Most everyone who still bothers to follow the climate change cabal knows that 2016 was the second-warmest year in the modern temperature record, but occurred during a strong El Nino year, which has always driven temperature spikes in the past, especially 1998, the previous big El Nino year and the previous warmest year in the record. (Need I remind everyone that the temperature record we’re using for these claims goes all the way back to . . . 1880.)

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is just out with its finding that 2017 comes in as the third warmest year in its instrumental temperature series (that goes back to . . . 1979), and emphasizes that this temperature reading came without benefit of an El Nino to juice it: