climate science are not stupid or unable to find the right information. They are reacting to a message that threatens their worldview, the values and even their sense of self. Stokes describes the roots of denial elegantly, saying we deny climate change because of our intense need to be innocent. ‘Deniers feel a need to defend their identity and lifestyle against the message that climate disruption is real, urgent and caused by human fossil fuel use; they feel an inner need to explain it away.’

As we saw in the chapter on guilt, implicit in the climate change message, especially for wealthy people in wealthy countries, is that we are causing and benefiting from a process that will damage the world and harm billions of people. We don’t want climate change to be our fault (we want to be innocent) and so we deny that it’s happening or happening to the extent it is or that there is anything we can do about it." '