Hopefully you'll forgive me for stepping in, especially on my first post here (Hi everybody!).
This is far from being a private conversation

. Come on down and say your piece, daunting though the prospect may seem.
The problem I see with what you just said is I've picked up a lot of "cult feel" to the AGW movement as well. A lot of the earlier posts in this thread seem to all but scream "you don't agree with me, therefore you are wrong." without any explanation as to why.
You'll find the
actual screamers in the anti-AGW camp.
There are also quite a few instances of ad hom attacks without touching the posters points, which strike me as very similar to the way a lot of cult like people act when someone attacks their beliefs.
Do you have any examples of this? Schneibster is a tad combative on occasion but he does address any scientific points that are made. varwoche can by spiky but never avoids other people's points. JoeEllison tends to the acerbic, but his specialist subject is more the way the the anti-AGW case is argued (and by whom) than the science itself. aup's hardly a monster. My own behaviour is impeccable, utterly pukka, officer and gentleman, what? And we can all plead provocation.
Especially in a great many of the cases where people in the AGW "camp" almost always say something along the lines of "there is a consensus, why are we even bothering to talk about this?" I honestly don't see a consensus in the case of AGW (GW, yes... but I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that at this point anyway).
There really is a massive scientific consensus, despite the great efforts being made to obfuscate it. You only have to notice how few are the scientists (and weathermen) whose names regularly come up in the vast panoply of contrarian websites to confirm that.
That said, I'm quite certain there are crazies on both sides of the issue as pretty much always seems to be the case.
Well, there's Diamond crazying for one side, but I'm lost for a local example on the Science side

.
On a different note, hopefully building up to something interesting when I have more time to post: Has there been any disagreement over the theory that in the past there has been an 800 year lag between Temperature and CO2? It was brought up a bit but I didn't see it touched much and I'm very interested in that aspect of the story for reasons I'll hopefully explain later.
It's been done to death over the years, yet refuses to die. interesting in palaeoclimate terms, but not relevant to AGW. In the past CO2-levels have responded to climate-change - thus the lag when warming occurs
by other means. Traditionally, CO2 acts as a positive feedback, just as water-vapour acts as a positive feedback to the CO2 feedback.
In the current case, where CO2-levels are being increased
by other means - human, aka anthropogenic, means - the climate is responding to the CO2-change.
This is an entirely new phaenomenon.
One final general note on the topic for now:
I don't understand why humans are so egotistical to see a huge global change in something and automatically go: "Oh *****! What did we do now?"
Humans have, by their activities, raised atmospheric CO2 from about 290ppm to 385ppm in century and a half. That's an observable fact, not narcissism. This is not something that any species has been known to do before, not even something
HomSap has done before, although we did it the first chance we got. Not deliberately, of course, and if CO2 wasn't invisible perhaps we wouldn't have done it at all. But there it is, we did it, and we're doing it some more as we speak.
You're actually voicing the established scientific world-view of the last couple of centuries and more. Basically, that catastrophism and anthropocentrism are out, gradualism and get-over-yourself are in. Science is often presented as being biased
towards AGW, but the opposite is true. AGW has had to swim against the tide, and yet it has become the scientific consensus
because it stands up scientifically. We have to get over getting over ourselves and realise that we really are awesome. The way a bull in a china shop is awesome.