Over his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, he writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind": the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward...

Michael E. Mann, who has been on the front lines of the fight against climate denialism for most of his career. He has witnessed the manipulation of the media by business and political interests and the unconscionable play to partisanship on issues that affect the well-being of billions. Portraying the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that human activity has changed Earth's climate. Mann's...

"In 2013, Kate Schapira sat in her office at Brown University and read about acidic waters, ecological imbalance, dead zones, and zombie ecosystems. Before then, she'd had the same broad understanding of climate change that most people did at the time, but these articles on the permanent disappearance of coral reefs filled her with such hopelessness that she desperately needed an outlet-someone or someone to talk to who understood how she was feeling....

"Most of us recognize that climate change is real, and yet we do nothing to stop it. What is this psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall's search for the answers brings him face-to-face with Nobel Prize-winning psychologists and the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the world's leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals....

"Today, about 98 percent of scientists affirm that climate change is human made, and about 2 percent still question it. Despite that overwhelming majority, though, about half the population of rich countries, like ours, choose to believe the 2 percent. And, paradoxically, this large camp of deniers grows even larger as more and more alarming proof of climate change has cropped up over the last decades. This disconnect has both climate scientists...