The way frequentist hypothesis tests work is broadly as follows: Say you have a hypothesis (H1) that you wish to support using a set of observations (X). Next you define a "null hypothesis" that is basically what you need to show to be false in order for your H1 to be true. For example, if you want to showhypothesise that there has been some warming, then the obvious choice for H0 is that there has been no warming at all, i.e. the rate of warming is zero. You then calculate the p-value, which is the probability of observing a trend at least as large as that observed IF H0 is true. If the p-value is sufficiently small, say p < 0.05, this is taken as sufficient evidence that H0 is false so we say that "we reject the null hypothesis" or equivalently "the rate of warming is statistically significant" and otherwise "we fail to reject the null hypothesis" or "the rate of warming is not statistically significant".
Now the first point to notice here is that H0 should be the hypothesis you are arguing don'tagainst want to be true. So for mainstream science, which suggests there will be warming due to the greenhouse effect, the natural H0 is that there is no warming. The "Skeptics" on the other hand want to argue thathypothesise there is no warming, yet they are using that as their null hypothesis as well. This is a grave statistical error as it means that hypothesis testing no longer functions as a sanity check, as the skeptics are assuming that they are right and requiring evidence to prove them wrong. Mainstream science on the other hand are assuming that they are wrong (H0 is true) and asking if the observations refute H0 (implying, but not proving that H1 is true).