Like most inconvenient stubborn climate facts, the mainstream media propaganda that modern global warming is "unprecedented" doesn't stand up to even simple scrutiny of the facts...with little effort, one can identify, via NOAA, earlier periods where global warming was greater and increasing faster...is this a case of journalists being deniers of empirical evidence?.....
As this chart of empirical evidence demonstrates, global warming has taken place in the past, well before the explosion of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
And there have been times when earlier warming either equaled or exceeded modern warming. For the 25-year period shown, early 20th century warming was actually greater than the 25-yr warming through 2014.
For almost all consumers of the mainstream press, they are totally unaware that recent warming has no 'chops', so to speak.
It is not "unprecedented" and it certainly is less rapid than the earlier period. Also, the modern warming rate exhibits a 1.16°C per century trend. The earlier period? A 1.75°C/century trend.
Boiling it down to the numbers...that's 1.5x faster warming for 1920-1944, yet modern CO2 emissions had a growth 5.6x greater. That's the opposite of expert predictions.
Accurate and fair to say, modern warming is not exceptional.
Regardless of this unequivocal and indisputable scientific empirical evidence, which challenges the "consensus" global warming orthodoxy, the mainstream media chooses to gleefully push the latest discredited propaganda regarding the "hottest year ever" - an event that has been happening since the end of Little Ice Age, with an astoundingly great frequency.
Facts rule. The 'PR' exaggerations and embellishments are just anti-science dressed in those old fearmongering clothes. One's got to sell newspapers or web page hits, no?
Additional global and regional temperature charts.
Note: Source for annual NOAA temperatures used in Excel to calculate and plot 25-year temperature changes and linear trends. For the earlier period (1920-1944), 1919 was used as the base year; for the modern era, 1989 was the base year.