NASA corrects temperature data

[Qun Mang]

Did anyone see this? Interesting...

Global warming? Look at the numbers

Lorne Gunter, National Post

Published: Monday, August 13, 2007

In his enviro-propaganda flick, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. That's been a common refrain for environmentalists, too, and one of the centrepieces of global warming hysteria: It's been really hot lately -- abnormally hot -- so we all need to be afraid, very afraid. The trouble is, it's no longer true.

Last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- whose temperature records are a key component of the global-warming claim (and whose director, James Hansen, is a sort of godfather of global-warming alarmism) -- quietly corrected an error in its data set that had made recent temperatures seem warmer than they really were.

<Click for full article>

[Guest]

Oops!

[kat8585]

Maybe someone should tell Al Gore, ya think? Before he makes a fool of himself more than he already has? Oh, wait, wasn't it him that said we were going to freeze to death from global cooling 30 years ago? Or was it him that was saying back then that we would be dead in 30 years from warming? I can't remember, but it was one of these.

[georgesbluegirl]

Hold your horses. The difference between the two years is STILL less than the uncertainty factor. And it doesn't impact the current observed trend.

[nebula]

Hey, georgesbluegirl - you are going to have to explain what you mean by the "uncertainty factor".

Also, I'd like to hear your input on some points the article claims:

A little less than a decade ago, the U.S. government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones, though

What do you know about how temperatures were recorded a decade ago?

What do you know about how this affected numbers being changed?

-- no one until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, that is. . . . In 2003, along with economist Ross McKitrick, McIntyre demolished the Mann "hockey stick" --a graph that showed stable temperatures for 1,000 years, then shooting up dangerously in the last half of the 20th Century.

The graph was used prominently by the UN and nearly every major eco lobby. But McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated it was based on incomplete and inaccurate data.

To NASA's credit, when McIntyre pointed out their temperature errors they quickly made corrections.

Still, the pro-warmers who dominate the Goddard Institute almost certainly recognized the impacts these changes would have on the global-warming debate, because they made no formal announcement of their recalculations.

If the results do not alter the impacts, as you indicated above, why do you suppose no formal announcement had been made?

The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third.

Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression.

The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.

Thoughts?

In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.

Ever since the correction became a hot topic on blogs, the pro-warmers have tried to downplay its significance, insisting, for example, that the alterations merely amount to "very minor rearrangements in the various rankings."

It's true the changes aren't dramatic. But the optics are.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine the shrieking of the warmers if we had previously thought that hot years were scattered throughout the past 130 years, but after a correction the warmest years could be seen to be concentrated in the past decade.

They would insist the revised data proved their case. They would blitz every news organization and talk show. They would demand to be allowed to indoctrinate school children on the evils of cars and factories.

True or false? If false, what would be true?

Thanks!

[ted]

This story is irrelevant anyway because we need to get off our reliance of foreign oil regardless of whether global warming is or isn't caused by humans.

I think you're mixing up two different topics, my friend. The story is very relevant to the topic at hand- global warming. How that gets wrapped up with dependence on foreign oil is beyond me.

t.