An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action (Source: NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies)
Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record
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.
The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less
warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming
propaganda machine could be huge.
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to
no attention from the mainstream media.
