Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7C cooling through the middle to late Holocene ( 5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios. - http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

"These warmings may not sound like much until you realize that the warming since the last ice age — a warming that completely reconfigured the planet — was 9F-14F (5-8C). The upper limits of projected warming over the 21st century would therefore herald a literal remaking of the Earth’s environment and our place within it." - Andrew E. Dessler

Right - Warming from the last ice age peaked about 8000 years ago. Since then we have had a very gradual cooling trend - until about the last 100 years where we appear to be in a warming trend again.

The post notes:

Curiously, last year was warmest even though the ENSO trend was neutral. Typically it would take an El Niño to nudge us up past the previous El Niño year, but not so last year. This means that the next El Niño will probably mean another record temperature.

in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold. Current Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had this to say about production cuts in late December: "it is not in the interest of OPEC to cut their production whatever the price is," adding that even if prices fell to $20 "it is irrelevant." Implied, if not explicitly stated, is that Saudi Arabia wants its oil out of the ground, regardless of how thin its profit margin per barrel becomes. - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

In 2000, Sheikh Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil." - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

Regarding witch hunt by right wing politician: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

I suppose it is only necessary to engage the lawyers if you are being libeled or if you and your family are the targets of death threats.

Regarding Fox News:

• http://watchingthedeniers.word...
• http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/de...
• http://mediamatters.org/resear...
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
• http://www.gcbl.org/blog/2014/...

Alarmist much?

Oh lord. It always devolves into some conspiracy theory. Somehow skeptics Roy Spencer and Jon Christy must be in on it as well because they have a satellite temperature reconstruction that corroborates the land based temperature reconstructions: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/u...

It's the trend(, stupid).

Maybe, unless you have insight into the trends and Australia Now is consistent with those trends. Extremes that would have happened about 2% of the time in the 30 years prior to the 80's were happening about 6% of the time in the 30 years prior to 2010. In the last 15 years they have occurred about 10% of the time: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of... . This trend of increasing extremes is what we would expect in a warming country: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of...

The picture becomes even more cohesive if you look at the temperature trend in the context of radiative physics and what we know about the atmospheric CO2 trend.