New Troubles for the Climate Change Fringe

It's always fun to see truth shine through the religious zealotry of the climate change crowd. Consider as you read this that 80% of man-made carbon emissions occurred after 1940. The latest is just beautiful (HT/Dave Riggs):

New Rankings for Warmest Years – 1934 Now Warmest in U.S. History – NASA Temp Error Rewrites Record Books
Excerpt: By Joseph D’Aleo, Icecap

With the changes to the GISS data made today after an error was found by Stephen McIntyre, 1998 falls to #2 behind 1934 as the warmest year, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999 and 1953. Expect more changes to come in the months ahead as more scrutiny of the data bases takes place. Note in the graph below the peak in the five year mean around 2000 is a mere 0.25F higher than that in the early 1930s.

More on NASA’s Reported Whopper of a Mistake

Excerpt: Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings are calculated separately.) Note: For the new leaderboard see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt.

Recent changes to the NASA historical climate data records refute claims by Gore that 9 of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995 (Newsbusters)

Excerpt: A change in climate history data at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently occurred which dramatically alters the debate over global warming. Yet, this transpired with no official announcement from GISS head James Hansen, and went unreported until Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered it Wednesday. <> Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.As global warming is such a key issue being debated all around this country and on Capitol Hill, wouldn’t such a change by the agency responsible for calculating such things be important to disseminate? When this correction was made by Hansen’s team at the GISS, shouldn’t it have been reported?In fact, it is quite disgraceful that it wasn’t, as it suggests that a government agency is actually participating in a fraud against the American people by withholding information crucial to a major policy issue now facing the nation. Think this will be Newsweek’s next cover-story? No, I don’t either. Post facto thought: If Hansen’s team had made changes to the data which showed that ten of the ten warmest years in American history occurred since 1995, do you think that would have been reported? Yeah, I do, too.

NASA’s James Hansen Reported Temperature Data Error Discovered (Note: This is a developing and story of potentially huge magnitude)

Excerpt: Steve McIntyre: I observed recently that Hansen’s GISS series contains an apparent error in which Hansen switched the source of GISS raw from USHCN adjusted to USHCN raw for all values January 2000 and later. For Detroit Lakes MN, this introduced an error of 0.8 deg C. I’ve collated GISS raw minus USHCN adjusted for all USHCN sites (using the data scraped from the GISS site, for which I was most criticized in Rabett-world). Figure 1 below shows a histogram of the January 2000 step for the 1221 stations (calculated here as the difference between the average of the difference after Jan 2000 and for the period.) <> NASA admists Error: “When we did our monthly update this morning, an offset based on the last 10 years of overlap in the two data sets was applied and our on-line documentation was changed correspondingly with an acknowledgment of your contribution. This change and its effect will be noted in our next paper on temperature analysis and in our end-of-year temperature summary.” (Stay tuned for this developing story)