Hierarchical-individualistic people (HI from here on) believe rights, duties, goods, and offices should be distributed differentially and on the basis of people's own decisions without collective interference or assistance.

Egalitarian-communitarian (EC) people, by contrast, believe rights and goods should be distributed more equally and society should bear partial responsibility for securing the conditions of individual flourishing.

Like all binary classifications, the distinction between HI and EC worldviews lacks nuance and oversimplifies the complexity of human worldviews. Nonetheless, the distinction is extremely powerful and permits prediction of people's attitudes towards numerous scientific issues.

Perhaps not surprisingly, HI individuals are more likely to resist acceptance of climate science than EC individuals.

Why?

Because implicit in the message we get from climate science is the need to alter the way we currently do business. The spectre of regulation looms large, and so does the (imaginary) World Government or other interventions — such as multilateral agreements — that are anathema to the notion that individuals, not governments or societies, determine their own fate.

To manage that threat to an HI worldview, the fundamental laws of physics underlying climate science must be denied. The greenhouse properties of CO2 may have been known for 150 years, but those indubitable physical facts cannot compete with the need to protect free enterprise from the threats posed by socialism, communism, Nazism, Green "watermelons", a corrupt IPCC, Greenpeace, the all-powerful solar-energy lobby, to name but a few of the imaginary monsters and enemies that are awakened by the peer-reviewed evidence.