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I think there's more skepticism in some fields than others -- particularly the fields where the findings are used by politicians to get us to do something. I study physics, which is pretty clean in this regard, and I don't encounter much skepticism at all.

One problem is that science is supposed to gain our confidence by sticking its neck out with new predictions -- if it survives, then we assign it some credibility. If the head gets chopped off, however, we are more likely to toss that particular idea aside.

The problem with climatology, etc. is that it combines the worst of both of these issues. "Sticking your neck out" amounts to making predictions for the future, perhaps decades down the line -- but the last time they did this, with the whole "global cooling" scenario in the 70's, the prevailing idea was, in fact, chopped off and thrown aside. And yet we're asked to make crucial economic policy decisions based on global warming models without much of an opportunity to see them succeed or fail. This is quite simply a recipe for intense skepticism, regardless of whether the models turn out to be right or wrong, or how much evidence the actual scientists working on these models believe they have.

This is aside from the whole "generate money and attention by creating a scare" argument, which may or may not be valid.