Remember the horror stories about 2014 being the hottest year since before Henry Ford took his date to the prom in a hay-fueled buggy? 

The terrors posed by melting glaciers and rising sea levels threatening polar bears and Al Gore’s new coastal California residence? And oh yeah, mustn’t forget those historic first-time-ever droughts and tag team hurricanes — all caused, of course, by our CO2-belching smoke stacks and SUVs?

Well, maybe not. It seems that official surface temperature records upon which this panic has rested have been systematically cooked to indicate that Earth has recently been overheating just as alarmists, including some at NASA, wish us to believe. This will come as no surprise, however, to scientists familiar with data recorded from satellite and high altitude balloon instruments. That data shows that global mean temperatures have been statistically flat over the past 18 years.

Pseudoscientific chicanery reported last year by Steven Goddard’s Real Science blog illustrates shameless manipulation of some of the world’s most influential climate records. 

His investigation reveals that many surface measurements originally recorded in NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) have been replaced with temperatures “fabricated” from theoretical computer models.

In doing so, original recorded temperatures were subsequently lowered, thereby exaggerating warming in recent decades by comparison. Whereas the original records dustbowlingshow that the U.S. has actually been cooling since the 1930s, the hottest decade on record, NOAA’s manipulated graph based nearly half on fantasy data projects a high warming rate in excess of 3º C per century.

ASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies based its recent mainstream media-parroted “2014 hottest year” canard on this same contrived data, but ratcheted up the hot spin cycle even more.

Yet when the Daily Mail asked the new NASA-GISS Director Gavin Schmidt why the press release failed to mention his own low confidence that the likelihood of 2014 being “the warmest year since 1880” is just 38%, he offered no response.

Incidentally, that alleged “record” amounted to a two-hundredths of a degree increase over 2010, the previously claimed “warmest year.” That miniscule difference falls within a margin of error broadly recognized to be several times higher.

More evidence of this feverish fraud was reported earlier this month by English journalist Christopher Booker in The Telegraph. Booker’s U.K. article discussed an investigation into “how we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming,” which was conducted by Paul Homewood who checked original temperature graphs for weather stations in Paraguay against subsequent substitutions.

Homewood then checked a swath of other South American weather stations around the original three, finding the same one-way “adjustments” in all of them.

The first of these again appeared in NOAA’s USHCN. These in turn, were then amplified by NASA-GISS and NOAA’s National Climate Data Center using hypothetical warming trends to estimate temperatures across vast regions of the planet where no measurements exist.

Yet, as Booker emphasizes, “these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in ‘global warming’.”

Homewood is now finding evidence of the same pattern of data fudging for weather stations across much of the Arctic between Canada and the heart of Siberia. In nearly every case the one-way tweaks show warming up to 1º C higher than actual original data indicate. Replaced versions also completely eliminate obvious evidence of Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when extreme cooling nearly devastated the country’s economy.

Homewood points out that even a 1987 NASA-GISS graph presented in a paper authored by its former director and lead climate alarmist James Hansen was doctored siberiandogsto “transform Arctic history.” 

This falsification was first exposed in 2007 by Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre. Here, the original Arctic temperatures which were actually much higher than any time since had been lowered so much that they became dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Those who worry a lot about the vanishing Arctic ice caps and drowning polar bears we keep hearing about in order to sell the Obama Administration’s EPA war on coal should be cheered to know that Arctic temperature shifts have virtually nothing at all to do with atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In reality they are caused by perfectly natural multi-decadal changes in Atlantic Ocean currents.

So now that the Atlantic is about to flip back to a cyclical cooling phase, perhaps we should begin to worry more about how to heat our homes with windmills and sunbeams. In any case, will someone please kindly inform Al Gore and those frantic polar bears they can finally relax?

NOTE:  A version of this article appears at http://www.Newsmax.com/LarryBell/climate-global-warming-gore-co2/2015/02/16/id/624956/#ixzz3SCr7yo6n