1998 was not the hottest year in US history. It was 1934.

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Far more relevant is which year is the hottest year on record for THE EARTH AS A WHOLE, as opposed to a select 1% of the area of the Earth. From the same page as your graph, we see these similar 2 graphs.  2005 and then 1998 are the two warmest years on record. The smaller the region of the Earth you are comparing, the less statistically significant it is.

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So for less than 1% of the world's surface area, it turns out that 1934 was 0.02 degrees warmer than 1998, instead of 1998 being 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934. This changes everything!

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In the interests of intellectual honesty, I noticed that the United States is actually a bit under 2% of the Earth's area. So there was a relative revision of 0.03 degrees between 1934 and 1998 in 2% of the world's surface area. Big deal.

Whilst the United States is unlikely to mirror the rest of the world's temperatures or its temperature changes, it is illogical to presume that the US lives merely in a vacuum or that it's temperature numbers and trends should not correlate to some degree in some larger timeframe to the world's temperature numbers and trends.

Translated into English:  If the US shows warming, it is likely the world is experiencing similar warming; if the US doesn't, the world likely isn't.

The charges of American centrism being raised here are merely strawmen that have nothing to do with the data or the observations.

If you were smart enough to understand the graph I had posted, you'd see that there has been considerable GLOBAL warming since 1934.

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For some reason they changed the URL of the global temperature graphs. Anyways, there is much less variance in the temperature at the global level, then the 2% of the surface that is the United States. From these graphs, it's really no contest what the warmest years were.

To even out statistical noise, they also have a 5 year mean, which has been going steadily up since 1970.

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None of the 928 peer reviewed papers looked at disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming.  While Lindzen is a rare climcatologist who has personal views that differ from the consensus position, he still believes that global warming is occurring.


http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

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None of the 928 peer reviewed papers looked at disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming.  While Lindzen is a rare climcatologist who has personal views that differ from the consensus position, he still believes that global warming is occurring.


http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

Believing in global warming and believing that it is due to anthropogenic CO2 are two entirely different things. Most, if not all, scientists agree that there is warming but they don't all agree that it s due to CO2.

BTW here is a list of 60 other scientists who don't believe in CO2 induced warming.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605&rfp=dta

They didn't exactly limit that list to climatoligists with a PhD.

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So at what point will the global warming slow down the Gulf stream enough so that global cooling will begin?

Huh? The Gulf Stream slowing down would just keep the Gulf of Mexico warmer. Of course the situation is more complicated, but generally moving temperature around won't affect the global mean temperature.

In any case, with global warming, and the Gulf stream slowing down, you can expect a lot of hurricanes where you live.