Hostility to progress remains mystifying

Like everyone who has some contact with modern life, I hear and read and see in the media the relentless conflicting noise around climate change, and sometimes it just makes me feel tired.

- Clive Hockey

There are numerous well respected, independent scientific bodies throughout the world whose evidence-based information we largely trust enough to take into account when making decisions in many areas of our life, including public health and disease, weather forecasting, technology and horticulture.

There may be some scepticism or questioning of detail but, largely, if the evidence is compelling, we act on it.

So with something that has such huge implications for us humans as dangerously rising CO2 levels due to our own and our ancestors' activity (some areas of the world proportionately much more so than others), why is there so much reactive noise that seems to me to go way beyond scepticism into aggression, derision and general hostility?