The lowest part Washington D.C. is at sea level on the tidewater Potomac. They might be some of the first to notice if the ocean rises four feet.

The most recent ice age covered as far south as Maine with ice 1.5 - 3 miles thick. Greenland is the remnant of that ice sheet. Two miles of ice disappeared from Maine in about 11,000 years. That was a very fast global warming without the use of coal. During this ice age Europe was covred with boreal forests instead of oaks. A simple truth.

http://www.climatechange.umaine.edu/Research/news/ClimateExplanation/Cli...

An earlier ice age epoch covered North America as far south as near the Indiana-Kentucky border. Carbon dioxide alone cannot account for interglacial warming or glacial cooling. There are many moving parts in the climate model.

The "larger size" version of that graph seems to end, I guess, somewhere around end of 2005, so it can't possibly address anything about the last couple of years. (If NASA publicists troubled themselves to read Tufte on chartjunk, the enlarged graph would have light gridlines instead of useless decoration and it would be easy to tell exactly what period it covers.) We need something more current.

What might be a current version (clearer and enlarged here) gives what one could construe, if one wished, as a leveling-off for the last two years. Given the substantial amount of noise, I think I wouldn't care to construe anything yet, but I suppose other people's mileage might vary.