Sounds like you’ve got this pretty well figured out, which leaves little room for debate.

The climate debate was warped by Tom Wigley when he unilaterally inserted words into AR3 that blamed Global Warming on humanity when there was  no clear evidence to that effect.  And thus lost the peer-review status for AR3 because the great majority of the scientists withdrew their approval. 

I was there and watched both of those circuses play out. 

The climate debate was further warped by Michael Mann and the Hockey Stick. Until that time I was willing to believe that there might be some merit to the argument. But when the “best science” is such that it wipes out several hundred years of history, then the “best science” is lying to me.  The insistence of the alarmist community on the viability of the hockey stick; the certainty of the righteousness of their cause; the rapid slide of the AGW community from anything resembling real science into religious dogma; the insistent drive to “change the world” into what I believe would be a pre-industrial society with the AGW religionists as the Masters; the obvious attempt to short-circuit the development of the Third World; the obvious hatred of humankind by those who promulgate the AGW agenda - all of those and more have made me an enemy of the agenda and those who espouse it and thus have warped the debate beyond reason. 

I’ve seen little on the skeptic side to match the lies, the idiocy, the vitriol and the plain bad science of the AGW advocates.  I’ve never heard any sceptic say “the science is settled” (It is NEVER settled).  Nor have I ever heard a sceptic refuse to debate the issues.  Nor have I ever heard an AGW adherent ask a question – any question about the facts/data/whatever presented by a sceptic.  I’m sure that somewhere, someplace, somehow, someone on the AGW side has done so.  But it’s more rare than hens teeth.  

Last year I spent 3 months in a debate with AGW believers on an Internet forum in a place that they sincerely considered their own territory.  In the end there was not a single one of my points that they managed to refute, only a few that they managed to modify – and the end result was that, when backed into a corner,  their only argument was that the “preponderance of evidence” and the “majority of scientists” pointed to catastrophic Global Warming.  But they couldn’t point me to either the preponderance of evidence or the majority of scientists. 

The debate has certainly been warped – not by the sceptics, but rather by those AGW believers who have turned  it into a religious debate.