NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have histories of tweaking global data and abbreviating recorded timelines to make the past colder in order to have recent temperatures appear remarkably warmer.
In January they rolled out a “hottest year ever” press briefing to report an allegedly dramatic warming trend purportedly based upon 57 years of radiosonde (balloon) records. Strangely, their presentation graph only showed the last 37 years dating back to 1979. Data going back another 22 years to 1957 would have revealed a very different trend line.
As reported by Real Science, radiosonde recordings in the Earth’s atmosphere show no overall warming since the late 1950s. And whereas NOAA’s surface station records indicate about one degree (1º) of warming between 1979 and 2010, far more accurate radiosonde and satellite measurements show little warming.
Global temperatures cooled from the late 1950s to the 1960s, and have since risen and fallen with as much pre-1979 cooling as post-1979 warming over the past half century.
Satellite records which date back only to 1979 show that 1998, a major El Niño year, was far warmer than 2015, which experienced an even stronger El Niño that had been expected to influence at least equally high temperatures.
In fact even the year 2010 (which was followed by four years of cooling) was warmer.
Those 18 years after 1998 were relatively flat until last year despite much ballyhooed “record high” 
atmospheric CO2 levels. The 2015 El Niño is now rapidly dissipating, likely to be soon followed by a cooling La Niña.
Alabama’s State Climatologist and University of Alabama Earth Science Center Director John Christy explained reasons for temperature recording conflicts and uncertainties to the House Science Committee last month.
He emphasized that satellite and radiosonde measurements, which tend to be quite consistent with one another, afford much more accurate and coherent gauges of global temperatures than surface networks.
Christy observed that significant land-based temperature contamination errors result from local “heat island effects” caused by urban developments and careless placement of recording instruments near heat sources such as structures and air conditioner exhausts.
Ocean surface measurements are also unreliable. He pointed out that water temperature trends at a depth of 1 meter “do not track well with those of air temperature just above the water [3 meters], even when both are measured on the same buoy over 20 years.” With regard to determining any human CO2 influences, “it is difficult to adjust for these contaminating factors to extract a pure data set for greenhouse detection because often the non-climatic influence comes along very gradually just as it is expected of the response to the enhanced greenhouse effect.”
As for theoretical computer models which project sharply climbing temperatures, actual atmospheric measurements have shown no such trend whatsoever.
Christy told the House Committee that, “The models over-warm the atmosphere by a factor of about 2.5, indicating that the current [greenhouse] theory is at odds with the facts.” This discrepancy “is not a short-term, specially selected episode, but represents the past 37 years.” He reminded the audience that, “This is also the period with the highest concentration of greenhouse gases, and thus, the period in which the response should be of the largest magnitude.”
Many will remember a previous “climate crisis” media scare in the 1960s and late 1970s when “leading scientists” were predicting an arrival of the next ice age.
Since 2011, NOAA has creatively revised that original temperature record to make that big chill go away altogether. They aren’t alone in cooking the books. NASA’s GISS, a small surface temperature modeling shop operating out of a midtown Manhattan office building has become a leading player in the political agenda-driven climate scare business.
The next time you hear a feverish declaration that the most recent day, month, year or decade is “the hottest on record,” perhaps consider “since when?” Are they referring to the brief period since satellites first provided the most reliable data? Do they mean since the time a spotty and haphazard global network of mercury thermometer surface stations was established in the late 1800s?
In any case, don’t expect alarmists to cite evidence taken from proxy records including ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica indicating that temperatures were warmer over most of the past 10,000 years . . . or that agricultural records show the climate was as warm or warmer 2,000 years ago during the Roman warm period and again 1,000 years ago during the Medieval warm period.