Not Even Close: 2012 Was Hottest Ever in U.S.
— headline on page A1 of The New York Times printed January 9, 2013
Except it wasn’t. After 1999, the National Climatic Data Center “adjusted” historical observed temperatures, lowering observed temps in the early to mid-20th century while raising observed temps in the last few years. The graph below highlights the difference between reported and observed temperatures (thanks to Steven Goddard at Real Science):
In other words, we don’t have a warming trend, we have a let’s-report-a-warming-trend trend. Current policy makers are trying to shape public perceptions, and public policy, by shamefully altering data to support their agenda.
Wikipedia says this about the fallacy of “proof by assertion”:
Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies. This fallacy is sometimes used as a form of rhetoric by politicians, or during a debate as a filibuster. In its extreme form, it can also be a form of brainwashing. Modern politics contains many examples of proof by assertions. This practice can be observed in the use of political slogans, and the distribution of “talking points”, which are collections of short phrases that are issued to members of modern political parties for recitation to achieve maximum message repetition. The technique is also sometimes used in advertising. An example is a quote by Lenin “A Lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
Strange that I would be quoting Lenin here, but there it is. For more detail about the alteration of historical temperatures, please see Steven Goddard’s excellent post NOAA Temperature Fraud Expands (Part 1).