There is quite a story, a back story, really, concerning the Tom Karl paper in 
2015 in which he concluded that there never was a pause in global warming because they needed to adjust the Sea Surface Temper-atures upward to make other measurements comport to (or with) the ship turbine inlet temps.
This gets into the weeds in a hurry, so to get in slowly, start with the Daily Mail link, then go to Tallbloke and finally to Judith Curry’s piece on this.
Avoiding the Weeds
The story centers on John Bates who just retired from NCDC and his battle with Tom Karl over the fact that the data and processing are irreproducible and clearly not in accordance with the requirements for publication by SCIENCE nor the data quality requirements internal to NOAA itself
https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-climate-data/
also
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/noaa-whistleblower-reveals-pausebuster-scandal/
in the popular press here:
The Washington Post did not allow John Bates to publish an op-ed on this. Another reason why I hold the Washington Post in such contempt.
This is another reason why we see so much Fake News there.
The Main Stream Media are insuring that people go to the Blogs and alternative media outside the USA.
Bob’s Personal Story:
Forty Eight years ago when I was at Penn State, our class in advanced meteorological analysis used data gathered by Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories from Vietnam; it consisted of surface weather observations, radiosonde data from Army Artillery Brigades and the Navy Carrier at Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf, and weather radar data. As an additional duty, I took it upon myself, with coordination with the now late Dr Karl Kreitzberg, of subjecting the data to quality control steps which I thought it needed.
The routines I used in analyzing these data were programs I wrote in FORTRAN and processed at the Penn State Computer Center.
Much (25 years) later, I became aware of the requirement to use Revision Controlled Software to insure that the code itself is subject to strict controls to insure that the code runs in a systematic manner, and that software testing is repeatable and within the bounds of the RCS version and versioning. For several years I tested IMETS software at Ft Hood, where all of the Army Battle Command Software was tested in a huge interoperability laboratory, with the dozens of Army functional elements bringing and using RCS-Controlled software.
Only software meeting those requirements for RCS, and passing tests in the interoperability laboratory was to be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other Army users.
So to see that Tom Karl did not use RCS controlled software and that he had his “thumb on the scale” towards warming should not really come as a shock, but to see this behind the scene fight now come into the open is quite the story.
This is important. It will take time to digest.
But the paper rushed — just-in-time for the 2015 UN Paris Global Warming meeting– is not settled science, far from it.