Why it's so hard to convince a climate denier

[LouisvilleDem]

19. The irony here is amusing

The Myers-Briggs test is enormously popular among HR department personnel that are trying to find out if a potential candidate will be a good fit for an organization and to train managers on how to deal with the different "types" of people. However, the Myers-Briggs test is not so popular among those who are arguably the most qualified to judge its validity: experts in the field of psychology. So why are psychologists not huge fans of Myers-Briggs? Apparently there are many reasons, but the one that seems to come up most often is that it categorizes people using false dichotomies.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/19/myers-briggs-test-unscientific

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

The reality is that people are not either sensing or intuitive, but are distributed along a bell shaped curve--with most people falling in the middle, meaning they have tendencies from both descriptions.

So why do I find the OP ironic? It is ironic because the climate debate has also falsely labelled people into one of two groups. You have people that are "believers" in AGW, and people who are "deniers" of AGW. That's it. Unfortunately, like the Myers-Briggs test, this categorization fails to capture the fact that opinions on AGW fall along a wide spectrum with significant diversity. While the vast majority (97% or more) agree that the world is warming and human activity is largely to blame, there are significant differences in opinion beyond that. First, you have the question of magnitude. You can find scientists that believe we are in for less than 1 degree of warming over the next century, and some that believe we are in for 5, 6 or even more degrees of warming. Beyond that, you also have differences of opinion as to what effect the warming will have. A little warming is actually good for the planet, but where precisely warming flips to become "dangerous" is debatable, in no small part because the term dangerous is hard to define and depends enormously on where you live.

I've mentioned these things many times in this forum, with no luck. I'm tempted to suggest that perhaps it is because this forum is dominated by 'N' types that are too busy looking at the big picture to look at what the actual facts say, but then I'd be engaging in a bit of false dichotomy myself.