The data won't support the global warming alarmists, so they change the data. They lie

It's really that simple. The people who want you to believe that the world is burning up act as if the surface temperature data for the last 150 years is a) 100% reliable, 2) consistently measured over time and iii) pure as the driven snow.

What they don't tell you is that most of the temperature stations in the U.S. (probably the best system worldwide) are poorly sited, there are far fewer measuring stations than there used to be just 25 years ago (although the NOAA tries to make that sound like a positive thing) and the temperatures are adjusted by opaque algorithms that always seem to make the past cooler and the present warmer. And that's for the "good data." How reliable do you think the temperature readings in Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union and other less developed countries are over the last 100 years or so? Yet those records also serve as "support" for the claim that surface temperatures are rising. Satellite records don't support that, but who are you going to believe, the climate alarmists or your lying eyes?

Well, some folks are starting to notice. James Delingpole lays out how the alarmists at GISS and the other official record-keeping organizations routinely adjust the temperature records to support their warming narrative. He presents a pretty clear picture of what is going on:

Suppose say, that for the last 100 years my family have been maintaining a weather station at the bottom of our garden, diligently recording the temperatures day by day, and that what these records show is this: that in the 1930s it was jolly hot – even hotter than in the 1980s; that since the 1940s it has been cooling.
What conclusions would you draw from this hard evidence?
Well the obvious one, I imagine, is that the dramatic Twentieth Century warming that people like Al Gore have been banging on about is a crock. At least according to this particular weather station it is.
Now how would you feel if you went and took these temperature records along to one of the world’s leading global warming experts – say Gavin Schmidt at NASA or Phil Jones at CRU or Michael Mann at Penn State – and they studied your records for a moment and said: “This isn’t right.” What if they then crossed out all your temperature measurements, did a few calculations on the back of an envelope, and scribbled in their amendments? And you studied those adjustments and you realised, to your astonishment, that the new, pretend temperature measurements told an entirely different story from the original, real temperature measurements: that where before your records showed a cooling since the 1940s they now showed a warming trend.
You’d be gobsmacked, would you not?
Yet, incredible though it may seem, the scenario I’ve just described is more or less exactly analogous to what has happened to the raw data from weather stations all over the world.

Delingpole provides a number of "before and after" graphs that show examples of how the actual records have been "adjusted" at various weather stations. These adjustments are not anomalies. They are routine. And they are consistent -- they always make the past colder, and the present warmer. Nothing like a little settled science, I always say. If the numbers won't support your theory, change the numbers. Read the whole piece, and look at those graphs. They are by no means the only weather stations that have undergone those kinds of adjustments. Every station in the U.S. has, as have most stations worldwide. The long and the short of it is that, as skeptics have argued for years, the surface temperature record is not reliable -- an intuitive position, really -- and the satellite record does not support the warming theory. Can we please stop worrying about the planet catching fire, Al?