So you ask a question, get it answered, ignore the answer and raise a strawman...
No strawman there, Megalodon. Although some of the individual words may vary, I've seen pretty much those sorts of putdowns. I have actually seen the "consensus" staement used as the be-all and end-all of the argument. No discussion. Case closed.
A couple of years of similar debating techniques is exactly why some people dismiss the denialists after a couple of posts. We all have been there and done that.
I've heard that one, too. Why the need to post at all if you're that ticked off? Why are the same posters only too happy to point out strawman arguments, Occam's Razor, Argument from Personal Incredulity, the Forer Effect and god knows how many other of the same principles again and again and again. They never seem to tire of that.
The answering posts may get a little tetchy if the same questioner carries on being wilfully ignorant, but they aren't dismissive from the off.
It's quite simple, and not at all dependent in a "consensus":
What we know about physics tells us that it should get warmer, unless there's a dramatic negative feedback in the system;
OK, what about those who say the CO
2 concentration has been much higher in the prehistoric past, without the temperature being radically higher? Are they lying?
CO
2 concentration has been rising pretty much steadily since the industrial revolution. After several decades of rises, the average yearly global temperature dropped fairly steadily year-on-year from approximately 1941 to 1975. We are told this is due to sulphate emissions creating a negative forcing. Why were sulphate emissions not seriously affecting the climate until the 1940s? They, too, were important industrial emissions. What caused the sulphate level to rise so dramatically in the 1940s that not only did they allay the temperature-increasing effect of the rising CO
2 concentration, they reversed it? CO
2 was still rising, after all.
Assuming that sulphate emissions were gradually curtailed as a result of Clean Air policies, why do we not see a gradual lessening of the temperature decrease until CO
2 begins to dominate again? Why the sudden, steady increase in temperature from 1975, instead of a curve as SOx dropped out and the still-increasing CO
2 began to take over?
What we know about the world tells us that no such negative feedback exists, and that some positive feedbacks are not only possible but highly probable;
I humbly suggest "what we know about the world" is insufficient to predict the climate. I've seen a huge spread in predictions of the rate of increase, confusion as to whether the rise will continue perpetually or peter out, whether the Northern Hemisphere will become a desert or an ice-bowl. Current climate models do not postdict the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period, which were significant climatic events. However, they did not depend on CO
2 as a forcing. Cloud formation seems to be all but absent in climate models, but is almost certainly an important forcing.
Real world measurments show that it's getting warmer.
And I have never, ever denied that. OK, this year, in the UK at least, is so far considerably cooler than last year, but I do appreciate the difference between weather and climate.
However, there is the fact that a large number of weather stations in Siberia and in non-urban areas have ceased to be. They are no longer taking measurements at all. And yet all I've seen as a rebuttal to the urban heat island forcing is along the lines of, "Oh, that's irrelevant."
We do not know all the factors affecting climate, not by a long chalk. The 30s were pretty warm in the UK. Builders started to put water pipes on the outside of new houses because they believed there was never going to be a cold winter again. Global warming was happening - after all, the temperature had been steadily rising for 30 years. It was simple.
This was proved to be an incorrect decision during the chilly winters of the late 40s to the mid-70s, as water pipes burst all over the UK.
In the 70s, climatologists just knew we were heading for another ice age. The temperature fell steadily for 30 years. That proved it. It was obvious.
Since then, the climate has been warming up for 30 years. That means global warming is here.
Really, the simple fact that the mercury's higher than it was thirty years ago says absolutely jack about continued trends. I have never denied that recent years have been warmer than in my youth. That is both simple and obvious. Yes, I would be an idiot to deny that.
Is it simple and obvious that human beings are causing the rise in temperature? Is it simple and obvious that the temperature will continue to rise without limit? Is it simple and obvious that carbon dioxide forcing is the only game in town? I don't think so.
It's simple. Not that a denialist will acknowledge it, in the exactly same way as a creationist will never acknowledge the fact of evolution... but it is simple.
A creationist denies that evolution is happening at all. I don't deny we're in a warming cycle. I just think we don't know enough about the climate to predict what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone a hundred years from now.
I'm all for recycling and cutting down pollution on a general principle: it would be nice to stop poisoning the earth. So basically, I'm happy to walk the walk. I'm just not convinced enough to talk the talk.
I would think that there were a few open question marks in the areas addressed by the papers published in those areas.