Gavin quietly says that there is a 62% chance that 2014 was not the warmest year on record, but he had to give his boss a talking point for the State of the Union address this week.

So Gavin simply fabricated warm temperatures across huge areas like Greenland, where he had no actual thermometer data in December.

Gavin showed much of western Greenland 1-2C above normal, when it was actually 2C below normal. It doesn’t take a lot of that sort of cheating to get temperatures up 0.02 globally.

There is only one chance in 27 million that there is a smidgen of truth to the hottest year ever claim.