Far too many of the deniers just guess as to why AGW is false (paraphrasing below):
“scientists receive billions in funding, therefore, AGW is not real”
“science has been wrong in the past, it could be wrong about this”
“here are four scientists who don’t believe in AGW, therefore, AGW is not true”
“only scientists can submit scientific papers to scientific journals, therefore, there is a bias and AGW is wrong”
“I saw a YouTube documentary and the person made the claim that there is AGW but did so without listing sources! Therefore, AGW is a hoax”
“there is no peer-reviewed evidence for AGW…”

This is actaully making me quite frustrated. Lay people making judgements about scientific research that they probably aren’t qualified to talk about. With this I mean that many people lack the education to understand why some research does this instead of this, or why data needs adjusting or transforming or why a particular sample was chosen. In regards to only 7 weather stations being used as representitives of NZ, for all I know 7 stations may be all that is required for the particular data collection to make inferences about a country as small as ours. Hell, it’s probably explained in the research but I doubt you’ll see most casual skeptics bothering to read that instead of watching a youtube video. To be fair, most research isn’t easily accessable to the public and most people don’t know that you can access it at many libraries.

I think a good portion of the population is skeptical about AGW due to news coming from US/UK about climate denial and the fact that there were a few NZ scientists caught up in that email thing a few years ago. I think our media is largely to blame for a lot of the denialism. It’s not that they have an agenda like FOX or CNN, but that they care more about headlines than information and “NZ scientists in global warming email scandal!” draws more readers than “NZ scientists contribute towards evidence for global warming”.

That being said, I’m pretty sure we have legislation about climate change that says it is largely human induced and we need to reduce carbon emissions. So I don’t think it is too controversial here in the sense that it isn’t taboo politically (probably because we like to think of ourselves as a clean and green country like Norway/Sweden) and not too many people are bothered about the carbon emission schemes.

Ask your average joe on the street and he/she probably lacks the information to make an informed choice: “global warming? we still have winter don’t we?”

Just some thoughts in case you were interested.