Well, let's try with literally the first Google hit for "global temperature graph": http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/giste

Well, let's try with literally the first Google hit for "global temperature graph": http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ The first graph shows that temperature for 1998 (I think) is very high (~0.6C), and indeed temperatures in this century centers around this value. Has global warming stopped since 1998? But wait, one quickly discovers that the temperature for 1998 was the highest among all years up to 1998. Not only that, it is ~0.2C higher than 1997, which was also higher than all previous years. In fact, 1998 is >0.4C higher than the coolest year in the 1990s. It doesn't take a lot of statistical expertise to conclude that 1998 was in fact an anomalously hot year, if one were to look at data only up to that year. In this century, we hover around this 1998 temperature, and even routinely exceed them. What was an outlier became the normal. Soon the same temperature will be considered a cool year. (Of course, the graph doesn't say that, but thousands of very bright people who spent their lifetime studying these graph say that. I have no reason to doubt them, when the best argument thrown against them is "if you compare the hottest year of the last century with today's average, they are the same!")