Murray Goot of Macquarie University reviews papers on the scientific "consensus" on climate change. This is a reasonably balanced piece and not just because it mentions The Hockey Stick Illusion a couple of times.
In essence Goot's paper looks at the Oreskes and Anderegg studies as well as considering the polls of climatological opinion run by von Storch and Bray and concludes that there is a consensus that the majority of recent warming is down to CO2. I don't doubt that a majority of people working in the area of climate do think that way. The problem is that most of them only believe this because they have read about it in the IPCC reports. Perhaps of more interest are the views of the handful of people working on detection and attribution. Here, though, I imagine we would find absolute unanimity on the question of mankind's role in global warming, but even this would be unconvincing to many in view of the poor performance of the models against observations over the last decade.
Goot's consideration of the allegations of difficulties in getting sceptic views published is also interesting:
It is certainly possible that a sort of closed-shop is at work, with the majority of those who side with the orthodoxy applying tougher standards to those that challenge orthodox views than they apply to those like themselves who work within the consensus, and that the differential publication and citation figures reflect this. But those who insist that this is the case provide no systematic evidence for it. Of course, arguments from first principles apart (see, for example, Guston 2006, 383, for a Kuhnian gloss), the operation of a closed-shop is always difficult to show.
The point about the difficulties of demonstrating a closed shop is a good one, but one point that is worth making here is that it is not only sceptics who have claimed that the scientific literature is largely closed to them. Several of the Climategate emails suggest that mainstream climatologists believed that they had successfully shut off most journals to sceptics too.
It's one thing to lose "Climate Research". We can't afford to lose GRL.
The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there, but these guys always have "Climate Research" and "Energy and Environment", and will go there if necessary.
There is a very strong implication in these messages that all the other journals which publish climatology papers were closed to sceptics. I think we can probably say that there is something of a consensus on this question.