According to whom?
Speaking of cherry picking data... From Canada's National Post, Published: Monday, August 13, 2007.
Last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- whose temperature records are a key component of the global-warming claim (and whose director, James Hansen, is a sort of godfather of global-warming alarmism) -- quietly corrected an error in its data set that had made recent temperatures seem warmer than they really were.
A little less than a decade ago, the U.S. government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones, though -- no one until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, that is.
McIntyre has become the bane of many warmers' religious-like belief in climate catastrophe. In 2003, along with economist Ross McKitrick, McIntyre demolished the Mann "hockey stick" --a graph that showed stable temperatures for 1,000 years, then shooting up dangerously in the last half of the 20th Century.
The graph was used prominently by the UN and nearly every major eco lobby. But McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated it was based on incomplete and inaccurate data.
To NASA's credit, when McIntyre pointed out their temperature errors they quickly made corrections.
Still, the pro-warmers who dominate the Goddard Institute almost certainly recognized the impacts these changes would have on the global-warming debate, because they made no formal announcement of their recalculations.
In many cases, the changes are statistically minor, but their potential impact on the rhetoric surrounding global warming is huge.
The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third.
Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression.
The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.
In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.
Read it and weep, turkey.