The hottest year on which record? Scientists seem to be adjusting the evidence. I’d still like to know why

Spectator
So it is with this ‘hottest year on record’ story. There are several reasons why it doesn’t stand up. The first is that it’s wilfully misleading. You read that headline and you think: ‘Wow! Hottest ever? That is serious.’ But it’s not when you consider the context. ‘On record’ means, in this case, since widespread global thermometer records began — which is as recently as 1880. There have been many, many occasions in history when the earth’s average temperature is reckoned to have been warmer than it is now: in the medieval and Roman warming periods, for example. Indeed, as the Canadian -scientist Dr Tim Ball has calculated by studying the evidence of ice-core data, earth’s recent temperatures rank in the lowest 3 per cent of those recorded since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.   ................
And in any case, 2014’s claim to being the warmest on record is at best moot. As Goddard Institute director Gavin Schmidt has since grudgingly conceded, it is impossible to be sure which of the recent years has been warmest because the temperature differences — we’re talking 2/100ths of a degree — are smaller than the margin of error.
But the biggest problem is this, and few journalists are willing to touch it because it opens such a huge can of worms: the surface temperature readings used by and quoted by all the experts mentioned above no longer accurate or trustworthy. When you write this, it invites the obvious question: ‘You’re not seriously arguing, are you, that all the world’s top meteorological institutions are cooking the books because they’ve got the same hidden agenda?’ And instantly you look like a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
There’s plenty of evidence to support it, mind. Exhibit no. 1: the satellite records which, unlike the land-based records, show no rise in temperature in the past 18 years. Exhibit no. 2: the actual raw data from weather stations all over the world. This, it invariably turns out, tells a very different story from the narrative which has been imposed on it by the Keepers of the Flame of the Great Global Warming Scare."