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Statistics, is by definition, the science of ignorance. We use statistics, or rather statistical technique to make decisions in absence of precise knowledge. For the most part, it works out beautifully.

Statisticians and statistics do not prove anything. The best they can do is evaluate the likely validity of a mathematical model. A simple example would be if you tossed a coin ten times in a row and got a run of ten straight heads. This does not “prove” that the coin is biased to produce heads, or that the next toss will be a head, though this is where the smart money might go. (Actually, the really smart money will wait on the sidelines, to see what the trick is.) The best that a statistician could say is that the observed outcome would occur only once in 1024 trials with “fair” coin.

What the article says is that statisticians cannot find a “significant” downward trend. But the generally accepted threshold for significance is 95% confidence level, which means that even if the data indicated that there was a 94.9% chance of a cooling trend, that would, by that measure, not be significant. The technique favors the “null hypothesis”.

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi

Samuel Clemens' observation has so much truth to it that it's not even funny.

Mark Twain is also sometimes credited with saying that there are liars, damned liars, and statisticians. But Benjamin Disraeli is apparently the original author of this jab at statisticians.