My take on Global Warming (AGW)

I am a skeptic because of who is on the other side. Many of the groups pushing AGW as a reason to severely limit consumption and production have sought such limits for countless other reasons - sometimes they've been right, sometimes they've been wrong, and the only consistency is this Malthusian belief that mankind is overconsuming, that we're a parasite on the planet. "We need these limits because of X" failed, and now they're arguing "we need these limits because of Y" - - how do you not take that with a grain of salt?
I am concerned that the desired conclusion is driving the research. This looks like the "nationalization of thought" as E.H. Carr put it, or the "end of truth" as Hayek put it. It really seems like the agenda is driving the process, not the other way around. They're not looking at evidence to see where it leads, they're trying to prove a theory and they're fitting the evidence into it - constantly revising the theory so that it has the same end - man caused the warming which will cause disaster. You do get this in other endeavors - scientists out to prove this or that theory as to what became of the dinosaurs, what killed most of them off, did the rest of them evolve into birds - - - but usually as with the dinosaurs there are many competing theories and variations on the question, while here, everyone researching the issue is in a race to prove a single theory as to a yes/no question.
How can that not erase objectivity? How can we know whether the results are the results? Along the way there have been gross exaggerations, there have been predictions that didn't come true - and the theory seemed to change overnight to take those matters into account but still reach the same conclusion, like when a stock analyst took the wrong data, corrected the data but changes his multiple to reach the same target price.
Specifically the treatment of prior climate shifts - the elimination of them to produce a hockey stick, to be able to say that the present climate is "unprecedented," concerns me. It seems Orwellian to me - the history books dating back as far as history books go, hundreds of years, speak of warmer climes from the Viking age to the early 14th century, followed by a cooling. The IPCC's 1995 report noted the MWP - and James Inhofe made hay with it, and as David Deming pointed out, the AGW theorists, or at least one of them, noted "we've got to get rid of the MWP" - and then presto, they did. What had been in the history books for centuries and didn't fit into an agenda, all of a sudden wasn't in the history books anymore.
How can any intellectually honest, open-minded person not be troubled by that? And as that onion is peeled back, we find that the hockey stick blade is measured surface temps while the handle is from proxy data. We find that while a few different studies were done, they all used the same model. We find that the model always produces a hockey stick no matter what data is plugged in, due to the algorithms it uses - however that a MWP (just not as warm as what used to be) shows up when you plug in more data. We find that the hockey stick theorists (Mann et al) don't want to update proxies that end in 1980, even though it's a simple matter of going to the site and drilling into a tree. We then find out that to the extent post-1980 proxy data is available, when you plug it into the models the post-1980 warming doesn't show up (meaning the models' failure to pick up higher MWP warming could simply be a problem with the model, rather than that the MWP warming didn't exceed 20th century warming).
Moreover no alternative, non-climate explanation for the phyiscal, tangible evidence of warmer climes - what species grew when and where, what mountain passes and waterways were iced over for what part of the year - on which the MWP interpretation had been based, has been offered. The only single attempt at an explanation is laughable - after 1000 years of breeding new wine grape varieties, and improving vineyard growing techniques, both specifically for cold-hardiness, now, finally, they again grow wine grapes in England in the same volume in which wine grapes were grown in England in the 1100s - just not the same grapes they grow in France and Italy, which were the only wine grape varieties around in the 1100s.
Otherwise the evidence is just dismissed as being "anecdotal" or "regional anomalies" - but the anecdotes are from regions around the world that do not share weather patterns - e.g., tree lines were higher in the Sierra Nevadas and the Alps. What's the world if not the sum of the regions in it? Why are there not a host of regions where there is any tangible evidence that it was cooler? If 1/3 of the world was significantly warmer and the other 2/3 stayed the same, the global average temperature would still have been higher - with man having nothing to do with it and with no "disastrous consequences." And how does anyone explain the contemporaneous observations that it was warmer than it had been, and then during the beginning of the LIA that it was cooler than it had been?
The MWP was the universally-accepted climate history for hundreds of years before climate became a political issue, and then, long after climate had become a political issue, the MWP, which didn't fit the AGW story about "unprecedented" and therefore "dangerous" 20th century warming, was written out of the climate history in a matter of about six months.
Doesn't that sound at all fishy to you? Doesn't that concern you? If somebody came up with a new theory that, scientifically, Washington couldn't have crossed the Delaware, would you just accept it? Wouldn't you ask how it was, then, that he and his army managed to get to the other side? All the things that Lamb and others looked at happened - hopefully nobody thinks the Viking dairy farms in Greenland were/are a Potemkin Village..... How'd they happen then, if it wasn't warmer, at least in those regions, and if it was warmer in those regions...
Even the Holocene Maximum has been downplayed - all of a sudden, it was warm only in the daytime or only on summer days - - how does that make sense? It's warmer than normal during the day, then it's as cool at night as it always had been, then it's warmer than normal again during the day? What process made cooling happen faster at night? There's no basis for any of that - the Holocene Maximum like the MWP didn't fit the agenda - it was possible to blame humans for this warming and still accept the MWP and Holocene Maximum but it was easier to just re-write the climate history.
The response I often receive to this is that, well, climate science when Lamb wrote was not nearly as well-developed as it is now - remember, chemists once universally believed everything was made of Phlogeston. But that leads me back to the original point - even if we accept that at face value, it means that this entire discipline of climate science was developed in a politically-charged atmopshere when 90% of the people developing the science were in a race to prove one particular theory and to thus show support for a political agenda. It's NOT like "Phlogeston" - Mendeleev in 1860 wasn't part of an effort to prove something about Carbon's atomic number in order to support a political agenda, there was no agenda and he and his peers were just trying to figure out how it all worked. It really concerns me that the best explanation for the revisions that have occurred both to the climate history and to the AGW theory itself are the result of present significant improvements to the science - even if that's true, it means that the scientific discipline itself is "advancing" solely as part of an effort to prove a very specific, narrow political theory.

When political agendas dominate science, when science is not open-ended, when it is not just an open-minded search for the truth or at least a number of competing teams trying to prove or disprove competing theories to a variety of questions, how can the scientific process not be skewed?

We had this with Economics - Keynes and Galbraith came up with new theories of how the government could manipulate the economy, not because facts led them to that conclusion but because that conclusion justified their political employers' proposed policies. And the end result was the stagflation and misery index of the 1970s.
The intellectual process has to be a matter of discovering facts and following them logically where they lead - not coming up with the conclusion you want to reach and then trying to find facts that fit into it and downplay or revise facts that don't.
It is possible to still end up with a valid conclusion based on the facts by this second process, but that is a happy accident.

And lately there's the "big hurry" - - - all of a sudden "the debate is over" - - skeptics are treated like Holocaust deniers even though in terms of factual certainty, AGW cannot be put in the same light as the Holocaust. All of a sudden "we cannot afford to wait" - - - - - why?

Why? I'll tell you why - because there's been a pause since the 1st shoe dropped. The hottest year on record was 1998. Nine years ago. This is a 100 year phenomenon - nine years cannot just be dismissed. Sure it's been near that 1998 mark for most of those nine years, but we haven't passed it. If the other shoe doesn't drop for another 3, 4, 5 years - as time passes, popular support for the agenda will wane. And if we get a cool year, forget it, it's over. They've even trotted out an excuse for this eventuality - supposedly waning solar irradiance.

Now does that necessarily mean that it's all a hoax, that even the alarmists themselves don't really believe it's us? Not necessarily - but it shows the problem when the cart and the horse are reversed - when the politics is the horse and the science is the cart.

As such I do not give the AGW theorists the benefit of any doubt, I do not find it necessary to prove an "alternate" theory - I have a right to commute to work, and I don't have to disprove the notion that I'm causing droughts in Africa through my commute before I commute - and I consider theirs to be a burden of proof, not consensus. And I have little patience for changing stories - - - if we don't pass 1998 soon, nothing is going to make me buy into this new "weaker solar energy is luckily buying us a few years to save the planet" excuse, and if the 2008 and 2009 hurricane seasons are again duds, I will dismiss the "end of the world is near" advertisements as a sham, I will consider Al Gore to be this century's William Miller, carbon footprints to be original sin, and carbon credits to be papal indulgences.