Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.

Decreasing doesn't mean reversing. And we have physical observation of ice melting, and releases of previously-sequestered gases on sea bottoms, underground, etc. These things all take a heat input. What happens when those buffers are spent and there is nothing to sink the heat input?

Had we depended solely on experiment for everything, we would know much less about the world today. When direct experiment is not possible we still have observation and modeling, and certainly that is science. And of course most of our models do scale, simply because of long observation at all scales. Were this not the case, we would still be arguing about the heliocentric theory, because we can not move planets and suns in order to prove it from first principles, and the orbits of planets would not necessarily scale to suns, etc.

Sure, the earth has large processes that regulate each other, but there is nothing purposeful in their existence and positive feedback is as likely as negative. The Earth is as likely to be naturally fragile as naturally robust. So you can not place faith in unseen processes that will tend to mediate insults to the environment.

If there is some unknown non-anthropocentric cause for climate change, we are still in the position of having to resolve the issue through some modification in society's behavior, rather than consign the victims.

It's not surprising that fitting a model to something so complicated takes more work. But it's irrelevant when the thing actually modeled gets progressively hotter.

Yes, I know. but it's more polite than telling them where their head really is. :-)

Um. That dozen years was the hottest dozen in history. Much more clearly than any individual year was the hottest. You might wave away one year as inaccuracy. But not 10 or more. See the NOAA data here.

The NOAA data says there has been no hiatus and the 10 hottest individual years have all been since 1998.

Now look, I know many Americans have been hearing from elite liberal leftist Harvard professors in their ivory towers who keep saying that 15 is greater than 5. And, I have heard from many other experts in this field who are frankly quite skeptical that this is the case, that we're simply overlooking 5 and what a tremendously big number it is. So I don't think it's time to just cut off debate before the data is in, as if 15 is just greater than 5 so we should just get used to it whether we think it's right or just. It doesn't comport with the experiences of average hardworking Americans who deal with these numbers every day, who depend on them for their livelihood. So at the end of the day, I think it's obvious that the data is just not in yet. Now I'm not a mathematician. But one thing I do know, is that on the other side of the aisle, we have people who also are not mathematicians, but they see this as an opportunity for their agenda to shove a draconian arithmetic inequality down the throats of the American people!

Our control Earth is history. We can see that this Earth killed most macroscopic surface life a few times in history, and we have evidence for why that happened. We can see that it once would not have supported our sort of life. We can see how its atmosphere developed and how ecological networks have formed. We also have a pretty good understanding of gases and their behavior, and we can measure the gases in the atmosphere and the gases emitted from our civilization.

We can readily disprove theories of lucky socks and umbrellas causing rain. We can't, however, explain how any atmosphere would be able to tolerate inputs of the sort our civilization produces without some change.

Oh, right. A vast international liberal cabal is adjusting historical temperatures. I guess they've replaced all of the almanacs in libraries with cleverly rewritten versions. And so on. In every country, regardless of the languages they speak and write.

And the last several years have just happened to be increasingly hot.

Take a look at any of the photos of the Earth from space. The planet is big. But the atmosphere is really thin! You can easily tell the difference in pressure if you only go up 8000 feet or so. It is that piece that we're unbalancing.

WTF?

I like how everyone assumes not only that a supreme being exists, but also that it has a penis.

This is a really old and mostly wrong story. There was a person who wanted to be paid for his invention, which happened to be a wrong-headed attempt to square the circle. He wanted government money for having done that work. That is what the bill was for. To give him money. He didn't get the money.

The scientific method is for experiments. If you wanted to use it to see if global warming was real, you would make a forecast like "The world will get hotter than it's ever been.", and see if it comes true or not. It did come true. Last year was hotter than it has ever been, globally. Scientists were telling us that would happen for years.

It's time to stop denying. It's time to stop saying "they should use the scientific method" when you know full well they have. You know, that is, unless your head is in the ground or your preferred news network is putting it there.