Remember when the Koch Brothers and bunch of other climate skeptics funded the only credible source of denial (Richard Mueller) who then proceeded to confirm the worst fears of climatologists with the caveat that his findings predicted worse results than their climate models? The consensus is unanimous: anthropogenic global warming is real and is already creating severe problems. On top of the huge droughts that have been afflicting us over the past few years, southern Russia has consistently had precipitation problems and India is facing problems with their monsoon (as predicted).
You can try to wiggle your way out of this issue all you want because the results seem far-fetched and damaging to your ideology but the verdict is in: global warming isn't going away. If we put this issue off for another decade, the damage will be done and the positive feedback loop will run away from us. Minute amounts of methane trapped in the permafrost of the arctic circle are already beginning to be released, over ten years ahead of schedule.
Torie is ignoring the models and the findings:
A couple of points about the graph above. First, the temperatures before 1850 are wild-ass guesses, and the black line is merely kinda the center of a series of wild-ass guesses. The next fifty years aren't particularly well documented either. Only the twentieth century is well documented. Since the temperature trend of the twentieth century is pretty uniform, it is fairly easy to "model." That doesn't prove the validity of the model since the model is based on past data points. The validity of the model is tested by its predictive value going forward. The reality is that in the last few years the model has broken down. Temperature increases predicted by the model simply have not occurred.
Uh, no they are not "wild-ass" guesses. There is a very secure methodology that is based around a variety of factors: tree rings, ice cores, glacial areas etc. You don't know what you're talking about.
They certainly aren't "wild-ass guesses," but on the other hand, I wouldn't call the methodology of forming climatological records based on historical biological/chemical data to be "secure". There's a lot of assumption that goes into those methods, and factors other than temperature can affect whatever it is that we're basing temperature off of as well.
