Well, I just posted this downstairs, but I figure it is now on-topic:

Since the AGW-science-deniers are now so hot for George Monbiot, I figure it would be a good to enter his latest piece in the Links section.

He makes some interesting conjectures regarding the possible source of the public’s vacillating beliefs:

One such is the critic Clive James. You could accuse him of purveying trite received wisdom, but not of being dumb. On BBC Radio 4 he delivered an essay about the importance of scepticism, during which he maintained that ”the number of scientists who voice scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing”. […]

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies - climate scientists on one side, right-wing bloggers on the other - he, too, might have realised that the science is in. In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for man-made global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer. […]

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the planet is warming, that it’s caused by humans, or that it’s a serious problem. This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be? […]

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with ”vital lies” or ”the armour of character”. We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death.

[…]

This goes along with my idea that what we are seeing in the AGW-denier camp is another reflection of the culture war.

That is, just as with evolution where the creationist fears the undercutting of their what-happens-to-me-after-I-die belief system, AGW threatens the what-happens-to-all-my-work-after-I’m-gone belief system that has empowered, especially in America, personal economics.

The acceptance of impermanence is a difficult thing.