As proof of the position of this opinion piece in sciencemag is the First reference in the article. A link to union of concerned sciences opinion piece. In THAT opinion piece is the claim that 2011 is the thirty fifth year that temperatures have been above average. The way this statement was made leads one to expect that 2011 was the 35th in a row of increasing temperatures. In fact it uses the historical record dating back to 1880. As there have been two cycles of temperature increases in that time...from the early 1900s through the 1940s, and the 1970s through 1998, the temperatures of the past 35 years started above the average of the record from 1880 to the present.

This is an strawman argument as no one claims that the temperatures have not risen for the past 130 years.

The next link is to a UCAR study that shows more warm records being set in the past decade. This is based on a study of temperatures over the past 60 years. Nothing like cherry picking your start date to exclude the 1920s through 1940s when other high temperature records were set. Furthermore the study found that the claim of a shift to more warmer records being set was that the ratio of warm records to cool records was used to make a comparison. The cooler records typically occur at night with the warmer records during the day. Thus what we are actually seeing is a moderation of temperatures from colder to warmer. Finally the UCAR study falls back on modelling to predict the future. While this is marginally more productive and sounds more scientific than reading chicken entrails...it still is not science.

And finally we see another NAS vanity piece which reiterates the "CO2 is causing climate change meme". The empirical science has yet to be proven and we get more correlation is causation hooted from the rooftops.