This claim was based on its interpretation of recent data from the U.K.'s Meteorological Office (the Met), one of the world's leading agencies monitoring climate change.

Journalist David Rose argued it showed there has been no appreciable rise in global temperatures for almost 16 years, from early 1997 until August 2012.

He added that's the same length of time global temperatures rose from 1980 to 1996 after being relatively stable, or slightly in decline, for 40 years prior to that.

(Recall the brief global cooling scare of the 1970s.)

So, does this prove the theory of man-made global warming - that global temperatures rise in lockstep with increasing man-made industrial carbon dioxide emissions - is a hoax?

No. The Met certainly didn't say that.

In fact, it issued a statement Monday accusing Rose of publishing misleading information about its data - twice - of cherry-picking, and of not including the Met's position that "the current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15-year-long periods are not unusual."

Rose had criticized the Met for releasing the 2012 data "quietly on the Internet, without any media fanfare" in "sharp contrast" to its actions six months earlier when it released data up to the end of 2010, a very warm year, thus showing "a slight warming trend."

What this shows is how politicized even the release of basic climate data has become.

Rose didn't deny global warming exists.

Far from it. He wrote: "(L)et's be clear. Yes, global warming is real and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 (carbon dioxide) emitted by fossil fuels."

That could have been written by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, except it would have said man-made emissions are responsible for most modern warming.

Further, the theory there's been a pause or hiatus in global warming - which early climate models failed to predict because they weren't programmed to take into account natural factors affecting climate such as the sun and ocean currents - isn't new.

As I reported in May 2008, for example, German climate scientists with the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences theorized at that time in a paper published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that global warming had temporarily stopped due to the influence of ocean currents. They predicted global temperatures would not start rising again until at least 2015, when the underlying man-made warming would re-appear.

One problem with determining whether the Earth is warming is that it's hard to measure.

The Met says 1998 was the warmest year on record, meaning in the past 132 years for which reliable temperature data exist.

NASA, another leading global climate monitoring agency, says 2005 and 2010 tied as the warmest years.

Interpreting temperature trends obviously depends on what years you choose.

If you pick 1997-2012, as Rose did, the Earth hasn't warmed significantly for almost 16 years.

But if you compare temperatures on a decade-by-decade basis, as the Met does, they've been rising for several decades and continue to do so today.

That's why relatively long periods of time - 30 years at a minimum - are needed to credibly determine global temperature trends.

Problem is, there are huge policy implications for the public right now if it turns out natural factors are having a greater influence on climate than previously believed.

This would call into question the value of government carbon pricing schemes such as cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, as well as the massive public subsidization of green energy.

Particularly since to date, none of them has significantly lowered greenhouse gas emissions, much less cooled the planet.