For the purpose of assessing the rate of global warming, whether a temperature index has the highest recent temperatures is less important than whether it has the highest difference between more recent temperatures and less recent temperatures.

I believe that GISS also wins by that standard.

So it should be possible to independently reproduce the GISS index oneself without relying on "the authority of James Hansen".

Evidently, when creating a temperature index, judgments must be made about what data to use; how to crunch the numbers; and so on. Presumably that's why the leading temperature indices don't all agree. In the case of GISS, those judgments seem to have been made in such a way as to favor the warmist side of things. I strongly suspect this is the result of some kind of bias.