The director of the Climate Outreach and Information Network explores the psychological mechanism that enables people to ignore the dangers of climate change, using sidebars, cartoons and engaging stories from his years of research to reveal how humans are wired to primarily respond to visible threats.

Why Disaster Victims Do Not Want to Talk About Climate Change -- Why We Think That Extreme Weather Shows We Were Right All Along --How the Tea Party Fails to Notice the Greatest Threat to Its Values -- How Science Becomes Infected with Social Meaning -- How We Follow the People Around Us -- How Bullies Hide in the Crowd -- The Strange Mirror World of Climate Deniers -- Why We Keep Searching for Enemies -- Why We Are So Poorly Evolved to Deal with Climate Change -- Why Climate Change Does Not Feel Dangerous -- How Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change -- How We Push Climate Change Far Away -- Why We Want to Gain the Whole World Yet Lose Our Lives -- How We Use Uncertainty as a Justification for Inaction -- How We Choose What to Ignore -- The Invisible Force Field of Climate Silence -- Why We Think That Climate Change Is Impossibly Difficult -- How Museums Struggle to Tell the Climate Story -- Why Lies Can Be So Appealing -- How the Words We Use Affect the Way We Feel -- Why the Messenger is More Important than the Message -- Why Climate Science Does Not Move People -- How Climate Change Became Environmentalist -- Why Polar Bears Make It Harder to Accept Climate Change -- How Doomsday Becomes Dullsville -- The Dangers of Positive Dreams -- How a Scientific Discourse Turned into a Debating Slam -- How Live Earth Tried and Failed to Build a Movement -- How Climate Negotiations Keep Preparing for the Drama Yet to Come -- How Climate Policy Lost the Plot -- Why We Keep Fueling the Fire We Want to Put Out -- Why Oil Companies Await Our Permission to Go Out of Business -- How We Diffuse Responsibility for Climate Change -- Why We Don't Really Care What Our Children Think -- How Climate Change Became Your Fault -- How the Climate Experts Cope with What They Know -- Why the Future Goes Dark -- The Phony Division Between Science and Religion -- What the Green Team Can Learn from the God Squad -- Some Personal and Highly Biased Ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole.