What are you to do if you are a liberal journalist and you get the news that 2017 was actually cooler than the year before it, 2016?  You can't write a headline that reads, "Earth getting cooler," because the enviro-nuts will storm your offices with pitchforks, and Al Gore, the grand imam of the environmentalist doomsday cult, will issue a fatwa ordering that steps be taken to stop you from exhaling carbon dioxide.

So what does a liberal writer do?  The answer: Disguise the truth.

The New York Times headline was "2017 Was One of the Hottest Years on Record."  Reading it, an uninformed person would think 2017 was hotter than ever, without quite lying about the facts.

 Here's the WaPo's misleading headline: "The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history."  Again, not an out-and-out lie, but a misleading statement meant to disguise the most recent cooling.

Here's what claims to be the data on historical climate temperatures, from the NYT article:

You can see the inconvenient fact of the cooling in 2017 compared to 2016.  Liberal writers explain it away by saying that even if 2017 wasn't the warmest on record, it is still on that sharp upward trajectory.

The only problem is that the chart itself is a lie.  Climate data has been manipulated to falsely show warming.

The raw temperature data shows no clear trend of global warming.  Only when the data is "adjusted" does it show a warming trend.  And guess what: the more the data is adjusted, the warmer the temperature seems to be.

This process of falsifying temperature readings has been widely reported on:

A new study found [that] adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years "are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data."

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for "biases" in the data.  The new study doesn't question the adjustments themselves but notes adjustments ha[ve] increased the warming trend in published temperature records over the years.

"Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments," Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.  "Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming."

"You would think that when you make adjustments you'd sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling.  That's almost never happened," said D'Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.

What's incredible is that even with widespread tampering, 2017 was still reported to be much cooler than 2016.  I'm guessing that upon examination of the real temperatures, before they were "adjusted," one must find that 2017 was substantially cooler than 2016.

No amount of fact will convince the left.  That's why they have to make up headlines to disguise truth, even after trying their best to change the "facts" to suit their own purposes.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.