Don't even think about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change

1. Questions

2. We'll Deal with That Lofty Stuff Some Other Day

Why Disaster Victims Do Not Want to Talk About Climate Change

3. Speaking as a Layman n Why We Think That Extreme Weather Shows We Were Right

All Along

4. You Never Get to See the Whole Picture

How the Tea Party Fails to Notice the Greatest Threat to Its Values

5. Polluting the Message

How Science Becomes Infected with Social Meaning

6. The jury of Our Peers

How We Follow the People Around Us

7. The Power of the Mob

How Bullies Hide in the Crowd

8. Through a Glass Darkly

The Strange Mirror World of Climate Deniers

9. Inside the Elephant

Why We Keep Searching for Enemies

10. The Two Brains

Why We Are So Poorly Evolved to Deal with Climate Change

11. Familiar Yet Unimaginable

Why Climate Change Does Not Feel Dangerous

12. Uncertain Long-Term Costs

How Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change

13. Them, There, and Then

How We Push Climate Change Far Away

14. Costing the Earth

Why We Want to Gain the Whole World Yet Lose Our Lives

15. Certain About the Uncertainty

How We Use Uncertainty as a Justification for Inaction

16. Paddling in the Pool of Worry How We Choose What to Ignore

17. Don't Even Talk About It!

The Invisible Force Field of Climate Silence

18. The Non-Perfect Non-Storm

Why We Think That Climate Change Is Impossibly Difficult

19. Cockroach Tours

How Museums Struggle to Tell the Climate Story

20. Tell Me a Story

Why Lies Can Be So Appealing

21. Powerful Words

How the Words We Use Affect the Way We feel

22. Communicator Trust

Why the Messenger Is More Important than the Message

23. If They Don't Understand the Theory, Talk About It Over and Over and Over Again

Why Climate Science Does Not Move People

24. Protect, Ban, Save, and Stop

How Climate Change Became Environmentalist

25. Polarization

Why Polar Bears Make It Harder to Accept Climate Change

26. Turn Off Your Lights or the Puppy Gets It

How Doomsday Becomes Dullsville

27. Bright-siding

The Dangers of Positive Dreams

28. Winning the Argument

How a Scientific Discourse Turned into a Debating Slam

29. Two Billion Bystanders

How Live Earth Tried and Failed to Build a Movement

30. Postcard from Hopenhagen

How Climate Negotiations Keep Preparing for the Drama Yet to Come

37. Precedents and Presidents

How Climate Policy Lost the Plot

32. Wellhead and Tailpipe

Why We Keep Fueling the Fire We Want to Put Out

33. The Black Gooey Stuff

Why Oil Companies Await Our Permission to Co Out of Business

34. Moral Imperatives

How We Diffuse Responsibility for Climate Change

35. What Did You Do in the Great Climate War, Daddy?

Why We Don't Really Care What Our Children Think

36. The Power of One

How Climate Change Became Your Fault

37. Degrees of Separation

How the Climate Experts Cope with What They Know

38. Intimations of Mortality

Why the Future Goes Dark

39. From the Head to the Heart

The Phony Division Between Science and Religion

40. Climate Conviction

What the Green Team Can Learn from the God Squad

41. Why We Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change… And Why We Are Wired to Take Action

42. In a Nutshell

Some Personal and Highly Biased ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole

Four Degrees: Why This Book Is Important

References, Sources, and Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Index