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That's a simple example and I'm too lazy, but you could easily improve upon it if you try. Picking one city and one temperature like that is an extension of the "weather's not climate" fallacy. So don't fall for that statistical trick again.

Another important thing that few people do is distinguishing between a hypothesis, and a well-supported theory, because people promoting their hypothesis will rarely inform you. Do that and you will be much smarter.

I'm really starting to think you have memory issues. You're still acting as if that cartoon is my only source of data, ignoring all my other links. There is a rising trend in the average surface temperature on earth, and if you focus on records at individual places, a large majority has a rising trend too. Ice sheets are declining all over the world, glaciers are retreating all over the world. Nobody is contesting that (but you, apparently). Saying rising temperatures are a hypothesis, rather than a well-supported theory, is dishonest to say the least. Deniers used to try to make that point 30 years ago. When that position became untenable, they retreated to saying it's it's the sun, not greenhouse gases. That has became untenable too, and they have been diversifying into a whole bunch of arguments, every one as wrong as the next one. Try to keep up.

Also, in teaching, it is often advantageous to give an example. A few degrees rise in average surface temperature doesn't speak to the imagination much, and ill-informed people are going to cherry-pick one particular cold winter out of a long record to try to disprove it. To show how silly that is, Randall Munroe picked one particular city as an example, to illustrate the wider trend more clearly. He also chose to start in the 1970 because that's where we have the most data and the trend is most spectacular; as I said before, it's still there if you go back to the 1920s or so (when the human-induced rise in CO2 levels became big enough to have a statistically significant influence). If you go out of your way to find a data point that goes against the trend (which is not all that difficult given the large fluctuations) then it is you who are cherry-picking and committing a fallacy.

Yeah, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Correlation combined with a physical mechanism (which you unsuccessfully attacked before), however, is strong evidence. Dismissing it is every bit as fallacious.

Here's a more to-the-point example... were you talking about cherry-picking before?

and freezing point depression, making ice form at 0C

I assume this was a typo as salt water freezes well below 0.

In what world can you have a *warmer* temperature form more ice?

If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice. Also if warmer temperatures or other factors cause higher winds the wind pushes existing ice packs from very cold areas into less cold areas which increases total ice production.

This article seems to make the most sense of what I've seen.

In a place where the temperature is always well below freezing, "global warming" is not going to melt all the ice. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem elsewhere. Even if there were no net ice loss on earth, if we're losing ice in places we need it (such as mountain ranges that supply people with drinking water), and accumulate it in places that have no humans at all (Antarctica), that's an enormous problem.

But hey, let's confuse land ice and sea ice and create doubt about the actual science by cherry picking data, spreading half-truths and general misinformation.

There's so much misinformation in your post it hurts. It's warmed 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past 134 years. It is currently warmer now than any time in the past 2000 years. In the past 17 years Earth has warmed by about 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade. And there's no sign of cooling or even temperatures leveling off.

. You mean like the overall long-term increase in Antarctic ice mass, despite breakups in the Western sheet?

Yes exactly right.

The gradual, long-term non-warming that has occurred over the last 15-17 years, depending on who you ask?

Anytime anyone cites 1998 you know they are willfully ignorant. Picking a local maxima as a starting point for measurement may fool the average guy on the street but anyone on slashdot who believes it is meaningful is making a deliberate choice to lie. In your case, the fact that your very next sentence is railing against exactly that kind of deception beggars belief. That level of arrogance deserves a gold medal, so no surprise that the captcha here is "medals.,"

. You mean like the overall long-term increase in Antarctic ice mass, despite breakups in the Western sheet?

Yes exactly right.

The gradual, long-term non-warming that has occurred over the last 15-17 years, depending on who you ask?

Anytime anyone cites 1998 you know they are willfully ignorant. Picking a local maxima as a starting point for measurement may fool the average guy on the street but anyone on slashdot who believes it is meaningful is making a deliberate choice to lie. In your case, the fact that your very next sentence is railing against exactly that kind of deception beggars belief. That level of arrogance deserves a gold medal, so no surprise that the captcha here is "medals.,"

If the temperature were stable, I would expect the amount of ice to decrease as it reaches a new equilibrium. But we've seen the temperature rise and the ice melt at an accelerating rate. Most of the increased heat is going into the oceans.

Just kidding... the Antarctic ice has been melting for decades. More precisely, the mass of the old, thick land ice is decreasing due to rising temperatures, but the surface area of the short-lived, thin sea ice has been increasing, partly due to decreased salinity in the Southern Ocean because the land ice is melting. Overall, the Antarctic has been losing ice at an accelerating rate as temperatures have continued to increase.

Err no.

Haven't you heard about the consensus. (Before claiming that science is not consensus, that is a different issue, and a way to avoid the point, that the vast majority of scientists disagree with you.)

How can you tell if its a political document rather than a science. First sign is it came from a political organization. The second is that its not peer reviewed.

Oh yeah, there are problems in how the final language of the report is written, which every county pushing their special interests into the language. Don't change the fact that the scientists signed off on the document.

Try reading some of the citations in the report. See how well they match suggested claims in the report.

That's a howler, because I *have* read some of the citations of the report, and it seems very well written to me. If you a referring to some particular controversy in some paragraph (or sentence) of AR5, then you should (1) provide a citation, and (2) admit that the report is larger than one paragraph or sentence.

Yea i know several scientists that where involved with the last IPCC report and vowed never again.

I know of complaints from scientists about how the science gets watered down, and a rosey sheen is painted onto some parts of the problem. Doesn't change the central point that I was making: we can and must move to a carbon neutral economy. Quibbling over semantics won't change that at all.

Models are only a success on their training data, they have failed at predicting the future at every step

Wrong. These aren't Neural networks , and they aren't "trained". They are a simulation of understood physics that thus-far matches the historical data and is so far actually predicting things quite well (Although some of the earlier models where a bit conservative due to not accounting for permafrost).

What you are calling "training" , in science is called "Hind-casting" and its a standard method of testing scientific theories where we can't feasibly do experiments (other than the usual CO2 in lab type stuff from the 1870s when we first started talking about climate change from CO2).

If you disregard it, you have to throw away *so much* science. Why would you want to do that? Its a tried and tested methodology responsible for a huge amount of what we know about the natural sciences.

Regardless, as the IPCC has pointed out. The models have actually been quite accurate in predictions so far.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Human sources of CO2 are dwarfed by natural sources, please do your homework before making such claims. The additional CO2 humans are adding to the mix is tiny but could have an impact.

Yeah that idea was fundamentally discredited a long time ago dude. Sorry.

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

How in the world will we head for an extinction level event?

Obviously we aren't headed for a global extinction event. We are already in the global extinction event.

You do realize that this planet has seen CO2 levels 10 times what we have today (even 20 times higher) and not once did an extinction event play out due to CO2 increases.

Because the PETM didn't happen on your alternate earth?

In fact, at one point in our past, the planet had roughly 2000 PPM CO2 (5 times today's levels) and we were in the midst of an ice-age.

Boring zombie argument #49. http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Fascinating. While I can't comment on all of these points, I did a bit of searching regarding the second LINK about global sea ice: That graph shows the global sea ice area, not the volume. The area slightly increased while the volume has steadily gone down over the same period of time.

This is what makes it impossible for the armchair scientist to understand this. Inevitably, someone will reply telling me why my link is a bunch of dumbutts and how that graph is irrelevant, we should be looking at something else.

The whole thing will stop smelling like a religion when they stop CONSTANTLY trying to stretch some tissue-paper-thin suppositions into policy prescriptions.

I stopped reading at "...frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean..."

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Essentially, the link between global warming and hurricanes is hotly (get it?) debated, the data inconclusive and contradictory. My understanding is that reasonable scientists disagree on this one. To use this as wall paper in some recent 'boilerplate of doom' just proves that they lack any sense of their own incredibility.

Because "phantomfive" says so? No, really not. We can measure it directly these days, you know.

Because polar vortices are not a result of AGW

Absolutely! Indeed, the kind of temperatures we saw in the US because of the polar votex used to be normal a few decades ago. So I guess that answer your questions: North America. Obligatory XKCD.

Other valid answers:
- Western Europe (here are the years in which winters were severe enough to hold an outdoor skating contest in the Netherlands; making a graph is left as an exercise to the reader)
- Australia
- The antarctic (yes, the ice is melting overall)
- Greenland, where ice sheet decline, is a boon for agriculture - Pretty much any place that has seen shifts in habitat (here come West Nile Virus and Malaria)
- Pretty much anywhere where there are glaciers

A better question would be: "can you name any area of the world that didn't have its climate disrupted as a result of global warming?"

You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.

That was never actually a thing, except in the media:

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (source)

Peer-reviewed scientific literature overwhelmingly referred to warming, even back then:

A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). (source)

If you're going to mindlessly regurgitate debunked climate myth #11, at least get the decade right with respect to the canon...

Nice switch, but nobody said that. You're just trying to drag debunked climate myth #16 into the discussion.

It's been a while since we've seen debunked denialist argument #1 being brought up around this parts. Guess most of them got smarter than that...

Is this discredited climate myth #11 again? Or just a climate-scientists-are-radical-environmentalist-nutjobs strawman?

no one can actually use that data to reproduce the results he originally presented.

At this link you can find references to about 10 different independent reconstructions that find the same result as Mann.

Regarding Sullivan's assertions about the ongoing lawsuit, Michael Mann's lawyer basically said the guy is serially wrong, and doesn't know what he is talking about, and I quote:

Response from my lawyer in response to latest claims by #TimBall (more info on him here: http://www.desmogblog.com/timo...) & #JohnOSullivan (more inf on him here: http://www.desmogblog.com/affi... ): The review of Tim Ball’s new book by Hans Schreuder and John O’Sullivan makes preposterous statements concerning Dr. Michael Mann’s lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court against Tim Ball and other defendants. The Mann lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase, with further examinations for discovery (depositions) of the defendants to be scheduled shortly, following which I will either set the action for trial by jury in the usual manner, or bring a summary trial application on behalf of Dr. Mann for damages and injunctive relief. Dr. Ball has not set the matter for trial and there is no motion by Ball currently before the Court. The allegation by Schreuder and O’Sullivan that Dr. Mann has refused to show his metadata and calculations in open court is not true. Their assertion that Dr. Mann faces possible bankruptcy is nonsense. Dr. Mann’s lawsuit against Dr. Ball and other defendants is proceeding through the normal stages prescribed by the BC Supreme Court Civil Rules and Dr. Mann looks forward to judicial vindication at the conclusion of this process. February 22, 2014 Roger D. McConchie Barrister and Solicitor Legal Counsel to Dr. Michael Mann

You live in a world of made-up "facts". Presumably you *think* you are if your beliefs are wrong or right. Presumably.

Jolly, it's most used climate myth #11 again. Second time in this discussion!

Congratulations, you just mindlessly regurgitated debunked climate myth #11.

where can we find a completely accurate (or even reasonably accurate) climate model?

Oh hello, where can we find completely accurate anything (outside the field of mathematics)?

Even pro-AGW climatologists would shy away from claiming that they have one.

Are they completely accurate? Of course not, only an idiot or someone intent of spreading FUD would ask for complete accuracy. Reasonably accurate? Hell yes, what do you think all these IPPC reports are based on?

This is disingenuous due to the fact that you left out *why* life is better now than it was 200 years ago. Was it primarily due to politics, culture, technology, medical/scientific knowledge... what? Most of what I just listed has bugger-all to do with the climate.

You completely missed GP's point. -1 reading comprehension.

to keep everything just like it is in the 1980s (or whenever) may do more damage than just letting it cycle naturally.

Good evening, debunked climate myth #56.

before your investigations turn into actions, you'd damned well better know for certain what you are doing - making mistakes on a global level will have global consequences, and will last for a very long, long time.

There's something I can agree with. While the climatological effect of reducing CO2 emissions has been reasonably well studied and falls within the parameter space on which we have real-life data, climate engineering is totally out there and gives me the creeps. The easy answers are usually not the right ones.

Nobody is suggesting we turn off all fossil fuels RIGHT NOW (that would be a strawman). What is being suggested is that we phase out fossil fuel dependencies and phase in a mix of the many carbon-neutral energy technologies (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal etc etc) over the next few decades, rather than pretending we don't need to do anything, ever.

There have been numerous major studies about this. For example, the Stern Review makes it clear that the costs of inaction easily outweigh the costs of transitioning our energy supply, and more recently this Harvard Univesity study concludes that not only can the US switch to 100% renewable energy by 2050, it can do so while spending less than business-as-usual.

That STEP link you quoted elsewhere is interesting, though "pre-industrial carbon levels in 10 years" sounds wildly optimistic without throwing massive amounts of cash at it to develop it at huge scale.

You seem to think that a carbon tax would kill the economy. Carbon price legislation has been proposed in the US at least four times, and has accordingly been studied by the Congressional Budget Office as well as the EPA, EIA, and others (see citations), and concluded the impact would be less than 1% on GDP, compared to business as usual - without even considering the additional economic impact of climate change on the BAU scenario.

It's continued to warm and the ice has continued to melt at an accelerating rate. Isn't that what the models have predicted for decades?

Check the math. There's been no warming since 98. If you had facts on your side you wouldn't need to use rhetoric like "denier".

This is not the holocaust.

Also, this wasn't "a few days of bad weather" this was two years of awful winters, cold springs and 100 year record cold in some places because of five polar vortexes in a winter that a) began a month early and b) ened late and c) was predicted in 2007 by a method the IPCC claimed had nothing to do with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Excuse me but you're on the wrong side of the prediction credibility gap here. And all the rhetoric in the world won't fix that. You may lie, but the numbers do not.

The idea that there's been no warming since 98 is a popular myth amongst climate skeptics but it's still a myth. But it doesn't really matter, does it? I could cite 20 reputable sources saying so but you'd either not read them or just refuse to believe them.

I could again stress that local weather and global climate are not the same thing and also point out while this winter may have been cold in the Eastern half of the US it was very warm in parts of the West and ridiculously warm in Alaska. I could take it further and say that some people predicted that disappearing sea ice in the Arctic would cause this phenomena.

If I provided a link like this to a site that debunks David Archibald's predictions, what would you do?

Surprise me.

It's not science. The Scientific method requires that observations can be independently reproduced and that a hypothesis is falsifiable.

You can get all the relevant data yourself, and run the tests yourself if you have the expertise

This notion that AGW is not falsifiable is plain sophistry. My guess is that you've heard of Popper's name, but wouldn't know the first thing about the philosophy of science. It is a simple fact that the AGW hypothesis is built upon may falsifiable hypotheses that make predictions. Climate contrarians, on the other hand, owe the world a scientific explanation, but for some (obvious) reason fail to see the irony in them not needing to back up their assertions with anything scientific.

Yea, look at this ice core data. Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.

http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg

Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times.
Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.

The graph you link only goes up to 1855, so it is no wonder it shows no warming. Still, this graph keeps popping up to show that there has been no warming in recent years...

From http://www.skepticalscience.co...

"Easterbrook plots the temperature data from the GISP2 core, as archived here. Easterbrook defines “present” as the year 2000. However, the GISP2 “present” follows a common paleoclimate convention and is actually 1950. The first data point in the file is at 95 years BP. This would make 95 years BP 1855 — a full 155 years ago, long before any other global temperature record shows any modern warming. In order to make absolutely sure of my dates, I emailed Richard Alley, and he confirmed that the GISP2 “present” is 1950, and that the most recent temperature in the GISP2 series is therefore 1855."

What more carbon - global warming will do.

CLimate change will devastate agriculture.

As far as comparing man made vs. natural man is affecting the CO2 BALANCE - we're throwing nature off and causing unnatural warming.

Hur hur hur.

As I expected another long debunked idiocy.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=337

On the graph you gave the "present" is 1855..

Its called data reconstruction, and the existing large scale records factor use multiple proxy methods of records of reconstructing the temperature records.
There are multiple indirect ( or proxy ) ways of obtaining temperature history, and all of these would have to be invalidated to prove the existing reconstructions wrong.
The reconstruction models match with accurate instrument measurements that we have for a past hundred years or so.

Educate yourself
https://www.skepticalscience.c...

There are dozens and dozens, multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature records.

https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Its called science.

There are dozens and dozens, multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature records.

https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Its called science.

No, the term "climate change" refers to specific changes in the climate due to increasing temperatures. Additionally, the climate does not change every day. If you think it does, you don't know what climate is. It's the weather that changes from day to day, not the climate. In other words, climate determines what clothes are in your closet, and the weather determines what clothes you wear on a particular day.

"And this is why we fail."

Yep. That's why you fail. We KNOW that the survey that reported a 97% consensus was, in fact, bogus. 75 or so cherry-picked responses out of a 10,000-person survey is not anything a responsible statistician would call valid. And the "expert" doesn't even try to defend it. He does a fine job of moving the goalposts, but he doesn't support the actual claim at all. Because, of course, he knows it's bogus. We also know, from the science, that there is no significant evidence that "climate change" has been increasing either the number or severity of extreme weather events. And so on. The real question here is why a politician is actually asking perfectly legitimate questions, but is being labeled stupid on Slashdot for doing so. This is the domain of ideologues, not science.

You forgot to mention Al Gore. Seriously, this post explains why we'll never be able to defeat politicians on the ground of scientific illiteracy.

Its called a living planet.

Oh gee, the "It's natural" argument. You would have thunk that scientists would have thought of that, and written about it in the IPCC. That's why its call "Anthropogenic" global warming after all.

But since you're an expert, let's see, when was the last time that C02 was 400ppm? 12 times in the last 100k years? Or was it millions of years ago, when the earth was 8C warmer. And we might actually (small probability) reach that in a few hundred years too. Nothing could go wrong!!!

So don't worry, a few made up facts and some rose coloured glasses, and you can tell your kids that you wanted nothing more than to grow the economy through burning more oil/coal, because that was the moral thing to do!!!!

Its called a living planet.

Oh gee, the "It's natural" argument. You would have thunk that scientists would have thought of that, and written about it in the IPCC. That's why its call "Anthropogenic" global warming after all.

But since you're an expert, let's see, when was the last time that C02 was 400ppm? 12 times in the last 100k years? Or was it millions of years ago, when the earth was 8C warmer. And we might actually (small probability) reach that in a few hundred years too. Nothing could go wrong!!!

So don't worry, a few made up facts and some rose coloured glasses, and you can tell your kids that you wanted nothing more than to grow the economy through burning more oil/coal, because that was the moral thing to do!!!!

"And this is why we fail."

Yep. That's why you fail.

We KNOW that the survey that reported a 97% consensus was, in fact, bogus.

75 or so cherry-picked responses out of a 10,000-person survey is not anything a responsible statistician would call valid.

And the "expert" doesn't even try to defend it. He does a fine job of moving the goalposts, but he doesn't support the actual claim at all. Because, of course, he knows it's bogus.

We also know, from the science, that there is no significant evidence that "climate change" has been increasing either the number or severity of extreme weather events. And so on.

The real question here is why a politician is actually asking perfectly legitimate questions, but is being labeled stupid on Slashdot for doing so.

This is the domain of ideologues, not science.

I've actually looked over most of that information and it isn't really auditable. Most of the raw data isn't actually raw for one thing. I've compared specific land site temperature data with their sources and they don't match perfectly. Which means the data has been filtered and modified to some extent. I have no information on how that was done and can't reproduce the filtration system.

Are you saying you've got data from one of those sensors and it doesn't match the data in that source from the same sensor? Or from another sensor in the same area?

Second, the methodology itself isn't fully stated to the extent that I can't take data, input into a system, and get the same output they're showing.

I'd expect the programs wouldn't be user-friendly. Which model did you compile? If you have it running I'll see if I can find out how to make it work.

On a side note, what do you think of this:

http://theendofthemystery.blog...

Someone sent me this link in this discussion and I just want as many eyes on it as possible.

That is a lot of math to go through right now. But if he claims to have disproven something as fundamental as the greenhouse effect (or can even show that it somehow breaks down at large scales, since we can demonstrate it in a desktop experiment), he's either made a mistake or he's a future Nobel prize winner and deliverer of great news (since we could drop all efforts to reduce GHG emissions).

I found an article that claims to address his supposed disproof directly, and I'd say it makes a proof of the greenhouse effect that would require revisions to the laws of thermodynamics to disprove:

https://agwobserver.wordpress....

Where could the energy be going? If it's being teleported or stored somehow - again, Nobel prize material. Maybe cheap solar power if we can tap into this energy.

I ran across some other relevant articles on Venus' atmosphere:

http://m.teachastronomy.com/as...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...

How is it not falsifiable? If the measured temperature was different from what the model predicted then we'd decide that model is no good and throw it out. Look at the graphs here. The yellow and blue lines are ridiculous, so those models have been falsified. The models trending with the temperatures are still considered to be good. Weather patterns that we know about and can monitor and account for are not "ad hoc special pleading." They are part of what's required to model temperatures.

Why can't they take the data from the 70s, 80s, 90s feed it into their software and predict the 00s?

That's exactly what they do. https://www.skepticalscience.c... What did you think they were doing?

The hockey stick program also works with basket ball scores. It's all about acquiring grant funds by scaring rubes.

There's more money in predicting basketball scores, if they were looking for the money there are many easier ways to get it.

It's turned into religion by people who are too invested in the outcome. If I thought it was real I'd head the parade.

What would if take to convince you that it's real?

In fact climatologists don't consider 1997-1998 to be normal - they treat it as an outlier. It's the deniers who pick up on it and say "we've been getting cooler since 1998!".

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

1. AFAIK, a grand total of zero of the IPCC-favored climate models work in retrospect. I.e., one should be able to plug in data up to (say) 1990 and get an accurate "forecast" of the climate from 1990 to today. If they can't do that, why should I believe they will be accurate about the climate 50 years from now?

As far as you know? Have you bothered to look?

First off, you need to realize that there are a lot of different climate models, modeling different parts of the climate system. No one model is representative of the entire climate system, as it is too big and complex for a single statistical model -- so far. That said, there are a number of models which do very well, both in terms of hindcasting and forecasting for the specific area they were created to model. Quite a few of them are overly conservative, meaning that they under-projected the deviations due to climate change.

If you want to really understand how to interpret how the models work and what their output means, I would suggest starting here.

2. This article sums up my other objection. The TL;DR version: the IPCC-favored models are based on more than a simple (and rather inarguable) "more CO2 = hotter" greenhouse effect. They all assume various kinds of positive feedback to amplify that effect. Yet, the historical record seems to show the Earth's climate is a fairly stable system, not dominated by strong positive feedback effects.

This is woefully inaccurate. I don't know of any models which assume only positive feedbacks (well, I guess there are a few very old models pre-1990 which might, but I don't think anyone uses or references them any longer).

Yes, the Earth's climate is a fairly stable system, HOWEVER there have been periods of rapid change which cannot be accounted for by simply considering "more CO2 = hotter". The science behind both positive and negative feedbacks in the climate system is still a bit nascent, at least in terms of determining where the "tipping points" are, but the physics behind the feedback processes is pretty well-established at this point.

I don't consider myself a "warmist"; I simply follow the science with a skeptical eye. I have yet to see anything that I would consider discounts AGW/CC wholesale, but I am always looking. In the meantime, I am going to go on the premise that it is largely correct and change my lifestyle to address it, and urge others to follow suit.

After all, if climate science turns out to be completely wrong, I won't have any remorse for creating a better world as a result.

The key word in your assertion is "currently". There is little evidence to suggest that global T is in a long-term levelling-off trend, and plenty of evidence that it will rise significantly in the near term, just like it has repeatedly in previous periods.

To simply look at a very small window of data and infer long-term trends (or the lack thereof) from it is the epitome of cherry-picking, hence:

The Escalator

If anything, the IPCC errs on the conservative side.

Like hell they [sic] are.

https://www.skepticalscience.c... ".. the evidence suggests that changes in climate are occurring faster, and with more intensity, than the IPCC have predicted. It is not credible to suggest the reports were biased in favour of the theory of anthropogenic global warming when the evidence demonstrates the IPCC were, in fact, so cautious."

http://www.irinnews.org/report...

"The international scientific community’s new assessment of the estimated sea level rise caused by global warming is a significant development, but experts say the projections for higher sea levels in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate (IPCC) assessment report (AR5) are still on the low side. The projections are of immediate concern to low-lying countries and small island states."

http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

"This is where the “conservative” estimates of IPCC, seen by some as a virtue, have lulled policy makers into a false sense of security, with the price having to be paid later by those living in vulnerable coastal areas."

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...

What is done in these highly politicized reports, is take the 5% extreme case, say in California and report that. Then take the 5% most extreme case in NY and report that.. So on and so forth. Now even if these "confidence" things could be interpreted as probability of the event occurring, which they can't. They present all of these 5% things all over the world as if that is what could happen, while even with this poor interpretation of data, its a million to one that even a dozen of these predictions to come true. Its total misrepresentation of the model/data at best and scientifically dishonest.

Yes, yes. And at the bottom of your garden there are fairies as well! It must be true, because you said it was. No need to provide evidence or anything boring like that.

No, you can make the temperature appear to be going down for short periods of time by carefully cherry picking the data. If the temperature actually went down, we would see the melting slow down instead of continuing to accelerate.