The reason why you get the "unused argument" error is because the arguments for these two functions are different:
get_ensemble_temp(locator, type, start, end)
get_historical_temp(locator, time_scale)
For the "get_historical_temp" function, you would set time_scale="year", and then subset to the years that you want. E.g.:
USA_dat <- get_historical_temp("USA", "year")
USA_dat_small <- subset(USA_dat, year >= 1920 & year <= 1939,
select=c(1:length(USA_dat)))
The outputs of these functions are quite different, too. You will have to average and summarize the data from "get_historical_temp" to make them comparable to the output of "get_ensemble_temp"
Also, I couldn't get your first line to work with the argument "world."
According to the docs (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rWBclimate/rWBclimate.pdf)
you have to use a vector of all country codes in order to get the whole world's data all at once.