January 2006 was very warm in the US. I remember sitting outside in shorts and a t-shirt and thinking that global warming was the cause. That summer I drove through Sacramento, California at 115 degrees. Global warming was looking bad! But a few weeks later the weather turned cold and wet, and Fort Collins had their largest snowstorm on record during Christmas Week that year.
Since 2006, January temperatures in the US have plummeted, and the frequency of cold nights has skyrocketed. The century trend for January temperatures in the US is downwards.
I first heard about global warming in 1980 while working at Los Alamos National Labs. It turned out that the warming from 1979 to 2006 was not a linear trend, rather it was one arm of a cycle. In 2008 I wrote my first climate article in The Register, showing how temperature data was being altered by government agencies.
