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Basically:

• We're digging up fossil fuels, burning them, and releasing CO2 into the air. Some more enters the air from land use changes like deforestation. Other greenhouse gas changes are also a result of human activity. A tiny amount (1%) comes from other natural sources like volcanic eruptions.
  
• Greenhouse gasses really do cause warming. People have been able to verify this via backyard experiments since the 1800s, when CO2 was called "carbonic acid gas".
  
• There are second-order effects, like increased water vapor concentrations as a result of higher temperatures, melting ice making the planet less reflective, etc. These are called feedbacks. Taking all the ones we can figure out into account takes a fair bit of work, but multiple groups of scientists have done it.
  
• they basically all came up with a very similar result. A handful in the pay of the fossil fuels industry disagree
  
• people did analysis of the papers they wrote to see what they said, and asked the scientists, etc. Depending on when the study was done and the exact methodology, you come up with 95% to 99% agreement that the world is warming, and that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are responsible
  
  There's a super-simplified explanation of the science here, and a fully-footnoted version here.

Here are some tips to get started:

• This funny and good presentation by Dan Ariely is a good start about human moral behavior (assuming you agree that climate change is a moral problem). There's also a book if you prefer that.
  
• Another important point are the limitations of human morality. A short read would be Paul Bloom's piece in the New Yorker. Again, there's also a book. See also the The Identifiable Victim Bias.
  
• A description of these and various other effects can be fund in George Marshall's "Don't even think about it" which is specifically about the psychology of climate change.
  
  Hope this helps.

Try these:
Electricity Grid Infrastructure,
Oil and Natural Gas Infrastructure.
Maybe this site can help with some basic information. Valclav Smil is an excellent source for many areas you're investigating: Energy Transitions, Energy Myths and Realities, Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing, Oil, Prime Movers of Globalization, and Energy at the Crossroads

Sure it's depressing, but some people are intentionally evil, willing to actively lie to get what they want. They're called sociopaths, and they make up 2-4% of the population. They are defined by a strong personal sense of superiority, a reckless disregard for "little people's rules", a ruthless willingness to screw anyone for personal gain, and a psychotic confidence that they'll be able to lie their way out of any jam. Sound familiar?

I can't give you a straight answer but I would suggest reading about how their psychology works to prevent them from believing it. This book was recommended to me by a geographer and climate scientist and it's very good.

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

Otherwise, google it! :)

Watch this video clip, based on actual facts.

My top book recommendation:

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

It paints a picture in a real nice way and serves as a good guide for thinking about various degrees.

As mentioned by /u/extinction6 watch Kevin Anderson.

It sounds like you're working on an interesting project, so the questions you spam us with would probably be interesting as well.

The standard textbook for undergraduates (at several universities that I know of) is Earth's Climate: Past and Future. It's great, lots of detail but also very approachable.

If you want something a little more academic, try John Houghton's Global Warming: The Complete Briefing: 5th edition. It's an introductory textbook on Climate Change - it doesn't go into fine detail on how data sets are collected and managed, and any textbook like this will always be a little out-of-date. But it is a broad and comprehensive overview of the science of climate change, and the many consequences that flow from it.

There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it.
Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like:
site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle

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>tl;dr recommend me a book

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1426203853/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Go to your college library and check out this book. It has the answers your looking for in the context of the American southwest, which is as far as the US in concerned, is predicted to have the most problems with freshwater supply.
A Great Aridness

https://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Creation-American-Business-Politics/dp/0812224310


https://marianamazzucato.com/entrepreneurial-state/

read Too Much Magic by Kunstler first, then ask the same question...

https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-Everyone-Needs-Know/dp/0190250178/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498603345&sr=8-1&keywords=climate+change+what+everyone+needs+to+know

Scott Adams needs to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Worst-That-Could-Happen/dp/0399535012/

and listen to this podcast:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/consilience-powers-the-big-scientific-ideas/5111610

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190866101/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_zZOADb29KTXEB

pp. 123-127

What matters here is not the label, which we can debate another day.

The timetable of the climate crisis is dictated by physics, not politics. Climate really doesn't care why we do or don't change, or what political system drives it. The situation right now is that if we don't decarbonize very, very rapidly, we will soon reach a state where decarbonization is not enough to hold climate in check. It will either run out of control or require means of control not presently known (or at least well-understood at large scale) by humankind.

Incentives need to exist to get off of carbon, not to remain on it. It's critical to do this very soon. Now, really. As fast as is humanly possible or humanity is in for a much worse time than many imagine.

Folks in Ohio and the midwest and central parts of the US, should understand very clearly, as tornadoes and floods and droughts become stronger and more common in that area, that this is nothing to joke around with. We must decarbonize, and though that means getting quickly off of all carbon-based fuels, coal is among the worst.

To best understand the stakes in visceral terms, I very much recommend the book The Uninhabitable Earth. Or, if you're not a book reader, then try the National Geographic piece Six degrees could change the world.

I want to give another plug for Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt. Reading that, you realize it is the same exact set of people who were employed to manufacture doubt about tobacco, DDT, the ozone hole, and many other issues. It became their business model and it has worked.

> It is not clear what is delaying the Court of Appeals’ Mann decision.

Really? Aside from the court process being a disaster, and the Judge being known as one of the slowest ever, I would think that Mann standing up in court and defending himself, while many of his fellow scientists are throwing him under the bus can't help him any.

Here are a few links that I've found interesting or useful.

this one is an animation of the decline of arctic sea ice over the last couple decades:
Ice Dream by Andy Robinson

The Representative Concentration Pathways- possible future greenhouse gas concentrations depending on what emissions path humanity takes, adopted for the IPCC 5th assesment report in 2014.

How the global average temperature is expected to rise based on the chosen RCP's.
global temperature rise projections for different emissions scenarios

Here is what those temperature rises translate into in the real world-
a degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms a very short synopsis of some of the effects we may expect in the coming yeara as global average temperatures rise. More detail can be found in the book,
Six Degrees- Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

Antarctic sea ice has also begun to collapse in the last few months:
global sea ice area

From Climate Code Red, an article that contends there is no "carbon budget" left to limit warming to 1.5C under sensible assumptions of risk and potential damage-
Unravelling the myth of a "carbon budget" for 1.5C

Kevin Anderson argues in this presentationthat limiting warming to below 2C consistent with global fairness requires immediate and deep cuts in emissions in the developed world consistent with a revolutionary energy transformation.

Australians for Coal a insightful look at their corporate climate policy update.

I'm reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. He read a couple thousand climate papers and summarized what scientists think we'll see. He has chapters for one degree, two degrees, up to six.

Two degrees would be bad but manageable. Three degrees is apocalyptic.

At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest completely burns to the ground. Middle latitudes worldwide become too dry to grow food. We'd have millions of refugees from Central America alone. Soil and plants become net emitters of carbon, taking us possibly as high as 4.5 degrees even with no further emissions from us.

At our current pace we could hit three degrees by 2050.

Nardo is correct about this, it so happens.

Hollywood celebrities aren't a reliable source of scientific knowledge, especially including high school dropouts.

A question that has been posited, for instance, is "Is Gwyneth Paltrow wrong about everything?" And there's no doubt that she's wrong about a hell of a lot. And yet she still offers her opinion with no sign of self awareness.

I am reminded of that first year psychology lab where you make a bunch of pigeons superstitious by feeding them randomly. By the end of the year they each have an intricate ritual of movements that they believe increases their chance of food.

Hollywood offers ridiculously affluent careers on a pretty much random basis. Those that succeed think that the're on to something, just as the pigeons do.

So confirm that they're based in reality when Hollywood stars tell you stuff.

But Nardo is correct about this. Good on him for using his celebrity to raise awareness of this issue that is indeed an existential crisis for large whacks of civilization.