If you shift the end point you cannot make any claim about the last y years, because the last y years always end at the beginning of the current year. What he did is to take the entire dataset, not some selected part of it.<p>And there aren't many places on earth for which long term measurements even exist. So selecting this particular dataset seems plausible enough to me.<p>On the other hand I would like to hear the counter arguments as well, because if this is such an important dataset, proponents of AGW will have an opinion on it. There may be a good counter argument.