Living in denial: climate change, emotions, and everyday life.

292 C limate change is occurring with devastating impacts on human society, yet a major portion of the global population responds to this catastrophe with apathy. In the book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, Kari Marie Norgaard explores the puzzling disconnect between people’s daily activities and climate change from social, cultural, psychological, and emotional perspectives using a case study in Bygdaby, Norway. he author concludes that scientiic information alone is not enough to engage the public in climate change mitigation. Climate change denial is socially organized, and therefore, breaking the denial requires social, psychological, and cultural considerations. he book consists of a prologue, an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. he prologue deines the objective of the book, “to understand the complexity of the lived experience of people that leads to the gap between information and social action,” by briely describing the fact that people in Norway, the United States, and other countries of the world know global climate change is occurring and are experiencing its various adverse impacts but that they show little concern and do not take social actions to tackle climate change. he introduction speciies that failure on the part of the public to act on climate change cannot be explained simply by lack of information but that it is a result of how people process information on climate change with cultural and social notions. he six chapters present “where the story”—a typical town, Bygdaby, in western Norway, where an unusual warm winter occurred in 2000–2001; “what of the story”—the silence Bygdaby residents maintained toward the unusual warm winter; “the why of silence”—Bygdaby residents reinforced a sense of their innocence from moral conlicts and wrongdoing by climate change denial to obtain economic, social, psychological, and emotional protections; “how denial formed”—climate change information was processed with social norms of attention, emotion, and conservation and with cultural tool kits to manage unpleasant emotion and to obscure the life choices that exacerbate global climate change; and “sociallyLiving in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life