This is the hottest year ever!

It must be true because it says so in the Guardian.

Preliminary estimates from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) found global average land and sea surface temperatures for the first 10 months of 2014 had soared higher than ever recorded. The findings – broadly in line with those of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and other scientific agencies – indicate that by year-end 2014 will break all previous high temperature records.

The BBC’s David Shukman has been telling a similar story in his exquisitely modulated, eminently reasonable-sounding Old Etonian tones.

Some readers – especially those in the 43 US states which experienced record lows earlier this month – might be a little puzzled by these claims.

But they are forgetting an important detail: the latest UN climate conference has just begun (in Lima, Peru, this time) and on important occasions like this global temperatures always go up in a shocking and unprecedented way.

They have to.

Otherwise casual onlookers might begin to suspect that this whole “man-made global warming thing” was just a massive scam, cooked up by an unholy cabal of green activists, shyster politicians, grant-grubbing activist-scientists, rent-seeking corporatist greedsters, Hollywood luvvies and other professional charlatans. And then it would be game over for their entire sham industry.

So who are we to believe: the gatekeepers of the Mother Gaia’s Holy Temple of Endlessly Rising Global Temperatures? Or reality?

Well, here’s what reality tells us in the form of the most accurate records of global climate data – the satellite records from the UAH.

This data only goes back to 1998 but what we can see is that even in that brief period 2014 isn’t the hottest year. It’s the third-equal hottest. (And well below the highs of 1998 and 2010).

But I see the warmists’ problem and I quite understand why they prefer to use the notoriously unreliable and parti-pris adjusted data provided by NOAA.

I mean “Earth records third-equal-highest temperatures since satellite records began sixteen years ago” isn’t the kind of grabby headline that’s ever going to win you brownie points with all the sandals and hair shirt brigade in Lima, is it?