See:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm for a list of things blamed on global warming, in turn blamed on human beings on account of their CO2 production.
Some might see CAGW proponents as extreme anthropophobes, with a very dim view of their fellow human beings -- the hidden motive being to find some way of blaming others for all of our ills: some simplistic way of dividing humanity between
we, the faithful, and
they, the infidels. There's a similar dynamic behind political division, with which, as it happens, the CAGW meme interacts.
They can't see the irony in the mock environmentalism/humanitarianism involved in destroying large areas of rain forest to plant fuel crops; in imposing all sorts of taxes and financial burdens on those least able to afford it; and in jetting around the world to proselytise the evils of jetting around the world (Leonardo DiCaprio is a particularly egregious example).
As I intimated, I think CAGW is primarily a sociological phenomenon that has its roots largely in Western culture, where increasingly we lack the framing of good and evil in orthodox religious terms. It isn't that religion is disappearing, so much as that it is being transmogrified into something that continues to enable some people to be scapegoated much like black people once were. Now that the n-word can't be spoken, they use the d-word instead.
You see, one can't possibly have rational reasons for holding contrary opinions. One simply
must be evil, or at the very best, a deluded idiot. We live in a world that has become less tolerant of diversity, despite all the lip service paid to it. This may be the source of the current backlash happening in both Europe and the United States: a global and hitherto unarticulated discomfort with the status quo, which, rightly or wrongly, is finding its expression in the ballot box. The righteous upholders of the former status quo are wailing and gnashing their teeth at the possibility of loss of power and influence.
We shall have to wait and see what happens if and when the CAGW meme is rejected. Personally, I don't think that if it is, things could ever be the same again: its proponents have been so loud and intrusive about their opinions that there'd be no place for them to hide and pretend they didn't really mean it. From their viewpoint, it's absolutely vital that they defend CAGW to the death, because losing can't be contemplated.
The knock-on effects for proponent scientists (and indeed the whole scientific establishment) would be particularly severe: never before would there have been anything so visibly humiliating for them. It would bring into the limelight, most importantly for the movers and shakers at the political level, the question of what else scientists might be wrong about. The whole scientific establishment would be under scrutiny: how it is funded, how its work is supervised and vetted, and a thousand other questions would have to be addressed which at the moment are slowly bubbling under the surface.
It might be that rather than risk a stark unveiling of the truth, we will see in the coming months and years an attempt to gradually downplay CAGW in the hopes the whole matter could be quietly forgotten. I don't think that would happen, because it's become far too visible, and its ramifications would be too widespread to ignore.