Ah, well, when I say "climate denialism is an obvious coping mechanism" I don't mean that people are rationally thinking about the situation and deciding to put their heads in the sand. I think it is "Denial" in the Freudian sense:

> The same word, and also abnegation (German: Verneinung), is used for a psychological defense mechanism postulated by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial

BTW, I think human brains do work rationally to the extent that the world is rational, because they are evolved organs. But human personalities or minds are not necessarily consciously deliberately rational. Like how computers must use physics on the hardware level but can be programmed to model impossible physics in a simulated virtual world.