In March of 2015, Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz for the state of Texas told Seth Meyers on the show Late Night that “satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming. None whatsoever.” Sen. Cruz states that this fact is evidence that those warning of the reality and impacts of human-caused global warming are incorrect and merely alarmists. The statistic begs the question, why 17 years? This report investigates how changing that observation period impacts the findings of whether the planet is warming.