Or another way to formulate this: Can Earth support intelligent life? We don't know, we are about to find out.

One solution for Fermi Paradox ("Where is everybody?") is that technological civilizations like ours destroy their environment and go extinct.

It is beyond me why NOAA or NASA GISS (who use NOAA's data), ignore satellite measured temperatures, which give far more accurate and complete picture of the world's global temperature.

Below is a map of the coverage of the data NOAA and NASA GISS uses. I find it hard to believe they can tell us the global temperature in sufficent accuracy to claim whether some individual year was some hundredths of degrees warmer than some other.

There are almost no data on the oceans, Antarctis, Africa or the north pole. Just extrapolating the little data they have over thousands of kilometers just isn't going to produce accurate enough data to detect such a small changes.

This in mind, I'd rather turn to the satellites, which show nothing to be worried about.