That's largely because when you google it you get the same usual suspects, the denialist blogocracy, all trading the same meme back and forth because someone, I would suspect Steve Mulloy,( the paid PR hack who made his chops as a bought and paid for subsidiary of Big Tobacco claiming smoking and lung cancer were unrelated), who always uses HADCRUT data, first did his usual hack job on their output, and then all the other guys kept crossposting it. It was just another case of a denialist attempt to make a tempest in a teapot. Now there's a reason Mulloy pretty much only uses HADCRUT only uses HADCRUT. Of the three globall temperature systems, they always show the least amount of warming. This has long been known to be because they used the fewest Arctic temp readings, they were seriously underrepresented there. That is where the largest amount of warming has gone on, just as climate models suggested would happen They knew they had to do something about it, the scientific climate community knew it, and in the last couple months they said they are updating their analysis to reflect it. Which doesn't retrofit it to the older data. AND when you look at the other two major climate analyses GISS and NASA/NOAA, it's clear that temperatures have continued to increase.
Further, the statement that there has been no warming in the last fifteen years only sort-of works (it doesn't really if you actually look at the data) if you use 1998 as your base year, which the denialists always do. It doesn't work at all if you change the base year by just a year, to 1997 or 1999. Using them the trend is unequivocally up. It doesn't work either if you look at all the 90s from 1990 to 1999, and compare them with 2000 to 2011. This decade is clearly hotter. The two hottest years in recorded history are 2005 and 2010 (as you can see from looking closely at the HADCRUT graph). 2011's temp declined because it was a persistent la Nina year, which are cooler years. It was however the warmest la Nina year on record, so even cooler years are getting warmer. La Nina and elNino years mix in unpredicatbly with the majority of years with neither, and if you rolliing-average the years to smooth out the transient slight dips and peaks, the trend has been, and still continues to be, up. Just another wacked right-wing meme that it isn't.
From the US Government NASA/NOAA data:
Compare 1990-1999 with 2000 to 2011. Notice where the temps over multi years are higher. Compare el Nino year with each other. Compare la Nina years with each other. Compare 2005 and 2010 with 1998. Temperature has not take a vacation the last fifteen years. It's kept going up.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/hazards/2011/12/enso-global-temp-anomalies.png
