Environmental Talk

Hope the data’s being recorded in pencil ….

It all seemed to make so much sense. Greenhouse gases had been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Then came the pronouncements: “1998 was the warmest year in our country’s history,” “nine of the 10 hottest years on record all occurred since 1990,” and on and on.

The data was provided by NASA so you knew it had to be accurate. After all, these were the folks that had landed on the moon and sent an unmanned rover to Mars.

With all that data, only an idiot couldn’t connect the dots and come to the conclusion that global warming was all the fault of us humans.

There was just one problem. The dude at NASA in charge of temperature data couldn’t add.

NASA officials were red-faced today (but not from a global warming induced heat wave) when it was revealed that the temperature data for the past 20 years or so hadn’t been calculated correctly.

Some people might consider the new data to be just a little bit troubling for the climate change Cassandras of the world.

The Toronto Star describes the um, er, … glitch like this:

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. “temperature anomalies” for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

Remember how scared you were when, sitting in a darkened theater, Al Gore told you that nine of the 10 hottest years in history had occurred since 1995? Turns out you didn’t have to worry and you should have gone to see The Departed like you wanted to.

The NASA revisions for the hottest years now shake out like this:

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.

80% of man-made CO2 emissions have occurred after 1940. This remains one of the more bothersome facts that keeps getting in the way of the whole humans-cause-global-warming theory.

Kudos to NASA for investigating and admitting the mistake. It couldn’t have been easy for them in the current political environment.

And shame on the continued attempts by climate change advocates to attempt to stifle dissent on a complex and unsettled topic.

global warming, climate change, NASA, temperature record, hottest year on record, Dust Bowl, 1934, 1998