This is a case of multiple causation. And your informative but somewhat rambling rant has omitted at least five of the biggest causes:

1) Intellectual laziness

2) The counterintuitiveness of the reality that increasing a trace gas (from .03 to .04% and probably to .05% at least in the future) can severely alter the global climate, ecosystyem and economy to a degree that the Economist magazine, that ultra leftist tree-hugging eco-fascist rag, has called what we live in the Age of the Anthropocene. AGW is as least as counterintuitive as humans sharing 98% or whatever of chromosomes with chimpanzees.

3) The complexity of the science, and of the politics of the anti-science. One has to at a minimum understand what %s are, something about geological time scales and how they are different from election cycles, what photosynthesis is, the formula CH4 + 2O2 => 2H2O +CO2, what the greenhouse effect is and how it is not = to the ozone hole, some basics about climate, ice caps, oceans, etc., what a feedback is in global systems, what an economic externality is, and something about the history of politicians being bought by fossil fuel companies in order to deliberately confuse and mislead the public.

4) Peer pressure. Most people are confused about at least some major portion of the science, so instead of just saying "I don't really understand," many of them will instead say whatever they've heard lately, or nod along with whatever their conversation partners are saying. This is not denial in any deliberate sense, it is more like going with the flow, but does amount to denying decades of massive, and overwhelmingly solid science.

5) Greed, on the part of those with vested interests in fossil fuel consumption, or an opportunistic stake in having jumped on the anti-science con artist blogger bandwagon.

Most deniers, whether deliberately dishonest or duped, are driven by some some MIXTURE of ignorance, stupidity, and these other 5 factors above, and probably a few others I can't recall.

To keep with your polite tone, we haven't built our civilization on failed models that don't predict dangerous AGW. Only buffoons add the word dangerous or catastrophic in order to push their invariably dangerous and catastrophic political agenda. It was an agenda shared by those that murdered a hundred million people last century. They were all started by well meaning people who thought they were smarter than the previous and that the state would take care of them. These people are too smart to learn from history. They think they are the saviors and the rulers of the world. Instead, they are just the same old thing, deluded leftists.

If you would say dangerous AGW will happen, at least that is harder to argue against. To suggest there is already dangerous AGW is the epitome of buffoonery IMO. Our food production is so high we can waste half of it and still have enough to waste most of the other half and make our people fat. Are you feeling endangered? From what?

Edit: Linlyons quotes me: Jim Z "There is no other example in science where skeptics are compared to holocaust deniers"

Have I woke to a Twilight Zone episode? Does Linlyons think that skepticism isn't part of science or does he think there are plenty of other topics in science where skeptics are compared to Holocaust deniers? Bizarre and incomprehensible

Notice how your question assumes what is in issue?

There, right from the start, you've lost the argument.

Assuming what is in issue is a logical fallacy that was identified over 2,300 years ago. And yet we keep getting this, over and over and over again, from the warmists, whose entire argument basically boils down to these four endlessly repeated fallacies, and nothing else:

1. assuming catastrophic global warming in the first place - circular argument

2. appeal to absent authority -

3. ad hominem

4. non sequitur - even if the science demonstrated catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that policy could improve, it wouldn't follow from that, that

a) it's necessarily detrimental, and the climate models do NOT evidence that AT ALL

b) that government would have the knowledge, capacity, or selflessness to make it better.

A belief system that resolves to nothing but logical fallacies is an irrational belief system. For example, when I raise point 4. above, which COMPLETELY REFUTES the warmist policy argument, they go quiet, slink off, and re-appear somewhere else re-running the same refuted argument. What is that but dishonesty and religious fervour.

For another example, what about the intellectual dishonesty of constantly pretending that the science is independent and objective - like the warmist yesterday decrying "politics" as if the whole AGW industry is not government-funded to the tune of billions?

Notice how your question does not deal with ANY of the real arguments, but just casts the whole thing in terms of the alleged stupidity of those who dare to question the government line, who point out that ALL the publicly-funded catastrophism failed to predict what actually happened?

Real science depends on what the DATA say, not what the authorities say, no matter how big their hats are. Yes the computer models of scientific institutions support AGW. The problem is, the TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS don't.

Slathers of logical fallacies served with welters of personal insults do not establish that governments somehow magically know how to re-arrange the world's production so as to better satisfy all the subjective evaluations of all people, now and indefinitely into the future, and it is worse than simple idiocy to allege that they can.

You want to talk about honesty?

OK, lets. The IPCC places the warming by 2100 at 3 degrees. So who is closer to the truth? the person who say 10? Or the person that says 0?

If you can honestly answer that then you may understand that your alarmist friends are lying every bit as much. And thats assuming that the IPCC is right when 97% of the current models are overestimating the current warming.

You warmers allow the BS of end of the world, sea swallowing us all and every other stupid apocalyptic nonsense fly free. You do nothing to tamp down on what has become runaway scare-mongering and you have the audacity to expect that every "denier" will be what? More honest than you?

Here is honesty. The temps have increased by 0.8 degrees over the last 100 years with likely 0.5-0.6 degrees of it caused by our emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. Thus far ALL of the regression analysis of the past 60 years has been linear regression. Assuming a linear trend, it is reasonable to assume that the temps will increase by about 1 degree by 2100. Any modeling above this is based upon assumptions that positive feedback FAR EXCEED negative feedbacks and ONLY have shoddy surrogate data points with large error bars and even larger assumptions supporting them.

The warming we have seen, is enough for me to state that we should look towards ways of reducing our CO2 emissions. BUT it certainly does not justify giving children nightmares, stopping 3rd world countries from having the energy they need or taxing ourselves during a recession.

And if the greenies believe that this is the mark of some climate apocalypse, they have the religious right to believe whatever the heck they want, but if they want to convince me that they even hold this belief, they can start by supporting nuclear power instead of fighting it.

Even the way you address those who disagree with you shows a marked level of dishonesty. I am going to call all who agree with me the "Rights" and all who do not the "Wrongs", but make no mistake, I am completely open-minded??? REALLY???

how gullible do you have to be to really believe that 1 this all a new idea, 2 it is truly going to be some catastrophic is coming from it? Pick up a history book. IN the 70's they were telling us that we were all going to freeze to death as catastrophic climate change was cooling the earth down at an alarming rate. This was science!!! it was settled science! but none of it happened. these were Nobel prize winners and top climatologists. They wanted to cover the polar ice caps in coal soot because it would absorb more of the suns rays and melt the ice caps to help warm us back up. Sorry if knowing the history or how incredibly wrong scientists have been time and time again makes me skeptical. Gullibility is simply believing it all hook line and sinker. Like you.

I think that there's a problem with the question. Clearly AGW is a problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...

"The finding that the climate has warmed in recent decades and that human activities are already contributing adversely to global climate change has been endorsed by every national science academy that has issued a statement on climate change, including the science academies of all of the major industrialized countries."

https://www.google.com/#q=scientific+org...

https://www.google.com/#q=universities+g...

This is what we see from AGW deniers:

Sagebrush: "It already has been proven that CFCs have no affect on the Ozone layer."

James: "Without the sun the earth would have no climate."

James: "AGW is a straw man crisis designed for the sole purpose of implementing a new world social order (UN agenda 21) under the guise of saving ourselves from a concocted climate apocalypse"

James "We are due for plummetting into an ice age"

Kano "I hope we get some (warming), but at the moment cooling looks more likely"

Jim Z "There is no other example in science where skeptics are compared to holocaust deniers."

James (I think) seems to be a creationist, so that answers the gullible question, at least on one case.

Kano and JimZ claim to be educated. That would imply that honesty is a problem.

I have seen more than one denigrate education (dumb liberal universities, etc) but one is not sure whether that's a problem with honesty or intellectuality (yeah, I makes 'em up as I goes).

Clearly there are some who get their science from conservative media (Koch brothers) or fundamentalist churches. (That might be James.)

There are some who, when they're told that fixing global warming will make gasoline cost $20 a gallon, grab onto anything they can to make that not happen, or, when they're told that it's a plot, aren't able to look past that.

There are quite a number of folks who seem to honestly think that chemtrails, behind commercial jets, are a government conspiracy to spray ... whatever ... on all of us.

There are some who think that the UN is trying to take over the country.

Seems that paranoia is taking over a fairly large segment of the country.

One wonders if the same is true of the rest of the world - if that's a 'normal' human condition?

What proof do the Greenies have that it is. The only so called proof that I have seen has been readily exposed as fraud. I am not alone in this evaluation.

Quote by Will Happer, Princeton University physicist, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy: “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism....I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect....Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past.”

Quote by Martin Keeley, geology scientist: “Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.”

So what dangerous thing has AGW caused?

Extreme weather? There is no proof that weather is any more extreme than it was before. Global crop production is at an all time high. Less people are dying from natural disasters than ever before.

I know... I'm the "denier" because I look at facts and reality where you are the "realist" because you believe in predictions.

Alarmists: "There will be 50 million climate refugees by 2010."

Skeptic in 2011: "There were no 'climate refugees' in 2010."

Alarmists: "Who cares? Now they are predicting 300 million climate refugees by 2050. How can you not see things are getting worse? You are such a denier."

More exactly, you would have to be fully conscious.

The AGW hypothesis (which, interestingly enough, has been deftly shifted over to ACC, in light of the failure of predictions in recent history) is based on flawed models and pseudoscience. Not only that, but some of the IPCC officials have even admitted that that temperature and climate are not really central in this debate. The real issue is the promulgation of a certain―what I consider very problematic--globalist political agenda. I wish that I could physically shake each reader for a couple of minutes to break you out of your trance-like slumber and ennui, to full awareness of the reality in this case. And, incidentally, I am concerned about legitimate ecological issues and a shift to renewable energy sources and much more efficient and responsible means of propulsion. I am not a NeoCon nut or Big Oil executive.

Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official: "We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy...Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization...One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore."

You have to be the kind of person who listens to what the scientists are saying and then looks to see if the current climate variations are outside what has happened historically.

Can you answer that? Is the climate changing now in any kind of unprecedented way? Don't give me the "last ten years", "since records began" or "since the end of the Little Ice Age" disingenuousness. The "speed of change" meme does not seem well-founded either. Clue: Look for the big temperature changes in the following graph. Are they happening now or were there bigger ones in the past?

What about extreme weather I hear you ask. Well here is some extreme weather, but it is not recent.