In 1999, Hansen was concerned that the very high quality US temperature record showed 70 years of cooling, while his very low quality, cherry-picked, massively extrapolated global temperature record showed strong warming.

Science Briefs
Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen … August 1999

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature?

in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing…