I can understand why people, at a visceral level, have a hard time with global warming. People just see their local weather which makes it easy to dismiss (or even welcome, depending on how cold the weather) a global warming trend. People also have a hard time understanding how driving their car to work every morning can make the temperature warmer on the other side of the planet.I don't sympathize, however, with people that outright deny the fact that humans are making Earth warmer, to say nothing of the those that deny it is warming at all (regardless of the cause). In my mind, this is even worse than the 16th century Church denying the Copernican model of the solar system (in favor of the Ptolemaic model). The modern socio-scientific literacy of the population in exponentially higher. This is why I have to think that those who deny the existence of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, have some motivation for remaining ignorant. It particularly relevant (infuriatingly so) for policy makers. Many of them are very intelligent people, who should know better.
One possible motivation is short-term monetary gain. Burning fossil fuels to power our lives is incredibly cheap, without taking into account long term consequences. The up-front costs are a fraction of what power from "green technologies" costs, in a purely monetary sense. For example, as Earth's atmosphere warms and glacial/polar ice melts, the sea levels will rise. It will be incredibly expensive when lower Manhattan is below sea level (only a few meter rise), to say nothing of nearly all other major cities in the world (which lie close to sea level).
Here are a couple links, for those that want to educate themselves or others:
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming
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