re: I know a climatologist in Japan who knows these people
Since he is your friend, you might point out some problems with his link.
"We will compare global surface temperatures in 1998-2003 with those in 2012-2017 (6 year average in both cases), using the USA National Climatic Data Center data (which can currently be found here for annual and here for monthly analyses). (Update 13 Feb 2007: data seems to have moved to here.)"
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/08/bet.html
His updated link is:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1961-1990mean.dat
...
1998 0.4918
1999 0.3087
2000 0.2775
2001 0.4083
2002 0.4720
2003 0.4718
2004 0.4509
2005 0.5260
2006 -999.0000