The human instinct for self-preservation gets expressed in numerous ways, not always good.
One is a refusal to accept reality because we know to do so will force us to confront the need for change, both at a personal and communal level.
Bob Inglis, a former conservative Congressman from South Carolina, says this is the reason people deny the reality of climate change and the human factor in it.
In a 2012 Frontline interview he said:
So a convenient way to dismiss the anxiety [that] comes from the awareness of climate change, you say: “Must not be a real. Scientists must be off.”
Another part of that is that if I accept the science, then perhaps it means I need to change my behavior. Perhaps we really do need to figure out how to innovate on the energy front. And if I don’t want to innovate or feel it would be too expensive, I don’t want to admit that I’m selfish, so the better way to dispose of it is to say, “Well, science must not be right.” Dismissing the science becomes a way of getting around changing my life.
Inglis was a climate change denier himself during his first six years in Congress. Then he left office, decided to run again and won, and thereafter made a fatal mistake. In his own words, “The most enduring heresy that I committed [as a Republican] was saying climate change is real.”
It cost him his seat in Congress. Voters didn’t want to hear the truth about climate change because of what it could mean for their lives to believe it.
We’ve been here before.
The tobacco industry paid for pseudo scientific reports confirming that nicotine was not addictive and smoking was not a health risk. For years smokers believed this garbage science because they wanted to. My father was one of them, and it eventually cost him his life when he was just in his early sixties.
So our instinct for survival can in fact become our undoing by causing us to deny the things that threaten our way of life while making us believe that denial will save our way of life.
As such we prove that foolishness and selfishness fit together like a hand and glove.
I thought of this when Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe pulled his foolish snowball stunt on the Senate floor during a snow storm in Washington this past winter to show global warming was a hoax.
If Oklahomans were the only ones to suffer from Inhofe’s foolishness and selfishness that would be a bad thing, but limited in scope. Senate Republicans changed all of that when in a remarkable show of their own collective foolishness and selfishness they appointed Inhofe Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Talk about a slap in the face to the American people. Inhofe’s influence will not affect only Oklahomans and Republicans. It will affect the whole nation.
In the meantime the planet is making it unequivocally clear that it pays no attention to Republican politics or pseudo science just as cancer and heart disease have never paid attention to the tobacco industry’s propaganda.
The only question is how much damage foolishness and selfishness will lead us to do before the planet says enough is enough, or, to quote Bob Inglis again, “we’re all toast.”
One thing is for certain. The planet is having the last say.
linnposts.com 
Facing reality and speaking truth as always. Thanks, Jan
I see just one response, so far. That’s the kind of response I usually get when I post items/articles on this subject on FB. I don’t think most people respond because it seems inconceivable that our species could be extinguished by the planet’s natural biochemical response to the changes taking place on its surface now; even though we have scientific evidence that such mass biochemical changes, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, have happened in the past. But, this behavior is part of your point, I think. Besides, what can we do even if we believe it? I think its critical for our grandchildren, and those beyond, to know what species of the past did to survive! They will be living at the poles, starting new societies using new strategies for maintaining humanity! Oh well, my scope of vision has always been much greater than most of my fellows. At least I won’t be surprised by what is unfolding. Thank you for this message.