The global warming alarmist community has had to embarrassingly resort to the lamest of all fear-mongering refrains: "It's the warmest _________" (fill in the blank with decade, year, month, week, day, hour or whatever).
See this lame refrain in action, here and here.
Why lame? Simple.
#1. There's been a 'rebound' warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Per history, this current, natural warming rebound has been unexceptional and could actually last another 100 years - it's happened before, go figure.
#2. As the adjacent chart reveals, the 60 years prior to 1950 had a sturdy per century warming trend of +0.79 degrees, which reflects that natural rebound since the LIA.
#3. As the chart also shows, the modern warming 60-year trend, from the start of the 1950's, was enhanced to a +1.06 degree per century trend - specifically, a +0.27°C added to the already existing rebound warming trend of +0.79°.
#4. Using a 6th order polynomial fitted trend, it's clear that a recovery warming trend started in the mid-to-late 1890s, after some prior sporadic sputtering. And it has not stopped since. Along the way the trend has been enhanced by human forces: CO2 emissions, black carbon soot, urban heat island effects and climate altering land-use impacts.
So, in essence, since 1890 we had 60 years of warming then followed by another 60 years of "modern" warming from 1950 on.
Time to put this together......really, this is not difficult to conceptualize - we've had at least 120 years of warming, with some sporadic ups/downs along the way.
We are not talking brain surgery here.
That being the case, it is obvious, with a very high likelihood, that future time periods will also be "warmer" or the "warmest" - a simple repeat from the known trend over the past 120 years.
Let's summarize: Next month, or next year or the next decade is likely to be warmer due to the natural warming rebound since the LIA. Duh.
To reiterate, this natural, built-in, dominating LIA-rebound warming trend will continue regardless of the added impacts of greenhouse gases and etc.
Thus, it is extremely lame for alarmists to fear-monger about "warmest" since it happens naturally; it is also lame to imply that CO2 is responsible for the "warmest" anything, since natural climate change basically dictates it; and, it's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that the modern +1.06°C trend (only a 0.92° increase by 2100AD) at the end of 2012 is "dangerous" or an indicator of an imminent crisis.
Note: Annual HadCRUT4 data used in above Excel chart here. Trends are not predictions nor forecasts.