And rising surface temperatures are just one indicator of global warming. http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators Sea ice and ice sheets are rapidly declining. Sea level is steadily rising, due to both ice melt and thermal expansion of the oceans. Droughts, heat waves, and precipitation extremes are increasing. It's good to be skeptical about all of that, but there has to be a point when a rational skeptic recognizes overwhelming evidence.

I agree that "a living earth will always be dynamic and changing." Part of that dynamic over Earth's history is mass extinction due to climate change. Our problem this coming century is that Earth will have to support 9 billion of us while the rest of the biosphere faces extreme stress, instability, and possible collapse. We know that burning fossil fuels are causing this problem, and the sooner we take action to mitigate it the better. "We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect."

You didn't respond to the evidence in those papers. You put "extremes" in quotes and implied that weather should be easier to model than climate. That doesn't exactly raise your credibility with me.

But you've made reference to "dogma" twice now. Which claims of climate science do you view as dogma? Do you dispute that the planet has warmed about 0.6°C since the 1970s? Or that the Arctic has lost about half its sea ice extent since the 1980s? Or that ice sheet loss and thermal expansion account for about 3 mm/yr of sea level rise since the 1990s?

Do you dispute that atmospheric CO2 is a positive forcing on climate? Or that CO2 is now around 395 ppm and rising? Or that equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely between 2°C and 5°C per doubling of CO2?

Right now I see an impressive body of evidence agreed upon by top climate experts. I'll patiently consider any evidence you bring me that all of the experts are wrong.

Until you do that, the climate of the planet is on the line, and I think society would be outrageously foolish to bet against the track record of (here comes the list again—even my friends are teasing me now) NASA, NOAA, AMS, NAS, AGU, ACS, and APS.

By the way, skeptics such as yourself often attack the credibility of climate models to argue that we should dismiss the possibility of disastrous warming. But should the climate models be wrong, why would that be a reason to be complacent? The models for Arctic melting were wrong, and that was *bad* news. http://bit.ly/WJhTxT Some climate models show a small but significant chance of climate sensitivity being as high as 6°C. What if that turns out to be the truth?

First, I think your distrust of the "scientists" is a terrible, terrible mistake. The climate of the planet is on the line. http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/knowing-better-than-the-experts/

There is no evidence of fraud by the scientists at CRU, and such an accusation four years after Climategate is baseless slander. The real lesson of Climategate is the concerted effort by partisan and corporate interests to discredit climate science.

As for a skewed temperature record, former skeptic Richard Muller investigated exactly that suspicion, with a grant from the oil-rich Koch brothers. He found that global warming is real, and that "humans are almost entirely the cause." http://nyti.ms/X2SVtc

The fact is that during the recent solar minimum, NASA calculated an energy imbalance for the Earth of +0.6 W/m². That's roughly 150 million Hiroshima bombs per year going into our oceans. Anthropogenic CO2 is the obvious explanation.

If we are serious about mitigating global warming, our politicians' personal habits are negligible. Humanity is sending over 30 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, and that number is going in the wrong direction.