Your reply is all focused on a chart which uses "adjusted" temperatures - not the raw data that was originally captured. I wish I could find it - but I remember a chart from IPCC AR1 that showed the 20s and 30s being virtually the same as the 80s and 90s.........but with subsequent smoothing and adjusting, it magically disappeared. Putting aside the "hide the decline" debacle, common sense dictates that there are next to NO accurate records for Global temperatures prior to 1940, let alone going all the way back to 1880. Countries have come and gone, wars fought and lost. Temperatures from Africa, the Middle Esat, the Arctic/Antarctica, Russia, China? They were busy with other things other than measuring temperatures. Even ENVIRONMENT CANADA deleted all temperatures prior to 1950 from their temperature records because they were "unreliable". The historical data shown in your chart is therefore - mostly made up - created with an understandable bias towards the IPCC mission - to find the human figerprint of man-made global warming. .....and to support that claim, I go back to my point - why are all the "hottest temperatures" in US states and every Province set almost exclusively in the first half of the 20th centure, clustered around the 20s and 30s......could it be that those decades were at least much warmer than the chart indicates?