Here's the take on this from, you know, an actual scientist:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/10/is-it-hot-in-here-or-is-it-just-me/Basically, this drops one year off the "hottest" list.
But even if we take him on his word, what he said is still misleading! Look at the dates, and think about it. These data are culled from a table that goes back from 1880 to 2006, a 127 year interval. If there were no warming trend at all, youd expect the hottest 10 years to be randomly distributed in that 127 range, or roughly 1 hottest year in the top ten every 12.7 years (call it 13). But look at the data! In the last 13 year bin alone, from 1994 - 2006, we see 3 of the Top Ten years (2006, 1998, 1999). Another was in the second to last bin (1990). Then there is nothing before that until we go back to 1953.
...
The x-axis is year since 1880, and the y-axis is the temperature deviation from average. You see two big bumps, the one in the 1930s and the recent one since 1980 or so. Curious, I looked at the average deviation for 1930 to 1942, to encompass that bump, and got +0.44 degrees (if I go only to 1941 I get +0.47, which is a bit higher since 1942 was a cooler than average year, but not including it would be cherry-picking, so I left it in).
For the 1994 to 2006 bin I get a deviation of +0.57. The average temperature in the second bump is 0.1 degrees higher than the first. In other words, it was warmer on average in the last 13 years than any time in recorded history.
I am still going to trust consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities. You know, real scientists, not those backed by oil companies, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. All these orgs got money from Exxon Mobil, for instance.
This is the same kind of science the tobbaco lobby used to try and tell people that smoking was good for you.
Honestly, I don't care all that much; I'll be dead as the problem gets bad.
And another thing: What's wrong with wanting to get off of fossil fuels? Even if global warming WAS male bovine excrement, we should do it anyway; just so we can tell Saudi Arabia to kiss our glutius maximus.
