Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump | John Abraham

I propose that people take indefensible positions like climate denial and Trump support simply out of fearThis story picks up where an earlier post left off a few weeks ago. Then, I discussed some of the political realities associated with inaction on climate change. In that post, I said I would revisit the question of why so many people deny the evidence of a changing climate. Now is the time for that discussion.What continually befuddles people who work on climate change is the vehement and indefensible denial of evidence by a small segment of the population. I give many public talks on climate change, including radio and television interviews and public lectures. Nearly every event has a few people who, no matter what the evidence, stay in a state of denial. By listening to denialist arguments, I find they fall into a few broad categories. Some of them are just plain false. Examples in this category are ones like:There was a halt to global warming starting 1998.Humans are only responsible for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.Climate is always changing.We didn’t have thermometers a million years ago to measure global temperatures. Continue reading...