I equally wish that more Americans used SI -- Farenheit is about as familiar to me as Rankine; I have been bitten by the US use of 'mil' to mean thousandths of an inch whilst remaining how some en-gb engineers use it as inaccurate slang for mm. But this is a big distraction. Alas, I know that the whole reason we're in this pickle is that scientific literacy is low, and most people prefer short term gains over longer ones. In many ways the increased rate of increase in temperature might be a good thing, as it makes more people intuitively get that something is very, very wrong.

As an aside, most professional oceanographers or climate scientists I know are depressed, furious, or grant writing -- or a linear superposition of all three.