There are a couple key differences here through.
In the Pons and Fleischmann case, they were putting forth an experiment which, if it had actually worked, would have caused massive social upheaval as we changed over to a cold fusion based society. When their experiments proved to not be reproducible the status quo was maintained, and everyone got on with life. While it was important in the scientific community, for the average layperson it was a bunch of news about crap they didn't understand, didn't care about, and since it didn't effect them in the end, didn't need to care about.
In contrast, the scientists who are putting forth the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are also stating that the only real solution is going to involve massive social uchange. In general, people don't like change. Worse yet, the AGW folks are asking people who have grown up with the mindset of consumerism and waste to give that up. Again, it should come as little surprise that people are resistant to this.
And then there is the politics behind how to deal with AGW. Deserved or not, the green movement managed to get itself linked with socialism, and because of poor education in the US, communism in the 1970's. And, unfortunately, most of the solutions to the AGW problem need to be on a massive scale, involving whole societies working together, in other words: socialism. And, all the opponents of change need to so is raise this specter and many people in the US will eat it up. Coupled with the natural resistance to change, and people will go through all sorts of mental contortions to not have to deal with it.
The next political problem is that the people with money in this country are willing to spend that money to protect their income. Since the current system is known to make them money and the new system is an unknown, but will likely involve higher costs without an obvious mechanism for higher profits, the safe bet is to fight to keep the current system in place. Moreover, some of the people with the most money, the folks who run the oil companies, can easily recognize that the proposed changes are a threat to their primary revenue stream. It's no wonder they throw tons of money into fighting the changes.
As for solutions, I don't think there is an easy way to deal with all of this. Trying to force the change to happen fast has the possibility of backfiring. In the US right now the current makeup of government (heavily Democrat) has the best chance of getting something done on the AGW issue. However, too much change at once will give the Republicans a lot of ammo to use in 2010 and 2012. If the current government tries to force the people of the US too far out of their comfort zone at once, they may well be tossed out in the next election cycle which will give the Republicans the ability to undo those changes, and even the blessing of the people to do so. Instead, the change is going to have to happen slowly and incrementally.
The problem here, of course, is that we may really need to get something done quickly. My opinion on this would be that we really need to look at geo-engineering solutions for the short term. Certainly, it's not an optimal solution, and there is the problem that we cannot guarantee that tinkering with the climate is going to work; but, we're doing that at the moment anyway. We are dumping tons of gasses into the atmosphere every day which we know modify how the climate reacts to solar inputs. While the best solution would be to stop doing that, that solution isn't really practicable. The political situation to get it done just isn't there at the moment, And, while we may be able to get that change to happen via small changes in the market economy, that is likely to be a slow and inaccurate solution. And yes, I do realize that if everyone would just consume a little less, drive a little less, and get out of their comfort zone, we wouldn't need to do this. Wonderful, great, ain't gonna happen. The "reduce, recycle, reuse" horse is dead, American consumerism killed it, so either fuck it or walk away, but please quit beating it.
