This is sort of third or fourth-hand, so don't just trust it blindly, but what I generally hear is that most of the real "other side" does actually believe climate change is real. They just oppose action because they believe humans aren't the cause, and almost any action we take will be a lot of wasted time and money that could be used better for other things.
The problem is that upon hearing that they oppose action, the "climate change is real" people totally ignore their reasons and lump them in with the crazy "climate change isn't real" people.
The one time I heard him talk, he set off all of my kook alarms in the first few minutes of his lecture.
I did this once. I had fully accepted the media's narrative that these people were all kooks and idiots, so I was curious what could possibly cause them to think these things. I went and read some of their websites for the same reason I went and read some flat earther websites the other day, for amusement.
Unfortunately it turned out that (surprise) journalists had been wildly misleading me about what these people really believe, probably because journalists as a class of people accept intellectual authority without question, especially in the scientific realm. The problem of fraudulent psychology results is one well known example of this.
Here's what a lot of "climate change denial" really boils down to:
- CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. We are indeed releasing lots of it.
I've yet to see anyone deny this, although I'm sure there are people out there who do. However this is not mainstream "denial".
- But we don't really know what effect this is having, or if it's really changing the climate
This is where climate change "deniers" separate from journalistic mainstream. They aren't so much in denial as much, much less certain about climate science and its conclusions, to the extent that they often conclude nothing should be done.
- This is partly because the climate is too complex to model, and partly because of scientific bias, fraud and malpractice.
A lot of climate change denial turns out to be a specific case of more general criticisms of the scientific establishment. Their style of argument can easily be ported to criticisms of social science or economics, with hardly any tweaks.
Basically: proclaiming certain doom and that your field of study is the only way to avoid it is a surefire way to get massive amounts of grant money, media coverage and political power. In addition, the "deniers" tend to have lots of evidence of actual serious problems with the science. One recent article I saw pointed out that the thermometer dataset that has been used for over 20 years to measure climate change is full of obvious errors, like temperatures that would be physically impossible or which are clearly the result of bad celsius/Farenheit conversions, or which are taken from thermometers that are literally at the start of airport runways i.e. routinely blasted with jet exhaust.
When errors that are obvious to laymen are discovered in critical datasets that have been used for years to make very precise predictions about very complex things, it is reasonable for some people to conclude the science is less certain than journalists present it, and as a consequence that maybe the costs of inaction are lower than has been presented.