The graph pretty much constitutes "case closed," but if you need more, see Paul Krugman's writeup here:
One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is “but it was warmer in the late 90s...Given the overwhelming scientific evidence for what's happening in terms of climate change, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the only thing we should be doing right now is discussing how to head off planetary ecological disaster, not whether to head it off. Only in the world of people brainwashed by ExxonMobil-funded climate change denial institutes, or completely ignorant of the most basic scientific knowledge, or receiving huge campaign contributions from Big Oil and Big Coal, could this even be a question.
What this [graph] tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the last decade or so. But the direction of change is unmistakable if you take the longer view. The fitted line in the figure is a 3rd-degree polynomial, but any sort of smoothing would tell you that there is a massive upward trend.
Of course, trend-spotting is no substitute for causal modeling; and the models are getting truly scary in their implications.
Unfortunately, as the House of Representatives vote Friday on Waxman/Markey demonstrated, the phrase "ignorant of the most basic scientific knowledge" appears to describe all but 8 House Republicans. The rest of John Boehner and Eric Cantor's crew, including self-proclaimed "moderates" like Frank Wolf and self-deluded/self-proclaimed "environmentalists" like Rob Wittman, are in effect wholly-owned, bought-and-paid-for subsidiaries Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Big Lie.
