I'm not sure why you're skeptical. Scientists get a lot of flack for publishing "doom and gloom" results, even when those are accurate, and no scientist is part

I'm not sure why you're skeptical. Scientists get a lot of flack for publishing "doom and gloom" results, even when those are accurate, and no scientist is particularly interested in overstating this effect. Also, ".27 C" is not necessarily excluded from "about .2 C": it's not sufficient to simply compare approximate figures. There's a big difference in this context between ".2 C ± .5 C" and ".2 C ± .8 C". You would need to show that the observed result is entirely outside the predicted range, including both sets of error bars. However, focusing on the temperature record is pretty disingenuous. It's been proven beyond doubt that humanity is liberating gigatonnes of fossil carbon, which is proven beyond doubt to warm the planet, specifically by 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling. The actual rate of warming and total climate sensitivity are interesting areas of research, but do not themselves have any bearing on whether that warming will happen.