From schoolchildren shirking homework to cardiac patients disregarding the advice of their doctors, there’s no shortage of people who act as if ignoring a crisis will make it vanish. But the psychological mechanisms of denial are not the only thing to blame for the widespread rejection of the scientific reality of global warming.

Imagine a world in which the simple existence of heart disease was vigorously disputed; a world where the media promulgated an equivalency between concerned pulmonary specialists and those proclaiming that heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are fabrications of an international conspiracy. It sounds bizarre but it’s analogous to the way many news outlets address the issue of climate change.

Climate scientists are, in essence, “planetary physicians”. While their diagnosis is scary and their advice inconvenient, we owe it to our descendants to stop pretending that the problem will go away if we don’t acknowledge it.