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'on record' is a pretty useless measure.

It's a way to make a story more sensational than it is. You see it in tabloid newspapers often:

Headline: "Man eats biggest fish ever recorded!!!"

Small print: 'records on biggest fish eaten by humans have been kept for the last 6 weeks'.

Is it just me that is extremely uneasy about taking a few years of data, out of the bajillion years the earth has been about, and drawing any conclusions from it?

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It's not useless - it's just limited.

"Warmest decade in 160 years" still tells you something. It just doesn't tell you _everything_. As we can never have perfect data on everything, learning to take things in context and understand what they are good for (and what they aren't) is a vital skill.

Here's a great presentation on understanding just how limited the data is: http://web.mit.edu/esi/symposia/symposium-2009/wunsch.html

I would have thought though that 160 years when studying climate, is absolutely nothing.

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