Growing up in the US so-called "bible belt", I find committed climate observed people not really very different from any other fundamentalist extremist. Most strong believers do not have any academic background in the focus of their belief. They are unable to deal with open ended unbounded questions. They tend to believe in huge conspiracies and a looming apocalypse that will cleanse the world of wickedness and usher in an age ruled by the elect.Not much different than a typical ATTP or Joe Romm thread, actually.

If you want a creepy example of how the most extreme cliamte obsessed approach things, read the link in the "seen elsewhere" section:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/wcc.317 on so-called "public intellectuals". A lack of self-awareness, a lack of critical thinking, an inability to differentiate dogma from reality, all seem to support the warmist way...

I think anyone visiting an opposition site can be perceived as odd and I think it comes in several parts.

Firstly, you naturally have a different opinion but because you are polarised on the overall issue, the subtleties of what you think can be buried in generalised argument. The other side assumes you are in the wrong on everything and often argue at cross purposes. As you know from experience, it’s very hard to step into the lion’s den and engage. One to one is fine but en masse, the prejudices of the crowd always win.

Secondly, there will be view points that the other side just can’t understand. Some concepts we try to convey to warmists have no meaning to them. It’s like explaining music to a deaf person. And visa versa. So sceptics who think that AGW is all a con, ignore that most of those involved believe what they say and warmists who think sceptics must be bought, are assuming we can’t think the way we do when we look at the same evidence. The most logical approach is to assume the other side really does think the way they do and work from there. Eg I don’t understand why some left leaning members of society don’t understand that to give out benefits, the money first has to be created and hat beyond a certain point of taxation the total taken starts to fall not rise. I don’t understand it but I’d be wasting my time pretending that that’s not how they think.

Dogmatism is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. It’s not a bad thing to be dogmatic in the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun for instance. However with something as fluid and as new as climate science, dogmatism is inappropriate on both sides. We’re all guilty of it from time to time. For persuading others, dogmatism isn’t helpful and warmists are very much self defeating. They think they can bully people into accepting their flawed science and they fail miserably. It is possible for a minority to dominate a majority but it requires the majority to be relatively weak in comparison. People who are weak financially, physically or even politically are open for ‘persuasion’ but none of these words describe the sceptic majority. They can only negotiate with us.

The key part of their failure is a refusal to believe that we do have issues with the AGW edifice at all levels and they need to start asking ‘what’s wrong?’ before anything will move on.

"I am still not fully convinced that CO2 has anything to do with any of the aspects of global warming/climate change." RR.

And I don't think it matters at this point because the AGW bandwagon is so twisted that nothing substantial can be done anyway. Believers are treating this as an idealogical problem, not a practical one. They are less interested on achieving a goal than that we sign up to the same doctrine. Things like the disinvestment campaign are all about persuading others to act and not about considering what the believer should personally do. They truly don't think that they should or could take a lead on CO2 reduction. They feel that they've done their part by alerting us to the issue. I call those sort of people 'the bigger picture type'. Every organisation has them. Useless gits.

As for the spelling - 95% of the time my fingers do the spelling because they're far better than my brain. However if they get things wrong the brain scans it, shrugs and thinks 'looks ok to me'.

Despite TheBigYinJames’s valiant efforts on this discussion site, I am still not fully convinced that CO2 has anything to do with any of the aspects of global warming/climate change.

Well, to be fair to those discussions, I only ever claimed that CO2 contributes to a greenhouse effect, not that the greenhouse effect is the major driver of atmospheric temperatures. There is a lot of confusion and conflation of the two ideas amongst the lay sceptic community who believe that they are the same thing. This is the driver of a lot of the 'we must disprove the greenhouse effect' papers that go around.

There can be a greenhouse effect and CO2 can be a major contributor to it AND it still makes no measurable difference to global temperatures, because there is no simple time-dependent linkage between them. Trying to disprove a very basic physical phenomenon in order to make the more relevant point makes us look a bit daft - an analogy I've used in the past is that if the government wanted to ban sky-diving on the grounds that too many people die, then we wouldn't try to fight the ban by trying to prove gravity doesn't exist. That's the sort of level the anti-greenhousers are aiming at, it's only going to be 1. very difficult if not impossible 2. make us look very stupid 3. ignores where the real debate is.

On the point of how both sides of the debate behave, what you have to remember is that people take sides in order to feel the comfort of likeminded people. Most people do not stray out of the echo-chambers, they are there to block out all the people who disagree with them. So when it comes to blogs, the only two types of people you will see on a polarised blogs are 1. people who are not dogmatic and can live with difference of opinion and 2. people out to troll or disrupt the 'enemy' side.

Since people in the 1. category don't cause trouble, you don't generally see them. I expect there are many people here who are from the warmist side who are just here to read what's going on. Perhaps they want to know what the latest trends are in the sceptical side (so they can find out or work out the 'proper' responses for later debates) or they just find it amusing to see all the daftness which you get in a varied counter-community. Some may just be curious, there is a human trait which wants to look under the rock.

In defence of trolls, I don’t think it starts out as an intention to disrupt. It comes from a hope they can trigger the turning point where we say ‘Oh! Now I understand, you were right all along’. When it doesn’t work it dissolves into abuse, sometimes in a give as good as you get situation. Eventually the true troll emerges because they’ve become emotionally involved with the site but see everyone as an enemy worth abusing. Once turned into a troll, they see all opposing blogs as the same.

Warmists are particularly prone to this because they think our stand point is artificial and deep down we think they're right but chose the other path for capricious reasons.

I agree with your hero-hypothesis.

They come with the idea that they're not only going to help us poor fools out of our delusions, they are also going to solve the difficult problem of fixing the climate debate. Their disappointment when they find out that not only are we not delusional, but they have had zero impact on our attitudes is too much for the poor things to bear. Over the course of weeks they become flippant and finally angry, and start ignoring the 97% of reasonable stuff here in favour of raging at the 3% of lunacy an open site attracts. Finally getting angry with the host for not protecting them.