As to 2014 being the warmest year on record, apparently that is in direct opposition to what the satellites say about it.
Yes, 2014 won't be the warmest in the satellites records but it's hyperbole to say it's in direct opposition to the surface records. The two are complimentary. They are two different approaches to Earthly temperatures. But satellites don't measure surface temperatures like thermometers do so they're not quite the same thing. Satellites measure temperatures in different zones of the atmosphere. The lower troposphere channel measures the atmosphere up to 4-5 km.
You shouldn't think satellite measurements are some pristine thing. Like the surface temperature measurements they have their issues that have to be dealt with. Satellites actually measure a proxy for temperature, the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules. Those are processed to produce a temperature with adjustments for sensor deterioration, orbital drift and decay, and every 10 years or so a new satellite replacing the old ones. A couple of those satellite replacements had little temporal overlap making inter-calibration difficult. Also, clouds and precipitation affect the satellite measurements.
In a blog on "The Recent Slowing in the Rise of Global Temperatures", Carl Mears of the RSS team said " A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!)."
A final thought on comparing satellite and surface temperature measurements, since they are all within the uncertainty ranges of each other I don't think it's scientifically possible to say they disagree with each other. Maybe RSS is outside of that range but it's also the obvious outlier among all of them. What's more likely, RSS is right or all of the others are right?
As to how any climate model is supposed to account for the data... you're just giving an argument for not being able to model the climate which means you can't make predictions.
That's why they call the model output projections instead of predictions. The projections are what would happen if the real world followed what the model had. That Shaping Tomorrows World article that you are apparently ignoring shows what happens when you cherry pick model runs that just happened to match the real world more closely. The output matches the real world better.
2014 is just another year in the long run picture but it is also a way to tweak people who's short term thinking leads them to thing the "pause" is significant.
As to the constant warming, I think there was a long pause in the 70s and the 80s didn't go up much. The big jump was in the 90s and without that your numbers don't look as good.
Here is the graph of Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index from 1880 to 2013. 1964 was the coldest year since 1933 (although 1950 and 1556 came close). The only year after that that even comes close is 1976. Since then there have been occasional pauses but the long term trend is warming. In the 1980's there was a drop in temperatures after the eruption of El Chichon in 1982 and in the 1990's a drop after the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 and the models do rather well in modeling that drop in temperature after a major eruption. I think it's a reasonable statement to say it's been warming since the 1960s.
Keep in mind, they're trying to boil temperature differences of a tenth to a hundred of a degree over the whole surface of the planet over at least a year. That is a LOT of averaging. And they don't average the numbers together the same way every year.
Whenever someone brings precision up I point out baseball batting averages. The measurements are either a hit (1) or an out (0) yet they commonly express batting averages to the thousandths. The do average the global temperatures the same way every year and if they make a change in their methodology they go back and redo all the older ones.
The probability for math to get biased is huge. Especially since getting your hands on raw data is almost impossible. I've tried repeatedly and every time I get something other then raw data if I get data at all.
I agree with you, it frustrating to track down the raw data. But the Berkeley Earth group managed to use mostly raw data and their findings are substantially the same as the other temperature records. This page at Berkeley Earth is mostly raw data I believe. They talk about the data seat and there adjustments here.
All told, the sat data is probably the best way to go with it because it is one source of data. The problem from that again is that raw data from the satellite is literally impossible to get so far as I've found. If you have the raw measurements from space that would be something to look at.. I've read a few articles about how they've recalibrated the the data a few times. Effectively changing past records retroactively. Say what you will, you can see how that is troubling if you're trying to audit the data.
Of course the raw data from the satellites is measurements of microwave emissions of O2. You'd have to convert that to temperatures taking into account all of the issues I mentioned above. As far as recalibrating doesn't it make sense if you discover an error to correct it in all of the records the error affects?
As to what is reasonable and climate variability, I think you have to use the same time scale standards when you talk about what supports your case as well as what threatens your case
Humans naturally tend to think short term and pay attention to the current big story. I'm guilty of that myself at times but I think I'm getting better. Of course warming since 1964 is 50 years of warming now.