Climate Denial: So depite the fact that 97 % of scientists agree that climate change - global warming - is real and caused by human activity we look at the minority out there. The politicians and oil / coal proponents. The motivations that encourage politicians such as Donald Trump to deny human-caused global warming are clear: they don't like intervention in the economy in general, and in particular they don't like interference with the oil industry, a major source of carbon emissions. If global warming is a serious problem, then there needs to be massive actions by governments across the world to change people's energy practices that produce greenhouse gases. Oil company executives and allied politicians do not want to see such actions take place, so they make various kinds of maneuvers to undermine scientific conclusions: research is flawed, global warming is just natural fluctuation, and so on.
Hence psychology is very useful for explaining why politicians and other people continue to hold beliefs that are contrary to the available evidence and to the interests of billions of people. It is less obvious what can be done to overcome denial of a world-threatening problem. Providing more evidence that global warming is accelerating as the result of human carbon emissions is only part of a solution. We also need to convince people that the needs of the vast majority of the world's people are more important than the interests of an industrial minority and the anti-government ideology that supports them. Overcoming motivated inference requires recognizing and changing motivations.
