Overt refusal to accept the robust scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change has decreased recently, as examples of climate impacts have become increasingly severe. From there, two patterns emerge: Conventional survey scales to assess environmental and climate beliefs tend to experience ceiling effects, which is consistently very high values for most individuals, both over time and cross-county (e.g., France and Germany). Secondly, we assume new “soft” forms of climate denial emerge, leading to very limited individual action. They encompass the individual unwillingness to act, which they justify by the necessity of their own emissions, a belief in technological or offset fixes, doomism or overoptimistic beliefs.
Lastly, individual action is regarded as futile as long as the political system is not changed (following Adorno and the Fridays for Future movement). We will use these notions in addition to ISSP's Franzen&Vogel (2013) scale to see if these items help to distinguish between people scoring very high in the original scale as well as how it influences different climate change policy opinions. Based on a unique survey of 500 respondents each in two countries, we assess to which degree these new forms of soft climate denial occur. Our findings can be used to create new survey items with less ceiling effects for environmental and climate policy opinion formation. In the future, policy makers that observe and try to alter these new soft forms of climate denial might have chances to succeed implementing ambitious climate policies.