Dear Will (if you'll forgive the familiarity)
Thanks for the link in your Guardian post - much appreciated. There's lots I could take issue with in your post, but let me focus on the bit quoted below (and not just because it mentions me).
Science has not helped its own cause. The open science movement, and even the Royal Society, has become concerned that the quest to win commercial funding has made a growing number of scientists too anxious to make their science unique. Too many scientific papers are published in which researchers make it hard for others to reproduce their lab experiments. Key data are omitted.
Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology. But for climate change sceptics such as Andrew Montford, Bjørn Lomborg or Nigel Lawson's influential Global Warming Policy Foundation, this is an inconvenient truth. Climate change science must be greeted with the same sense that science in general is fallible.
Your suggestion that the IPCC insists on the best methodology made me laugh. I don't suppose the intracacies of Bayesian statistics are your cup of tea, but you really should try to get your head around l'affaire Forster and Gregory. If you are reading this, Will, it is an example of climate science using the worst methodology - a methodology without any support among reputable statisticians - and the IPCC rewriting the results of people who used the best methodology.
You need to to expand your reading I think.
But thanks again for the link.