It is certainly not a strawman argument. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they often fail in a number of ways: Occam's Razor and falsifiability especially. One of the problems with the AGW conspiracy theory is that it supposes that academics all over the world are actively suppressing evidence to the contrary.

The other problem with your hot dog system is that it's not a conspiracy theory. It was quite likely that the actual arrangement happened entirely by accident. Once there, the manufacturers just decided it wasn't in their best interests (profit) to change. To make the same argument about AGW you would have to argue that there is a huge benefit to climatology supporting AGW -- enough to not only convince the academic departments of every major university to go along with it, but also some kind of silencing of the morally grounded climatologists. Instead it seems that disproving the AGW theory would prove quite a nice feather in the cap of any recently hired associate professor at a major university.

I'm not saying that all of this is impossible. What I am saying is that this requires extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim.