OK folks, my 2 cents:

Talking to a number of the academic research scientists I get to meet as part of my day job (and I can talk shop with them, as I got my Ph.D. and the equivalent of another writing computer models), I can tell you the following:

(a) A surprising number of people working in climate, and in related areas (like atmospheric chemistry) will parrot the AGW propaganda in public but admit to significant doubts about AGW in private. This includes people who are out-and-out liberals politically.

(b) Others use the “pious fraud” argument: they saw they don’t really believe AGW but think Al Gore-type hysteria serves the higher goal of mankind weaning itself off fossil fuels (a finite resource, whichever way you turn it).

(c) People who do numerical modeling in other areas for a living —- and know (including 1st-hand, in my case) how bl**dy hard it can be to get things right in much simpler systems —- sometimes have language for climate alarmists that makes Watts sound like a moderate.

(d) And finally, funding for climate research is a meal ticket for many of them, especially in an age where research funding for any subject not heavily mediatized is becoming increasingly hard to come by. “He whose bread you eat, is he whose word you speak” (Dutch proverb)

My own educated guess is that AGW may have some effect, but that it’s a minor perturbation compared to natural phenomena, and that global climate in general is a complex system par excellence. The intellectual arrogance of those telling us to basically turn our whole economy upside down based on half-baked models is absolutely staggering, and a textbook example of both Sowell’s “Vision of the Anointed” and New Class “rent-seeking”.