Extract csv file specific columns to list in Python

This looks like a problem with line endings in your code. If you're going to be using all these other scientific packages, you may as well use Pandas for the CSV reading part, which is both more robust and more useful than just the csv module:

import pandas
colnames = ['year', 'name', 'city', 'latitude', 'longitude']
data = pandas.read_csv('test.csv', names=colnames)

If you want your lists as in the question, you can now do:

names = data.name.tolist()
latitude = data.latitude.tolist()
longitude = data.longitude.tolist()

A standard-lib version (no pandas)

This assumes that the first row of the csv is the headers

import csv

# open the file in universal line ending mode 
with open('test.csv', 'rU') as infile:
  # read the file as a dictionary for each row ({header : value})
  reader = csv.DictReader(infile)
  data = {}
  for row in reader:
    for header, value in row.items():
      try:
        data[header].append(value)
      except KeyError:
        data[header] = [value]

# extract the variables you want
names = data['name']
latitude = data['latitude']
longitude = data['longitude']