The Washington Post published an article this week which explained why people differ in their interpretations of climate data trends.  Trends are highly biased by which time period you pick to calculate the trend, and this article explains why we can have both a short-term cooling or hiatus in warming trends at the same time the longer-term trends show warming across the country.  Meteorologists tend to look at short-term trends, according to the article, while climatologists look at longer-term trends and consider short-term trends to be inconsequential.  You can read the article by clicking here.