WINGNUTS ON THE WEATHER

In a silly attempt to disprove global warming, wingnuts sometimes advocate that earlier years were much warmer and since CO2 was less back then, global warming is nonsense. Here's a typical example:

bobmarle 01:44:12 AM Dec 12 2007
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Before McIntyre's discovery, NASA considered 1998 the warmest year
in the continental U.S.; now, as explained by Paul Driessen in Monday's Canada
Free Press, it is 1934, with 1998 second and 1921 third. When human production
of CO2 was minimal, in the 1930's, four of the 10 warmest years are now seen to
have occurred. The past decade now includes only three of the ten warmest
years.

If one of these morons bothered to look on NASA's site for "warmest year," he would've found this graph:




and this text:

On February 8, 2007, climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced that 2006 was the fifth-warmest year in the past century. GISS scientists estimated that the five warmest years on record were, in descending order, 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2006. Other climatology groups ordered the years somewhat differently due to different measuring techniques, especially in areas with sparse measurements, but they also considered these years to be the warmest. According to NASA GISS director James Hansen, 2007 is likely to see warmer temperatures than 2006 and could prove to be the warmest on record, thanks to an El Niño and continued emissions of greenhouse gases.

The top image is a global map showing temperature anomalies during 2006, blue being the coolest and red being the warmest. Areas with cooler-than-average temperatures appear primarily in the northern Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean,
as well as the interior of Antarctica. The very warmest regions appear in the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is consistent with climate predictions that global warming will occur more quickly and dramatically in high latitudes. The red colors that dominate the image reveal the overall warmth of 2006 compared to the long-term average.

The graph below the image tracks mean global temperatures compared to the 1951 to 1980 mean. This graph shows two lines, the 5-year mean, indicated in red, and the annual mean, indicated in pink. Temperatures peaked around 1940 then fell in the 1950s. By the early 1980s, temperatures surpassed those of the 1940s and, despite ups and downs from year to year, they continued rising beyond the year 2000.