I'm confused by your post. I've been to realclimate.org and find it full of global warming Kool-aid drinkers. Now McIntyre and McKitrick have a site up that appears to debunk the those on realclimate. On the other hand it appears that they are equally skeptical of the AGW crowd (if AGW means "anti-global warming"). So are M&M septics of both sides? Do they have a firm position or saying we just don't know enough yet?
AGW in global warming circles = Anthropogenic global warming, i.e. man made-----not Anti global warming.
I don't think M&M have taken a position on AGW, what they are doing is trying to apply a normal degree of scientific rigour to the GW "science". Full and fair disclosure, for example - it's a principle of science that results must be replicatable, but the GW side seem to be a bit lax about publishing their methods and data.
Both sites are not typical blogs, there are well qualified scientists who post on both, plus the usual "hangers on". A deep reading over several days of climateaudit will be very rewarding for bolstering scepticism.
I have spent the last couple of weeks reading them, and my impression is that realclimate is they are rather defensive and dismissive of anyone who doesn't share their opinions.
I'd also heartily recommend the Wegman paper which deals with networks of pro-GW scientists - http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf - by reading it you will come to understand how incestuous the AGW crowd are!
Here are some of the findings
Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.
In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue. It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
They're saying that many of the studies don't seem to really say what their authors are saying that they say. When you dig into them, you find proxies being used for things they don't represent, statistical errors (both mathematical and conceptual), self-selecting methodologies, "independent" studies by close associates of the original authors that reuse the same datasets as the one they are "verifying" and using the same known-to-be-flawed methods, finding various publications peer review process doesn't include looking at either the data or what calculations were done on it, proxies for which the originator can't say where they got them, and many other flaws which make the studies *meaningless*.
By and large they take no position on what is. They are primarily pointing out that what IS being put out there on the subject of AGW is not science, or is at best merely an inkling worthy of investigation not a conclusion.