Some of the denial spokespersons are on the payroll of fossil fuel companies with a clear financial incentive to delay any regulation of CO2 emissions. A few of these characters were at one time employed in a similar capacity denying the healh effects of smoking.
I suppose that is no longer true. It was, undoubtedly, but in my opinion the time it worked and they needed it has passed. The magic number is 15. Fifteen years are more than enough to get your money out of a any investment -unless it involves real states or other long term businesses, but even with a hotel you can get your money out by letting it go to pot-. I don't mean earnings, which can be little or a lot, but through depreciation -and other allowance accounts-.
Imagine the manufacturers of cylindrical pacifiers on face of the fact that their product kills. They can be close down in a minute and be left with scrap and location rental for Hollywoodish chases and shootings as their only source of income. So they decide to hire people who had a vocation for criminal law but were forced by their parents to become physicians -a much more respected profession in Tinytown and an effective social climber- and they have them using powerful fans and arguing nothing is final until the dust has settled. They fund them to do that.
By the time the product is widely acknowledged to be a serious threat for its consumers first, and for the bystanders later, all the money have moved into other businesses like gyms, health products laboratories or big retailers of home improvement and construction services, and the financing of the anti-science advocacies has fizzle out to coins.
With AGW it is happening again. By 2005 much money had been channelled to other businesses and investments diversified. Of course there's a constant menace of heavy taxation on greenhouse gas emissions so some money is still poured into anti-science. Ten millions a year is more than enough, because a hundred or a thousand millions is not going to buy them any scientific game changer. A hundred or a thousand millions are much better used in selecting a group of idiots that can still believe the same old trash so they buy their ways into the Capitol. Sounds familiar? Similar to frogs that boil, a myth that has become the picture of any tragedy in very slow motion, the people haven't realized how their political landscapes and in the end their fundamental institutions are being domesticated by vested interests.
So, AGW denialism is dumbest than ever. This thread is a tiny example of what is happening worldwide. June has been the worst month in this thread ever. A few vintage arguments reflecting the shade of sepias is very narrow, masterly depicted by Jules Galen's argumentation of mid-troposphere temperatures in models, as declared by that Hillybilly, PhD at Congress, or AlBell mixing up three concepts in a still valid question and unable or unwilling to make herself clear and open a fruitful debate. The scene is completed by a few doing voice-over and keeping the myth alive by declaring they are not convinced and they have not been reduced to silence. And nothing more.