Sierra Rayne, writing at the American Thinker blog over the weekend, took a gentle pop at AP's Seth Borenstein for making alarmist claims regional temperature trends in the USA while barely paying lipservice to standard statistical techniques.
The AP used "the least squares regression method" to calculate the annual temperature trend for all these regions, but then proceeded to ignore entirely whether the regression method indicated if the trend was statistically significant (the typical criteria would be a p-value<0.05).
This is first-year statistics level stuff. Quite simply, if your statistical test ("least squares regression method") tells you the trend isn't significant, you cannot claim there is a trend, since the null hypothesis (i.e., no trend) cannot be rejected with any reasonable degree of confidence.
In an area like climate, you would have thought an experienced journalist like Borenstein would take some statistical advice before writing.