Recently, during the much-needed period of recovery and imbibing after a long day of talks at a scientific conference, I found myself in the midst of a friendly – if only slightly heated – debate over climate science.  Two aspects of this realization surprised me greatly.  First, the conference had nothing whatsoever to do with climate change.  Second, my verbal adversary who seemed to be denying the science so thoroughly laid out in the IPCC reports, was a fellow scientist whom I would have thought able to see where the science was clearly pointing.  Intrigued and always up for a good debate, I dove in eager to learn what thought processes could have led him to dou