DANIEL KAHNEMAN is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.”

Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me.

Kahneman’s views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: “A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.”

People from other disciplines also seem to view climate change as a “perfect” problem. Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change, describes it as the “perfect market failure”. Philosopher Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington in Seattle says it is a “perfect moral storm”. Everyone, it seems, shapes climate change in their own image.

Which points to the real problem: climate change is exceptionally amorphous. It provides us with no defining qualities that would give it a clear identity: no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause or solution and, critically, no obvious enemy. Our brains scan it for the usual cues that we use to process and evaluate information about the world, but find none. And so we impose our own. This is a perilous situation, leaving climate change wide open to another of Kahneman’s biases – an “assimilation bias” that bends information to fit people’s existing values and prejudices.

So is climate change really innately challenging, or does it just seem so because of the stories we have shaped around it? For example, the overwhelming and possibly hopeless struggle portrayed by the media and many campaigners provokes feelings of powerlessness. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s reinforce distance with computer predictions set two generations in the future and endless talk of uncertainty. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses the word “uncertain” more than once per page.

Discussions about economics, meanwhile, invariably turn into self defeating cost-benefit analyses. Stern offers a choice between spending 1 per cent of annual income now, or risking losing 20 per cent of it in 50 years’ time. This language is almost identical to that Kahneman used two decades earlier in his experiments on loss aversion. Is it surprising that when a choice is framed like this, policy-makers are intuitively drawn towards postponing action and taking a gamble on the future?

“Is it any surprise that policy-makers are tempted to postpone action and gamble on the future?”

If cost and uncertainty really are universal psychological barriers, it is hard to explain why 15 per cent of people fully accept the threat and are willing to make personal sacrifices to avert it. Most of the people in this group are left wing or environmentalists and have managed to turn climate change into a narrative that fits with their existing criticisms of industry and growth.

Conservatives may justify climate inaction on the grounds of cost and uncertainty but they, too, are able to accept both as long as they speak to their core values. As former US vice-president and climate sceptic Dick Cheney said: “If there is only a 1 per cent chance of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction, we must act as if it is a certainty.”

Strongly held values can explain the convictions of those at the ends of the political spectrum, but they do not adequately explain the apparent indifference of the large majority in between. If asked, most agree that climate change is a serious threat, but without prompting they do not volunteer it.

This silence is similar to that found around human rights abuses, argued the late Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. He suggested that we know very well what is happening but “enter into unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged”.

Our response to climate change is uncannily similar to an even more universal disavowal: unwillingness to face our own mortality, says neuroscientist Janis Dickinson of Cornell University in New York. She argues that overt images of death and decay along with the deeper implications of societal decline and collapse are powerful triggers for denial of mortality.

There is a great deal of research showing that people respond to reminders of death with aggressive assertion of their own group identity. Dickinson argues that political polarisation and angry denial found around climate change is consistent with this “terror management theory”. Again, there is a complex relationship between our psychology and the narratives that we construct to make sense of climate change.

For all of these reasons, it is a mistake to assume that the scientific evidence of climate change will flow directly into action – or, conversely, that climate denial can be dismissed as mere misinformation. The systems that govern our attitudes are just as complex as those that govern energy and carbon, and just as subject to feedbacks that exaggerate small differences between people. The problem itself is far from perfect and the situation is not hopeless, but dealing with it will require a more sophisticated analysis of human cognition and the role of socially shared values in building conviction.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Hear no climate evil”

CHRISTINA ESCOBAR cast a nervous eye at the spiral of smoke on the horizon as she set off to buy groceries. By the time she returned an hour later the police had closed the highway. Two weeks later, when the road finally reopened, the only possession she could find in the ashes of her house was her great-grandfather’s Purple Heart medal.

The wildfires that swept across Bastrop County in autumn 2011 were the worst in Texan history. They burnt 140 square kilometres of forest and destroyed around 1700 houses. The state climatologist, of Texas A&M University, is reluctant to attribute the event to climate change, stressing that droughts are a regular feature of the Texan climate. He nonetheless describes the combination of extreme drought and record-breaking temperatures as “off the charts”.

Visiting Texas last month as part of my research into the psychology of climate change, I found a state of extremes that in many ways reflects the tensions and contradictions across the entire US. A state where attitudes to climate change are a mark of cultural identity, where the political economy is still inextricably bound to fossil fuels and yet there is a raw economic drive that offers the hope of a rapid transition to new fuels.

There is no shortage of concern about climate change in the liberal enclaves of Austin, or outright denial in the Republican heartlands. One old lady, coming out of a Baptist church in Houston, told me that she had “prayed for wisdom” and now knew that climate change is “a Marxist plot by the Muslim terrorist Obama to impose one world government”.

Generally, though, my questions about climate change were met with polite embarrassment and a swift change of topic. Escobar could not recall a single discussion about climate change in relation to the Bastrop fires. Nor could the mayor, the editor of the local newspaper or the head of the chamber of commerce. The topic appears to have been actively excluded from public discourse.

Nevertheless, , professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, detects a subtle shift. He feels that the extreme weather has caused a mellowing: “Even among Republicans I think there’s a lot more belief in this than people are willing to say out loud. They just can’t talk about it.”

Nielsen-Gammon says that policy-makers are becoming more open to climate change too, as long as it is framed as a long-term risk and adaptation issue.

Last year, officials surrendered to a revolt by scientists over attempts to purge all mention of climate change and sea level rise from a report on the environment of Galveston Bay. And criticism from climate specialists, North and Nielsen-Gammon among them, led to the including mentions of “potential” climate impacts, albeit as an “ambiguous” risk. One of the contributors, Jennifer Walker of the environmental organisation, describes even this small victory as a “major breakthrough”.

The real political minefield, though, is carbon mitigation. This is understandable when one considers that Texas is in the midst of an oil and gas boom. It already has the ; if it was a separate country (as a good few Texans would like) it would be the .

The boom is being fuelled by technological breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which have given declining oil and gas deposits a new lease of life. The city of Midland is now ringed by hundreds of wells amid the cotton fields. Oil companies are investing over in drilling; trailer parks are springing up to house workers migrating in to take up . One study estimates that shale gas could create by 2015.

At the same time, the low tax, low regulation policies that have facilitated the fracking boom have also fuelled a remarkable growth in renewable energy. Texas now has the highest installed wind-power capacity of any US state. For several days last month, wind was generating over a quarter of its electricity.

“The policies that have facilitated the fracking boom have also fuelled growth in renewables”

Texas’s second city, San Antonio, has embraced the new energy economy and is reinventing itself as the Silicon Valley of renewables. The local utility company CPS Energy has installed wind turbines with a total capacity of 1000 megawatts and has just issued contracts for 400 megawatts of solar installations. To the delight of environmental campaigners, it is . San Antonio is well on course to generate 20per cent of its power from renewable sources by 2020, a target that the European Union is struggling to meet.

Even so, carbon remains a taboo subject. When Chris Eugster, strategy and technology officer for CPS, describes the project his talk is of “new energy” rather than the low carbon economy.

But there are significant changes under way that may yet challenge the orthodoxy of climate change denial. Inward migration is leading to a population boom, most markedly in the Hispanic population, which has grown by 2.7 million in the past 10 years. And Hispanics are currently overwhelmingly Democrat voters.

Julián Castro, the Democrat mayor of San Antonio and the architect of its clean energy vision, has ambitions to mobilise the Latino vote with a narrative of opportunity. Climate change is firmly on his political agenda.

North sees this demographic shift as a potential game-changer. “Within eight years the state will be majority Hispanic. Republicans will see that they can’t win elections with climate change denial. When the time is right we will see a change.” And where Texas leads on climate, the rest of the US may follow.