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Nowhere is the partisan politicization of science more pronounced than on the subject of climate change, with Republican and Democratic voters divided on whether climate change exists and how to address it. Existing research tends to explain the partisan climate gap through a process of manufactured doubt, with a network of corporate and conservative organizations using their considerable resources to spread denial about climate science among conservative and Republican voters. I argue that this explanation is incomplete and inconsistent with recent sociological research on scientific conflicts. I explore an alternative hypothesis for the partisan climate gap: distrust in science. I apply a Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis to a large non-probability sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 1808) to examine the relative contributions of climate science denial and scientific distrust to the …