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How to combat denial and misinformation by developing effective motivational interventions is key to dealing with behaviour concerning global warming. The dilemma of feeling powerless and even apathetic although knowing that there is a crisis must also be tackled on a psychological and cognitive level.
One’s personal worldview has such a powerful cognitive effect that an individual is fully able to dismiss the broad scientific consensus about global warming as untrue and to ignore or explain away its most egregious local effects. In addition, in-groups can reinforce shared worldviews so that entire communities can become inaccessible to rational, scientific facts.
There is evidence that systematic misrepresentation of global warming over more than a decade by right-wing groups and corporations in the US, motivated to maintain the current consumption-led capitalist status quo, has led to the current partisan divide on global warming 45, p. 35. But the non-partisan objectivity of science should surely be a central pillar of our Enlightenment heritage.