I started responding to your GP comment, but I moved it here (and lightly edited/expanded it) to let you know that I see you (though your pivot from "suspicion" and "bias" to "psychology" and "identity" makes me leery).

Without specific cited examples I'm not sure if you're talking primarily about actual research papers, broader research summaries/reports, coverage in dedicated science publications, coverage in the general news outlets, political/interest group reports or talking points, discussion with random science-citing people online, etc. (I get the impression you're talking more about latter than the former examples, but I'm not confident enough to tailor the response in either direction):

In general, people are not great at thinking (even in system 2) or communicating precisely.

Unjustified thinking and bias are hard to tease apart. (I'll stick to Hanlon's razor and avoid focusing on bias--the term tends to impute even though bias can be unconscious.)

Our primary tool for communicating, human language, didn't develop to meet complex communication needs (be they scientific, technical, philosophical, etc). Some concepts are hard or impossible or tedious to communicate in language. Worse, these can get folded into nuanced domain-specific terminology or unstated shared context among practitioners.

Small portions of people are pretty good at thinking, though this is often domain-specific.

Small portions of people are pretty good at communicating, though this can also be both domain and audience specific.

To the point (roughly):

I've seen frustrating examples at each of these levels. It is (roughly) everywhere. (I won't impute, but if you see this in climate science and not everywhere--do investigate why.) Not that I would know where the Overton window is, here--but I get the impression from how you frame this that you think you are further outside of it than I think you are. I wonder if you're seeing (something like?) Dunning-Kruger here--many (but not all) of the people left arguing on the internet about facts and gigatons and global cooling and ivory tower conspiracies may just be identifying at each other.

I assume most people who see through this avoid engaging. I occasionally engage, but rarely head-on. My goal investigate to obliquely+gently give someone who appears to be thoughtful a chance to realize they are in a trench.

In any case, I'm unsure what practical application this realization has (beyond the obvious--lobbing fact-grenades into the other trench doesn't accomplish much). Do you see applicable lessons, here? One lesson can be that the message should come from someone with a lot of identity overlap. I think it's useful, but it takes a while to scale well (for example, you need people willing to risk ostracism and exclusion from groups that are core parts of their identity; people most knowledgable about the science don't have a lot of identity overlap).

Katharine Hayhoe is a decent case study, here. She stays busy, but I don't have a good sense of how readily she can move the needle with skeptics. Either way, her identity doesn't seem to defuse the regular conspiratorial comments on posts/videos about her.

I find the discussion of memes in The Selfish Gene useful here. It's worth a read if you haven't. Considering the "fitness" of individual memes, fellow travellers, and memeplexes as a whole (i.e., their virality, whether they fit in well with or oppose other common memes, how resisitant they are to displacement, etc.) is a good place to start with evaluating how climate change denial slots into people's broader belief systems. Unfortunately, it also underscores that a number of its frequent fellow travellers are fairly "fit" memes.