Most people in countries with the highest climate impact per capita are well awareof the climate crisis and do not deny the science. They worry about climate and haveclimate engaged attitudes. Still, their greenhouse-gas emissions are often high. Howcan we understand acting contrary to our knowledge? A simple answer is that wedo not want to give up on benefits or compromise our quality of life. However, it ispainful to live with discrepancies between knowledge and action. To be able to avoidtaking the consequences of our knowledge, we deal with the gap by motivating toourselves that the action is still acceptable. In this article, we use topical analysisto examine such processes of motivation by looking at the internal deliberation of399 climate engaged people’s accounts of their reasoning when acting against theirown knowledge. We found that these topical processes can be described in at leastfour different ways which we call rationalization, legitimization, justification andimploration. By focusing on topoi we can make visible how individual forms of rea-soning interact with culturally developed values, habits and assumptions in creatingenthymemes. We believe that these insights can contribute to understanding the con-ditions for climate transition communication.