Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They're not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an "immediate and radical transformation" of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but I think the inferences you're making about their collective psychological state are at least plausible. I suspect that the number of people in power who genuinely believe that climate science is bunk or unproven is, at this point, vanishingly small. The "we still don't know and the science isn't settled" narrative, as well as the "it would just cost too much to fix" narrative are just stop-gaps to gum up the machinery of change for as long as possible. They know change is coming one way or another, so they're trying to extract every last drop of profit from this system while they still can. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway did an excellent job tracing the history of this strategy in other areas (e.g. tobacco industry regulation) in their book Merchants of Doubt , which I can't recommend highly enough.