I have to agree with you about Greenpeace. However, I find it quite strange that you consider RC a reliable source, even though the people controlling that site cooperate with Greenpeace.
McIntyre is absolutely hated by the Mann and Jones and probably the rest of the hockey crew. From the mails you can see that Mann is taking everything about McIntyre very emotionally. In the same mails other scientists do comment, that McIntyre is onto something or that Mann's work has been sloppy. But Mann is pure emotion. So McIntyre's sin is, that he found errors in other peoples work and reported them.
You've mentioned the FOIs a few times. I think you have the time frame wrong. McIntyre politely asked for Mann's data. He got it the first time. When McIntyre asked about problems he found or details, how Mann's MBH98 was done, they decided to stop giving him information. It was only years later, that McIntyre or any other skeptic sent a FOI. Before the first FOI, you can find a lot of e-mails that show, that withholding data, software and methods was their standard way of operating. And that is not scientific at all. And when the first FOI appeared, these guys pulled every rabbit from every hat to not have to disclose information. When these guys started blocking McIntyre, he had really not done anything worth the hate.
How does NASA do their quality control? Nobody knows. They don't share the raw data and software used. Neither does CRU. The only good look at their methods and software has been HARRY_READ_ME.txt and the Fortran code in FOI2009.zip. And Ian Harris is pretty blunt in his comments: "In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don't think people care enough to fix 'em, and it's the main reason the project is nearly a year late."
Climate Science needs to learn from the Open Source movement. They need to release everything and make sure anyone can reproduce their work. And they have to change their attitude: They should constantly be skeptic about their own work and beg people to find and report bugs. Now they get offended, if someone dares to verify their work or report problems.
To be honest, I also thought, that science works the way you wrote. But reading those e-mails made me think twice. I keep asking myself, what are these people thinking. I know, that there's something wrong, but I can't explain why they act the way they do.
Do these people get so emotional, because they truly think they are right and that their work is correct? Or maybe they think they are doing the right thing by saving the world and anyone disagreeing is automatically bad? And as they are doing the right thing, cutting corners or doing a sloppy work is ok - they know the right answer anyway?
There's no way IPCC will audit this science. The universities are not doing it either. And very few scientists want to face the wrath of the hockey crew by criticizing them. When this is the situation, I appreciate those individuals, who go through the trouble of checking the work of these people. So my hat is off for McIntyre.
However, I'm not a cheerleader or a mindless fan. If I ever find similar damning e-mails from McIntyre, I will criticize him just as hard as I do Mann, Jones, Kelly et al.
Back to the science. There's really no consensus. Even those scientists in the e-mails are not agreeing with each other.
1. Earth is warming. There's really no point in denying that. It's been doing that since the little ice age. The place I sit and type this used to be under gigantic glaciers.
2. Humans are responsible? The science behind this conclusion is anything but solid. It's way too early to state as a fact, that co2 is the explanation. Actually, we don't even know how much the warming has been (thanks to sloppy science), so it's a bit too early to point fingers at the human race.
3. When it comes to the future, even more is uncertain. Scientists don't even know if the earth has positive or negative feedbacks to the warming. In AGW it's assumed that the feedbacks are positive. Lindzen thinks that he has good proof, that the feedbacks are negative. What we know, is that climate models have been very bad at predicting the future. And we know, that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and has survived and rebounded from all kinds of climate changes. So it's even probable, that the feedbacks are negative.
Reducing emissions is so much easier said than done. Fundamental physics, you know ;-). Throwing a lot of money at that problem will not change the laws of physics. Commercially viable nuclear fusion may change the picture in the future, but until then it's practically impossible to reduce the amount of co2 we output.
Oh, about IPCC not considering any paper that is less than two years old? If you think that's the case, you really have to read about Caspar and the Jesus paper: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html