Academic but accessible defense of the scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change? I'm an intelligent and well-educated guy, but all of my schooling has been in economics, statistics, and public policy. I'm interested in reading a thorough explanation/defense of the scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change that is intended for somebody who doesn't know anything about meteorology or climate science. However, I'm also looking for something fairly academically/scientifically rigorous. Something on the level of "An Inconvenient Truth" is probably just going to annoy me more than anything.
The definitive place to start is the Summary for Policy Makers at the start of the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 on the physical science basis of climate change.

This also acts as a suitable introduction to the massive rest of the physical basis report, and will, together with the contents table for the full report, enable a reader to quickly find the sections of interest that cover greater detail. And to burrow deeper again, if there are specific sections that you'd like to know more about, the thing to do is to follow through and read the references from those sections.