NASA corrects climate figures: Warmest year on record is 1934

Via Michael Asher at the Daily Tech Blog (emphasis his):

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000. 

These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place.  1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.  Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events. 

Warren Meyer at The Coyote Blog has much more, and notes something at the beginning that scares the absolute you-know-what out of the global warming alarmist crowd: that debate is, you know, healthy:

This is really big news, and a fabulous example of why two-way scientific discourse is still valuable, in the same week that both Newsweek and Al Gore tried to make the case that climate skeptics were counter-productive and evil. 

Vindication is sweet.

This is, btw, the hottest story at Memeorandum right now, but I’m not seeing a lot of lefty/greenie blogposts on it for some reason …  :-?


Not a happy camper.

The Goracle couldn’t be reached for comment.

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