It's getting harder for conservatives to deny that climate change is a problem. But for the past two decades, they've been against it as a "junk science." When you've been against something for such a long time, how can you admit you were wrong? The psychological dissonance is just too strong. One maneuver now is to say "those environmentalist made the wrong arguments for the wrong reasons, even though we know they were right."

And there is another out, which Orson Scott Card has found. While you can't get a social conservative to believe climate science, they seem to be more open to the concept of peak oil. As it turns out, many of the same policy prescriptions for dealing with global warming also address peak oil issues. If the debate gets framed in terms of peak oil, I wonder if more conservatives will be convinced.