I'll kick this off with a recent read of mine: The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life by Eviator Zerubavel. I bought this because I think the general topic of denial is very pertinent to any discussion of global risks. When something is scary, people have an incentive to somehow avoid dealing with the facts, and a variety of creative strategies are available to them.
And in the alternative, if you commit yourself in some way to the idea that a particular risk is a big deal, (eg taking a public position, making career choices based on your assessment), you have a psychological incentive to deny evidence that maybe the problem is not so severe after all.
I think it's these dualing incentives that create the structure we so often see around major global risks - one side is busy either ignoring the problem, or if that is no longer working, minimizing it, attacking the integrity of the proponents, etc. Meanwhile, the other side is at risk of exaggerating the seriousness of the problem, ignoring countervailing evidence or important context and of course attacking the integrity of the deniers. Both sides are often sincerely convinced of their own rightness (though there certainly can be scope for cynicism and deliberate dishonesty as well, and both sides will be very quick to point to the evidence for this on the other side, and very slow to examine it on their own side).
