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Notes -
It seems to me that you are framing your question as one about beliefs, when in fact is it about behavior: You are puzzled why people's actions are sometimes inconsistent with their beliefs. Yet, people's actions are the result not of a single belief, but of all of their beliefs, values, and interests. After all, plenty of people who think that murder, or theft, or cheating on taxes, is wrong nevertheless commit murders, steal, or cheat on their taxes. And, it is possible to believe both 1) climate change is a mortal threat; and 2) eating meat is necessary for good health (or, humans were meant to eat meat, and it would be an affront to deny that nature). That person might eat meat, not because his belief about climate change is false, but because he has to strike a balance between competing ideas.
Moreover, a person who sincerely holds general beliefs (Muslims are bad) can also sincerely hold more specific beliefs that superficially seem in conflict therewith (My friend is a nice guy, despite being Muslim).
Certainly people's behaviour is complicated by a host of competing beliefs, goals, and interests, and people are very good at rationalising away conflicts. However, the specific class of pseudo-beliefs I had in mind are those that people don't feel particularly obliged to reconcile with their actual beliefs or translate into behaviour. Sure, you have the person who genuinely believes that climate change is a real threat, and would love to be vegetarian but feels unable to do so for health reasons. But you also have people who seemingly sincerely assent to statements like "climate change is a real threat" but don't feel any real normative pressures to make that fit in with their other beliefs or translate it into behaviour. I think a lot of our social and political utterances are like this. They're not lies, and we take ourselves to genuinely believe them, but they constitutively function in a manner quite different from canonical beliefs.
I am not sure how you can determine what pct of their behavior is a function of not feeling normative pressure, versus feeling that pressure but having it overridden by other factors.
And, when you say, "they constitutively function in a manner quite different from canonical beliefs," how are you defining "canonical beliefs," and how are you measuring them? There is a danger of circularity, if they are, eg, beliefs so strong that they override others.
PS: Maybe look at work re value rationality (see eg here
[noting that "Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be" -- you would think, given some people's rhetoric, that fighting climate change might be one of them, but as you note, it often isn't] ).
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