Study Reveals Why People Deny Climate Change

However, there are some who don’t believe in climate change, and researchers from the University of Bonn wanted to find out why they deny this “glaringly obvious truth.”

Within this small collection of people, there are essentially two theories: One is that the climate is not actually changing and the entire fight to save the planet is an elaborate hoax. The other is that while the planet’s climate is changing, it’s not because of anything humans are doing.

Of that 19%, 5% said they don’t think the climate is changing at all, whereas the other 14% said it is changing, but humans aren’t responsible. They also noted that 24% of Americans agreed the planet will not experience any residual effects from the changing climate, such as rising sea levels or extreme weather, in their lifetime.

However, that’s certainly not what the science says. From NASA to university research, there is an undeniable amount of scientific evidence that shows climate change is not only real, but it’s happening right now. Sea levels are already rising, icebergs are melting, and extreme weather is almost constant.

The vast majority of these people agree that one of the major culprits of climate change is fossil fuel emissions. And the general consensus is that eliminating, or at least significantly cutting back on fossil fuel use, is absolutely necessary.

He signed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which states that the United States will invest hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, environmental justice, and electric vehicles. As well as funded solar and wind farms all over the country and much more.

According to Independent, former president and candidate for the 2024 election Donald Trump has said that climate change is a “make-believe problem,” “nonexistent,” and “a very, very expensive form of tax.”

And while Trump has claimed that the crisis is simply a hoax, a research team at the University of Bonn wanted to find out what the rest of the population thinks.

Within the experiment, they offered two random groups of participants $20. The first group could donate the money to an organization fighting against climate change of their choice; the other group had the option to donate the money to one of those charities or keep it for themselves.

Zimmerman reported that half of the people in the second group chose to keep the money instead of donating it. And one interesting thing they reported was that many people said they “specifically [are] denying the existence of human-made global heating forms [as] part of the political identity of certain groups of people.”

Instead, the most common motivated reasoning among participants was essentially that they “define themselves by the very fact that they do not believe in climate change.”

Essentially, if people simply believe what they’re told by the politicians and people in their lives they trust, they can be swayed in the future. For example, if former president Donald Trump were to suddenly change his tune, America may have far less climate change deniers than it does now.