Gavin Schmidt quotes:

You can get good science out of stupid questions. If someone says the world is flat, maybe in proving them wrong you can calculate the curvature of the Earth more precisely.

If the models are as flawed as critics say you have to ask yourself, 'How come they work?'

It is expected that there will be discrepancies between models and observations. However, why these arise and what one should conclude from them are interesting and more subtle than most people realize. Indeed, such discrepancies are the classic way we learn something new.

It's the whole or it's nothing.

While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases, the data shows quite clearly that it's the greenhouse gas trends that are responsible for the majority of the trends.