Ok, now this is classic. Bloggers have now debunked the myth that 1998 was the hottest 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.
Yup, man made global warming is here and its time you all realized this you knuckledraggers. Buy a damn Prius and STFU! You cannot dispute the data!
Guess someone just did.
Meanwhile go check out some of the comments left at Roger Pielke’s blog:
It appears that the historians busily re-writing history in the novel “1984″ have modern competition. Does the well-meaning possession of an agenda excuse such excess of professional scientists?
GISS may well have to adjust 2006 down a bit further [as Steve M observes, it’s only been adjusted down by 0.10 as compared to 0.15 for all other years].
As it stands, we are looking at a bladeless “Hockey Stick”, and for all intents and purposes at the falsification of the anthropogenic warming hypothesis for North America.
Of particular note is that the Climate Audit piece indicates that GISS has erased the old [unadjusted] data, giving it the makings of an excercise in covering one’s tracks. The legality of this must be questionable given that we are dealing a federally funded agency. Astounding.
Yesterday they completely overwrote their US data set, changing virtually every number prior to 2000, explaining this only with a cursory comment on their webpage. In addition, they have changed their UHI adjustments so that in many cases the changed UHI adjustments offset the error in their “raw” data.
Even before these change, I was unable to track their pre-2000 data to any archive. It was sort of like USHCN adjusted data in the 1990s but diverged in earlier periods. I’ve requested a copy of the original data set or information on its provenance.
I would welcome letters to GISS urging them to fully disclose their source code.
The unravelling of the GISS temperature story has only just begun and is bound to have repercussions. You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not both. The non-scientific, professional press have been airing questions about the IPCC “science” for some time now, and the mainstream media are picking up on the fact that some things don’t smell all too good in the AGW/Climate Change larder.
And this great comment rounds up the timeframe of events:
The whole issue came up because of some photos Anthony Watts volunteers took of the Detroit Lakes, MN USHCN site in July.
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=3891
Climate Audit first commented on the Detroit Lakes site on July 26th.
http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?paged=3
The debate/discussion continued with a post at
http://rabett.blogspot.com/ on August 1st.With a further look at the data, Steve McIntyre discovered the Y2K error and announced it on August 3rd.
http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?paged=2
And NASA corrected it’s GISTEMP data on August 7th. I believe.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
All happened very fast.
And this commenter explains why this change in data is so important:
the USA has been the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world over the past 100 years. We have for 20 years or so been asked to accept as the fundamental hypothesis the postulate that an increase in CO2 is the primary and single most important independant variable forcing increased temperatures. CO2 ppmv has continued to increase, temperatures have not. The hypothesis has been falsified for North America.
[…]The overarching question in all of this is: why have publicly funded research organizations [in the US, UK and elsewhere] been getting away with publishing increasingly questionable climate data that is turned into government policy as if gospel, without subjecting themselves the most basic of scientific scrutinies, that of publishing their respective “materials and methods” sections?
if CO2 is a so called greenhouse gas, it was supposed to force an increase in temperatures. This has not happened and is not happening. 1934, during the Depression and the ensuing economic downturn [= less use of hydrocarbons = less CO2] is the warmest year on record since 1900. There is no post-1998 Hockey Stick as forecast by the IPCC. The CO2 based AGW hypothesis has been falsified. Back to the drawing board.
The error noted by Steve M. was obvious, its source was obvious, and the fix was obvious. The keepers of the data could not argue against it and so they caved in and adjusted their data in less than a week. The fact that one error had such a profound impact on a key piece of hype that is used to push the need for drastic action should make everybody pause and wonder what the eventual outcome will be of the broader issues being looked at by Anthony Watts and his volunteer observers. What happens if there is another tenth of a degree (or more) taken out of the dataset by errors and biases uncovered there? Doesn’t that begin to call into question the whole theory of AGW? If the models can account for warming up to the 1950s with natural forcings, but not all of the warming since 1980, then what happens if that chunk of the post-1980s warming is found to be error or measurement artifacts? Will the experts admit that the models can account for all warming with natural forcings? Then what? The wheels fall off the Al Gore snake-oil-mobile…
For all who were sarcastic, etc., about that .1C. As pointed out that is 16.7% of a total phenomena claimed to be valid. Not only is it significant, considering that IPCC claimed that the correctness was about 99% and now part has been shown to be at best 83.3%, should cause an appreciation that potential (not actual) problems have been proven. The correction has falsified an important claim of at least the significance, if not the relation itself.
Much more where that came from. Go check it out.
See author page
And the Middle Ages was even warmer than the 30’s. Now they are saying it is natural occurances (duh…really!!!) that are hiding the effects of global warming and that it will really get bad in ’09…so sad!!!
“The wheels fall off the Al Gore snake-oil-mobile”
And if you follow the money, the wheels fall off of the “carbon credit” trading market and many relatives of politicians who have managed to place themselves in companies that “mitigate” global warming.
Not only does one of THE main issues of the “green left” disappear, but so does an entire market segment and those who were capitalizing on it. Don’t look so much at Gore’s snake oil, look at the value of the carbon credits he owns.
But that gives me an idea … a snake oil powered car.
Uh, guys, this is just the US average. 1998 is still way, way warmer than 1934 using the annual mean for the world. Try again.
Uh, dude:
Try again
Are you serious? Are you seriously going to pretend that the US can be treated as a closed system, and that our CO2 production must result in our warming? That’s nearing on the most scientifically ignorant thing you could say. Really, try again. The warming trend is indisputable.
As to the “result” above – 1934 was #2, 1998 was #1. Now the situation has reversed because of a .01 point change in the annual mean. This is laughable. That you would play this up is laughable. Seriously, get some better data.
And are you serious? Are you going to continue to pretend that humans are the cause of global warming on data that is continually proven wrong or is disputed in many circles. You are your kind pick and choose who to believe, the studies to believe and then mock changes in data that prove the global warming conspiracy theorists are wrong. Your a sheep, just admit it.
You really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? This is a 0.01 degree difference, NOT a 0.1 degree difference. Second, even if it was a 0.1 degree difference, that’s only the ANNUAL MEAN, which is subject to so much stochastic variance that no scientist would ever pretend it was meaningful. The trend is unchanged. Third, this is the ANNUAL MEAN for the United States only. The IPCC makes NO claims on the basis of US means, it uses global means. Tim Lambert of Deltoid has some nice plots of the change (though you could have reconstructed them yourself from the above data), and you can see for yourself how insignificant the shifts are: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/08/global_warming_totally_disprov.php
This result disproves nothing. You should check out the Instrumental Temperature Record (global mean) graph, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
You’ll note that, globally, 1998 is WAY WAY above 1934. And the warming trend is impossible to dispute. QED.
Whie it is possible that CO2 will increase the energy trapped in the lower atmosphere in a static model, none of the models include the other major feature of the system. Earth comes equipped with a convection-based refrigeration and shade system using water vapor as the working fluid. When water evaporates it cools the surface and when it condenses in the form of clouds it releases that energy very high up in the atmosphere while at the same time increasing the albedo to reflect more light into space before it has a chance to warm things and be trapped by CO2. None of the models factor in the water cycle.
Another environazi dismissing anything that proves their belief system is full of lies and half truths. Whether its dismissing the scientists who disagree with them as not educated enough to dismissing changes in data which was hidden from the masses.
It’s actually quite humorous. Watching people like you squirm because people are starting to come around to your religion and it’s complete stupidity.
I’m hardly squirming, Curt. You couldn’t come up with an adequate response to my comments, so you respond with insults? Please address what I said, if you can. I think you’ll find you can’t, simply because the vast majority of the scientific evidence (and not just a single piece of evidence, many, many independent lines of evidence) prove indisputably that warming occurred in the 20th century. I wish you would acknowledge this and stick to reasonable science, not to ideology.
Everything you addressed has been addressed in the post. You dispute it, I don’t. And believe me the religion you stick to is not reasonable science. It’s hocus pocus, but hey…maybe you still believe in santa claus also.
Your comments are typical and expected. The first step from the environazi’s is always to claim that we’re wrong, the data the is right. Then when proven that the data is indeed wrong they cry “insignificant.”
Oh, of course you threw in the expected “impossible to dispute” crapola also you are indeed being a good little environazi and sticking to the talking points.
saurabh, I won’t insult you, but hopefully I will give you some information to consider. I have no axe to grind about global warming and whether or not it exists, but I do have a graduate degree in statistics, am a former instructor of college stats and must say that from what I’ve been able to study, the methodology used in the climate studies would not pass even the simplest tests for validity.
NASA won’t release its data, which casts huge doubt on its approach. Furthermore, it is indeed a serious flaw to use only US data – it makes the sampling process totally non random and that means worthless. Couple that with some other new data – Austalia and Argentina (never included in the studies) experiencing their coldest temps ever and in a 5 year cooling trend, the subsurface ocean temps in the Atlantic in a four year cooling trend and lower than normal, the 40,000 square mile area in Texas where I live experiencing this summer it’s coldest temps on record (July the coldest in history while the publicity was all about Las Vegas which was 2 degrees above normal) and I conclude that before we start wondering about what’s causing warming, we should establish a mathematically valid case for it. To my mind (and the group of mathematicians with whom I correspond regularly) that simply has not yet been done. In fact, the data we can analyze (admittedly imperfect) show the earth’s overall temps to be in a period of stability and on the verge of a cooling trend.
My concern here is with the analysis of the data, as it’s a blot on an already misunderstood subject (statistics, in general) to publish any study on any subject which is blatantly wrong in its approach and then hide the data and methodology from fellow researchers.
NASA DID release its data. It is linked above. They’ve also published their methodology. You can read the references for yourself. It’s simply false to claim that they haven’t.
If you think the temperature record is unclear, or that the isolated instances of variance that you cite somehow obscure it (which, as a statistician, I would think you understand to be wholly unrepresentative and useless for examining trends), I would posit that it’s because you have not done due diligence in investigating it. I suggest you crawl through the references at the GISSTEMP page, here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/references.html
I’m sorry, I just got interested in this subject. I’m mystified by the concept of “global temperature” on a short time frame (like a year). The problem I see is that temperature is the wrong index of whatever is happening because the seas (water), surface materials (rocks, biota) and the atmosphere (gases)have different heat capacity and are not in thermal equilibrium. IF the the “globe” were homogeneous I could see taking a number of temperature measurments and trying to do some sort of statistical average to come up with a global mean. But I’m estimating teh heat capacity of a cubic unit of water is about 1000 time the heat capacity of air and apparently most of the data pertain to air. Is there a weighting scheme that weights water temperature and air temperature to represent the global heat capacities of tehse media? You could have a lot of heat stored in surface water with minimal thermal indication or very little heat stored in air with a large temperature change. Ultimately what we want to know is the energy balance. Temperature is not doing it for me.
A related point, the 18O/16O data provide an operational definition for historical global temperature. How do current isotope ratios compare with current averaged temperatures?
Moreover, do we know when the 18O/16O ratio is “frozen” in glacier ice? Is it when the snow flakes form (thousands of feet in the air) or does it happen on the surface of the new fallen snow through sublimation/deposition in the sun. If we are going to use the isotope ratio for ancient times, why not just scrape up this year’s snow fall and measure the ratio and call it a day.
I don’t get the tree ring thing either since tree growth is affected by temperature, water and CO2 levels. How do you resolve these factors.
DO we really have any data on the thermal balance of the biosphere?
Well, I painstakingly checked the NASA references, not one cites any actual data or readings or specifics on its methodology. I think omitting an entire hemisphere from the base data used in the UN studies is perhaps a “minor” flaw, and the sub surface oceanic temps to which I refer are not anecdotal, in fact, it’s the only ocean temp data extant. The methodology is a mess, and like so many other topics, such as abortion, this needs to be settled outside of the political arena, by people who do not stand to profit in any way from the results.