1. Questions 1
2. We'll Deal with That Lofty Stuff Some Other Day 5
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 17
How the Tea Party Fails to Notice the Greatest Threat to Its Values
5. Polluting the Message 22
How Science Becomes Infected with Social Meaning
6. The jury of Our Peers 26
How We Follow the People Around Us
7. The Power of the Mob 33
How Bullies Hide in the Crowd
8. Through a Glass Darkly 36
The Strange Mirror World of Climate Deniers
9. Inside the Elephant 39
Why We Keep Searching for Enemies
10. The Two Brains 46
Why We Are So Poorly Evolved to Deal with Climate Change
11. Familiar Yet Unimaginable 52
Why Climate Change Does Not Feel Dangerous
12. Uncertain Long-Term Costs 56
How Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change
13. Them, There, and Then 59
How We Push Climate Change Far Away
14. Costing the Earth 65
Why We Want to Gain the Whole World Yet Lose Our Lives
15. Certain About the Uncertainty 72
How We Use Uncertainty as a Justification for Inaction
16. Paddling in the Pool of Worry How We Choose What to Ignore 77
17. Don't Even Talk About It! 81
The Invisible Force Field of Climate Silence
18. The Non-Perfect Non-Storm 91
Why We Think That Climate Change Is Impossibly Difficult
19. Cockroach Tours 99
How Museums Struggle to Tell the Climate Story
20. Tell Me a Story 105
Why Lies Can Be So Appealing
21. Powerful Words 109
How the Words We Use Affect the Way We feel
22. Communicator Trust 116
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 121
Why Climate Science Does Not Move People
24. Protect, Ban, Save, and Stop 127
How Climate Change Became Environmentalist
25. Polarization 135
Why Polar Bears Make It Harder to Accept Climate Change
26. Turn Off Your Lights or the Puppy Gets It 138
How Doomsday Becomes Dullsville
27. Bright-siding 145
The Dangers of Positive Dreams
28. Winning the Argument 150
How a Scientific Discourse Turned into a Debating Slam
29. Two Billion Bystanders 155
How Live Earth Tried and Failed to Build a Movement
30. Postcard from Hopenhagen 159
How Climate Negotiations Keep Preparing for the Drama Yet to Come
37. Precedents and Presidents 162
How Climate Policy Lost the Plot
32. Wellhead and Tailpipe 168
Why We Keep Fueling the Fire We Want to Put Out
33. The Black Gooey Stuff 175
Why Oil Companies Await Our Permission to Co Out of Business
34. Moral Imperatives 182
How We Diffuse Responsibility for Climate Change
35. What Did You Do in the Great Climate War, Daddy? 187
Why We Don't Really Care What Our Children Think
36. The Power of One 192
How Climate Change Became Your Fault
37. Degrees of Separation 198
How the Climate Experts Cope with What They Know
38. Intimations of Mortality 205
Why the Future Goes Dark
39. From the Head to the Heart 211
The Phony Division Between Science and Religion
40. Climate Conviction 217
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 226
42. In a Nutshell 231
Some Personal and Highly Biased ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole
Four Degrees: Why This Book Is Important 239
References, Sources, and Further Reading 243
Acknowledgments 249
Index 251