A combination of selfishness and outright bullshit. Have you ever noticed that the people who pour scorn on climate prediction and say it's all just playing with models and overactive imagination on the part of scientists are perfectly comfortable making dire economic predictions about the costs of mitigating climate change, despite economics' relative crudity? Have you ever seen an economic model that even aspires to the sophistication of climate models? Or economic metrics that were broken out to measure unemployment trends and glows of goods, labor and capital? such data exist but they're rarely more fine-grained than the state level and they're horribly crude because people feel an economic incentive to hoard that data for profit.

<ost of the so-called skeptics don't know any economics beyond basic things like how to find equilibrium pricing between supply and demand curves and some outdated macroeconomic myths, but they know that the majority of people don't get economics and can be easily scared with threats of recession. That's how we wound up with a President that claims climate change is a myth created by the Chinese to steal their jobs and a dominant party that's champing at the bit to sweep away any and all environmental regulation so they can make a quick buck.