It's not unique to climate change deniers: incapability to admit when we're wrong, doubling down at every occasion and opportunity, is an inherent trait in all mankind. Our brains are shitty like that.

Prescribed fire and climate change are not the same issue. They are different scales of management.

A lot of the backlash against prescribed fire isn't from the land management agencies themselves, they fucking know how disastrous repression has been (I know because I've been in them and have worked on multiple prescribed burns). In 2022 British Columbia retired Smokey the Bear in "trying to shift people’s focus away from how to suppress fire toward how to live with it." Everyone I worked with in the Midwest and range management wants there to be more fire.

However, a lot of people want to live in the wildland-urban interface. They don't want others telling them to have defensible fire space. They would rather just stop all fires to begin with. So much of the money that could be going to fire education and preventative management goes to stopping fires from destroying a handful of communities. Even people who are willing and able to do prescribed burns on their own private property are scared of the litigation from either private citizens, or local laws that have made it illegal.

In addition, if you want to focus on fire in Western North America, surely you know how difficult that is with Bromus tectorum right?