Runaway Global Warming

Here's the temperature trend for the contiguous 48 US states. As you can easily tell, Al Gore's famous hockey stick of runaway temperatures is clearly obvious if you ignore some the the 'inconvenient' data points like the 1930s and 2008/2009:

The above is from Anthony Watt's Watts Up With That web site.

I can't help but sarcastically point out that with data like this, it is obvious that industry should be shuttered, caps should be put on carbon emissions, and the economy should be thrown into turmoil to avert this obvious 'runaway' global warming. Even a third grader could look at that graph and declare an emergency and say "let out all the stops, throw money to the wind, we have to save our children's and grandchildren's future!" At least that is what Al Gore is saying. On the other hand, I look at that graph and say what global warming?

By the way... for those who don't remember Al Gore's hockey stick graph of runaway global warming:

That curve is truly really scary, but it doesn't include the recent cooling and is uses some data that others dispute. It is easy to create a scary picture if you pick the data that makes your story and ignore the other data.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but history is littered with movements and panics about doom-and-gloom: the the post-WWI worry about the decline of the West, the post WWII Commie threat with the 'domino theory' of Western collapse, the 1960s 'population bomb' and a threat of widespread famine by the end of the 20th century, the 1970s Club of Rome's dire warning of resource depletion, the 1980s worry that Japan would soon own the US, the 1990s worry that regulation was strangling US enterprise and that entrepreneurship was not being rewarded, and the last thirty years the IPCC has been telling us that we are doomed to a heat death because of greenhouse gases. Lots of scare stories. Just how many have been true? Is this different? I don't think so. Others claim that this one is 'based on science'. But Paul Ehrlich, a population scientist, was using demographics and agronomy to tell us that we faced a dire future of famine. The Club of Rome used specialists to paint their picture. All doom-and-gloom has some element of truth. What they all fail to account for is the fact that the future is subject to change and that linearly extrapolating past scientific 'knowledge' is not a good guide to the future.