Open lecture by professor Hallvard Moe, University of Bergen.

Literal rejection by so-called hard deniers remains a problem for climate action. But people can realize the momentous situation, yet still fail to act on the insights. Beyond hard denial, such soft denial is still widespread. As Naomi Klein recently put it, “the bigger obstacle may always have been the soft deniers, the rest of us who know it’s real but act like it’s not, who keep forgetting, in myriad ways, both large and small”.

In this talk, I want to address the problem of alarming climate news and soft denial. I will argue that seeing knowledge-processes as well as denial as inherently social facilitates a better understanding of the problem with alarming climate news: it solidifies soft denial, making climate action more difficult.

The talk attempts to substantiate this argument theoretically, and then illustrate everyday soft denial as it is performed by citizens facing alarming climate news, mobilizing qualitative data on news use among Norwegians.

The lecture is arranged as part of the ERC project "Prepare - Distributed and prepared. A new theory of citizens` public connection networks in the age of datafication" with support from the Digital Transformations Centre of Excellence at Södertörn University