Australia To Treat Climate Change Denial as a ‘Mental Disorder’

People who question man-made climate change in Australia are now considered to be ‘mentally ill’, a team of psychological researchers have declared.

Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast looked to explain why so many people continue to deny what they call “the reality of climate change, its causes, impacts and the need for mitigatory action.”

Thenewamerican.com reports: The study’s authors — Breanna Fraser, Patrick Nunn, and Rachael Sharman — set out to discover why climate change skeptics think the way they do, beyond what they call “sociodemographic and value factors.” Instead, the study proposed to look at psychological factors involved in climate change skepticism. The study asked 390 Australian participants why they refused to buy the climate change narrative.

“This mixed-methods study investigated whether more malleable psychological factors: locus of control; information processing style; and anti-reflexivity, predicted climate change scepticism above and beyond socio-demographic and value factors,” the study’s abstract declares.

According to the researchers, climate change skeptics were guilty of using “mental gymnastics” in order to deny what they called “the near-universal agreement among scientists on the reality and impact of climate change.”

Near universal? Really? What about the 1,100 scientists — including a Nobel laureate — who recently signed a declaration proclaiming “there is no climate emergency?” Among those scientists were 134 signatories from Australia, the same nation the participants in the survey were from.

The researchers found one very interesting result: Those who actually study an issue instead of blindly relying on government propaganda were actually more likely to be skeptical of so-called climate change.

“Contrary to our predictions, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be sceptical about this,” stated study authors Nunn and Sharman in a piece for The Conversation.

Imagine that — people who take the time and effort to study the issue of climate change have a tendency toward skepticism.

Also, in the study’s view, people who value individual liberty are less inclined to buy into the notion of a full-blown climate crisis.