You can replicate experiments. It's hard if said experiment involves say an expensive telescope, but the observation should at least be consistent with what's observed with cheaper telescopes.

But the same applies if you replace “telescope” with “thermometer”, so replications in that sense are possible in climatology too! (The difference is just that the theoretical underpinnings of cosmology are much more solid than those of climatology.) You'd have a point if you said that you cannot create a new planet to test whether your climatological models are correct, but then again you can't create a new universe to test your cosmological models either, or get a bunch of maniraptorans, wait 150 million years, and see what their descendants look like for that matter. (EDIT: Now I remember that at least one person has said more or less that as an argument against evolution being a scientific theory. Alas.)

I've never heard people arguing for evolution use "the scientific consensus says evolution is true" as their main argument.

Okay.

As a non-palaeontologist who's never dug fossils or anything, the main reason I believe that birds are dinosaurs (in the monophyletic sense of the word) in spite of a small minority of palaeontologists disagreeing is that I think it's far less likely for the consensus to be wrong than for the dissenters to be wrong.

There. Now you've heard one person using the scientific consensus as the main argument. Are you shifting your probability that birds are dinosaurs downwards?

Their tendency to rely heavily on appeals to authority, e.g., "the science is settled".

I asked for a citation and I got a bare assertion. Can you produce a reference where a climatologist says “the science is settled” as if it was itself an argument, rather than a summary of evidence (preferably in a peer-reviewed journal -- surely if you dug long enough you could found some exasperated evolutionist on the internet telling a creationist the same thing)?