I agree with some of what you wrote. I just wanted to point out:
You said, As I have noted, the deniers have changed from arguing that the earth is not warming to maintaining that it is not warming because of human activity."
To be fair, it is the climate alarmists who intentionally confused "mere global warming" (MGW) with "imminently harmful anthropogenic global warming" (IHAGW).
They did this because MGW is a scientifically provable concept regarding which there is a general scientific consensus.
But, IHAGW is a policy evaluation of a scientific principle, about which there is no scientific consensus at all. They are building their political consensus on that point, but they are being opposed, and they don't like it at all.
The alarmists wanted to silence the opposition, so they intentionally confused MGW with IHAGW, just calling it GW or climate change. Getting control of the language was a brilliant political move (not a scientific move), and trying to transfer the certainty of science to politics was also a brilliant political move. Basically, the alarmists tried to pull a Gruber, relying on successfully confusing people to get their funding. (Yes, we are seeing a pattern. The elitists think most people are stupid.) But, just because they fool enough liberals to get something to pass Congress, or to get the media on board, or to get governments to hand out money...that doesn't mean they are right. The article I linked talks about all of this in detail.
You said, "The sun suddenly kicked into high gear, in a completely unprecedented level, or some such unscientific nonsense." That is not unscientific...except perhaps in how you stated it. There is science on solar cycles and many other contributing factors to global temperatures Even you would admit, I assume, that the warming of the earth and rising of the seas started thousands of years before human civilization arose. Something had to cause it, and it certainly was not humans. The debate should be whether or not the sun or the other factors are more or less of conributors than man-made warming. As for me, since warming started with a vengeance well before man entered the picture, it seems reasonable to assume that there are cycles which control the world's temperature more than we do ourselves.