Thread: 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

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.

DailyTech - Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data

Originally Posted by conservative

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.

DailyTech - Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data

Ice Age Melting and Rising Seas
Most of us are used to seasons. Each year, spring follows winter, which follows autumn, which follows summer, which follows spring, with winters that are colder than summers. But Earth can go through much larger temperature cycles over longer times than those that we normally experience.
Between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago, for instance, the planet was much colder than it is now. The temperature also changed a lot during that time, with periods of warming and cooling. Ice melted during the warm periods, which made sea levels rise. Water refroze during the cold times.

Con, I copied the above from a science for kids site in hopes to give you a better idea of the big picture. You see it really does not matter if 3 days 60-80 years ago happened to be the warmest, the fact is, our ice is melting and if a simple shift in ocean current were to occur everybody’s fucked.

Now I don’t necessarily ascribe to the theory that man is at fault but I do believe that if he is, it’s probably too late to fix things. But you see the thing is, I have been wrong a couple of times before and if there is slight chance that some of the innumerable scientists that are claiming otherwise might be right, and the result of following their advice might just lead us to not needing that fucking oil in the mid-east and telling them all to get fucked, I’m all for following it!

Wonder what 600-800 billion dollars investment in ridding ourselves of that addiction could have produced?

Originally Posted by conservative

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.

DailyTech - Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data

Doesn't matter. CO2 is 1.5 times heavier than garden variety air. That's why it's floating in the upper atmosphere, creating a "blanket" that is 0.038% as thick as anything else around it, causing people to seek shade when it's hot outside.

Originally Posted by dzustaparadox

Doesn't matter. CO2 is 1.5 times heavier than garden variety air. That's why it's floating in the upper atmosphere, creating a "blanket" that is 0.038% as thick as anything else around it, causing people to seek shade when it's hot outside.

I think clouds do the same thing at a lower altitude. Water vapor makes up a much larger portion of the atmosphere than CO2 and clouds and son explain temperature change better than CO2 anyway.

Man made CO2 is .0016% of the atmosphere. Water vapor is around a percentage. That's gotta be a rather thin blanket....

Reality Check:

Some says that CO2 is heavier than air, which is fine, but then uses that to explain why he believes it's in a layer in the upper atmostphere?

Hello?

Anyone out there? No. You're out there inspecting the ozone. There's no "CO2 layer".

I love how Warmists try and spin this to defend their religion.

Bottom line: it warms and cools all the time. The warming we're experiencing now (not even close to as warm as its been within the last 1000 years) is quite normal, and part of an ongoing cycle that happens all the time.

If Warmists gave a rats ass about the planet (and they dont, typically) they'd concentrate their efforts on whats important: alternative fuels, and cutting reliance on fossil fuels.

Originally Posted by mpano66

I love how Warmists try and spin this to defend their religion.

Bottom line: it warms and cools all the time. The warming we're experiencing now (not even close to as warm as its been within the last 1000 years) is quite normal, and part of an ongoing cycle that happens all the time.

If Warmists gave a rats ass about the planet (and they dont, typically) they'd concentrate their efforts on whats important: alternative fuels, and cutting reliance on fossil fuels.

The warmists as you call them make up the bulk of the scientific community and as this article states they may be wrong but they make up the overwhelming majority of experts in the field, you are in the minority. We know the earth is warming and based on what the experts say, man has had a hand in it.

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes*
Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

References and Notes


A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
See About IPCC.
J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
See AAAS ATLAS OF POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT.
The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put "climate change" in their key words, the paper was not about climate change.
This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture, "Consensus in science: How do we know we're not wrong," presented at the AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.

I'm not saying that I believe man is the cause or that he can do anything about it but to say those who believe man is the cause are a small group of whacko scientists is flat out bullshit. The overwhelming majority of experts say man is a contributing factor and to ignore them is pretty stupid.

Originally Posted by Pragmatist

I'm not saying that I believe man is the cause or that he can do anything about it but to say those who believe man is the cause are a small group of whacko scientists is flat out bullshit. The overwhelming majority of experts say man is a contributing factor and to ignore them is pretty stupid.

One belch from a volcano is far more deadly than years of human activity. The fact that the earth is warming isn't in dispute by many, what is in dispute is that mans existance is somehow balanced on a razor's edge and that saving it entails taxing the crap out of western countries to distibute to poorer countries....all the while exempting major world poluters.

That is the solution for those of the Global Warming Religion?

Originally Posted by Pragmatist

I'm not saying that I believe man is the cause or that he can do anything about it but to say those who believe man is the cause are a small group of whacko scientists is flat out bullshit. The overwhelming majority of experts say man is a contributing factor and to ignore them is pretty stupid.

It has been proven that man contributes to CO2 in the atmosphere. Scientists agree that CO2 is influencing the climate. The place where the alarmists go wrong (algore among them) is to take this agreement and turn it into an immediate crisis. There is very little scientific agreement on the "crisis." In fact most scientists think that natural variability in climate is full of unknowns and that man made CO2 only amplifies the natural trends of nature.