How Science Is Supposed To Work

Popular Mechanics has a good review of the Climategate scandal:

What does it mean to be a scientific skeptic? If you say you are "sure" (as in the phrase "settled science") typical scientists are suspicious. Certainly, scientists know that some ideas have been tested over and over again, and are 99.999999 percent sure to be accurate. So, for example, we can be pretty sure that a satellite launched to orbit the Earth will go to the right place and do as we predict. And, we do accept scientific results that individually we don't fully understand. Thus, I am not fully conversant with the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, but I use electron microscopes that take advantage of the wave-like character of matter, and I have seen that those microscopes work really well in just the way predicted by quantum mechanical theory.

The final page sums up what we know about global warming.

(Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center: ISS007-E-10807)