"The public debate around climate change is no longer about science - it's about values, culture, and ideology.

"Climate change has become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars," writes Andrew Hoffman. "Acceptance of the scientific consensus is now seen as an alignment with liberal views consistent with other 'cultural' issues that divide the country (abortion, gun control, health care, and evolution)."

There are plenty of hypotheses for why global warming has become so polarizing in the United States - more polarizing than it was in the early 1990s.

Some blame oil companies for sowing doubt about the science of climate change. Journalist Chris Mooney has suggested there may be something about conservatives' worldviews that makes them inherently inclined to distrust climate scientists. Yale's Anthony Leiserowitz has argued that Al Gore may have helped deepen the partisan split when he became its most high-profile champion in the 2000s.

Or here's another factor: psychologists have recently shown that people first think about potential solutions to global warming and then work backward to assess the problem itself. Climate advocates tend to argue that tackling global warming will require major government intervention: carbon pricing, clean energy support, public works for adaptation. But if the fix for global warming is lots of big government, then of course conservatives are going to be skeptical that it's an issue in need of urgent attention."

Obama's Catch-22 on climate change

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill