NOAA’s big announcement regarding last year’s average global temperature, which allegedly put 2014 at the top of hottest years under modern records, made top news among heavyweight news outlets – the AP included. At the time, the AP reported the findings absent some important disclaimers, prompting a largely unnoticed but significant “clarification” (read: correction) in a Friday afternoon news dump. A truncate of it reads: “In a story Jan. 16, The Associated Press reported that the odds that nine of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 2000 are about 650 million to one. These calculations, as the story noted, treated as equal the possibility of any given year in the records being one of the hottest. The story should have included the fact that substantial warming in the years just prior to this century could make it more likely that the years since were warmer, because high temperatures tend to persist. The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high – and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.” Oops. Too bad millions of people heard the opposite. The important thing is that the narrative lives. More…