20 years of no warming? What the hell planet are you living on? The ten hottest years on record (since we started keeping detailed records in 1880) have all occurred within the last 17 years!
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Between the ages of 20 and 30 I was tieing the record for the tallest years of my life set at about age 20.
Turns out that when any system is on a particular secular trajectory, the nearest years tend to be record setters...and the earth has been in a secular warming period since the last ice age. Actually, that's a little bit unclear as we may be in kind of a funny plateau which has not spiked like the previous major ice ages as far as we can tell from the proxy records, but anyway that's the basic idea.
This principle of how 'records' tend to work is very basic logic, but is sufficiently advanced (amazingly) that it is highly useful to the chicken-little climate cult. There is an awfully funny video of Dr. Lindzen trying to explain this to a completely retarded politician:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUT7hLtFXIkI'm not sure if it was more amusing when Lindzen realized he was talking to a person of very limited intellectual ability, or at the end the politician finally seemed to have realized what a jackass he was, but it was to late.