Read here. As the New Zealand climate authorities recently admitted to wholesale temperature fabrication, it is important to note that other national climate agencies continue policies of blatant fabrication. NASA's GISS research unit is still on a personal quest to make 1998 hotter than by 1934, which they appeared to have finally acheived.
Despite 65 years of 1934 being recorded as the hottest U.S. year, NASA's James Hansen and his personal minions turned up the heat furnace on 1998 and the A/C on 1934. Over a decade of effort they finally achieve their result, a fabricated temperature record that the lame mainstream media (NYT, Wapo, AP, NBC, etc.) duly reports without mentioning to the public that NASA's temperatures have been faked.
"Why? Well, given steadily rising CO2 levels, and the high warming sensitivity of virtually all climate models to CO2, it would have been, let us say inconvenient, for 1998 to have been bested by a hot golden oldie from over 60 years previous! Kind of like your great grandpa beating you in a foot race."
"Sato’s first report, dated July 1999, shows 1934 with an impressive lead of over half a degree (0.541ºC to be exact) above 1998.....OOPS, the hot race continued after the FOIA email! I checked the tabular data at GISS Contiguous 48 U.S. Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (C) today and, guess what? Since the Sato FOIA email discussed above, GISS has continued their taxpayer-funded work on both 1998 and 1934. The Annual Mean for 1998 has increased to 1.32ºC, a gain of a bit over an 11th of a degree (+0.094ºC), while poor old 1934 has been beaten down to 1.2ºC., a loss of about a 20th of a degree (-0.049ºC). So, sad to say, 1934 has lost the hot race by about an eighth of a degree (0.12ºC)."