I've taken part of several unprofessional debates over climate change on a different forum jam-packed with 40+ year old american conservatives... Even thinking back to those experiences makes me shudder... There's is mass ignorance around the subject especially here in the grand ol' USA...

 

I've come to the conclusion that three aspects are what determine's one's dismissal/resistance of evidence:

-rigid political viewpoints (media consumption falls under this)

-culturual and material attachment

-fear (one that isn't often admitted)

 

Most recently in big news around our atmosphere, we hit a 400 ppm co2 milestone. Though, I didn't hear of it until recently.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/may/30/carbon-milestone-newspapers

 

Here's what soma folks from NASA have to say:

http://climate.nasa.gov/400ppmquotes/

The argument that the science is unconcluded is true, but not the exactly how denialists would hope... There's an overwhelming amount of evidence and consensus supportiung anthropogenic global warming. Even Noam Chomsky is on record saying such is actually remarkable. Big names, intellectuals, on the opposing side (let's take Richard Lindzen for example) either spout flat lies or make oversimplified and in fact unscientific rebuttals. There's is a video of Lindzen discounting data as "not a big deal" purely based on it's appearance rather than implications as part of his lecture, shows which crowd he caters to.

Such are the tactics presented by any side which opposes the truth: misrepresenting facts, denials, lies, fabrications, unrespected PhD testimonies, etc...