When Kari Marie Norgaard, author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, was asked by Science Codex to explain the cultural resistance to climate change despite the growing evidence, she responded:
Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected. People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. This habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level -- how we think the world works and how we think it should work.
When asked why "climate change has been seen as either a hoax or fixable with minimal political or economic intervention", Norgaard replied:
This kind of cultural resistance to very significant social threat is something that we would expect in any society facing a massive threat.