Has anyone noticed Nasa revised its numbers and 1934 is now the hottest year on record, not 1998?

Question

I'm just wondering how this will affect the global warming debate.

http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

Answer 1

Judging by the damage control being performed here, my guess is it will be BIG.

To cambelp2002: Take a look at your info again, starting with the second site you provided:
"Annual and five-year running mean surface air temperature in the contiguous 48 United States relative to the 1951-1980 mean."

The anomaly is measured against the average temp from 1951-1980. This means that the "x-axis" (ie, y=0) is set to that average, and that 1934 was 1.25 degrees higher than that value, hence the hottest recorded year in the 48. Why this convention is used probably has some significance, maybe because 51-80 represents a cooling trend, quite the opposite of what we are now seeing.

Global temps also use this convention:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.txt

And parrot: Thanks for the link. With climateaudit down until earlier today, I had not had a chance to see that info. I applaud your forthrightness in including this link, but you very much misrepresented McIntyre's view. He only said it was not a "magic bullet", but by every other indication he implies it is a "smoking gun".

He stares here and elsewhere that the global temperature measurements appear as troubling, if not more than the US numbers, which are still, despite recent corrections, possibly in error. You couldn't possibly have read that text and missed those points - they were the crux of the article.

His conclusion:
"One more story to conclude. Non-compliant surface stations were reported in the formal academic literature by Pielke and Davey (2005) who described a number of non-compliant sites in eastern Colorado. In NOAA’s official response to this criticism, Vose et al (2005) said in effect -

it doesn’t matter. It’s only eastern Colorado. You haven’t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the United States.

In most businesses, the identification of glaring problems, even in a restricted region like eastern Colorado, would prompt an immediate evaluation to ensure that problems did not actually exist. However, that does not appear to have taken place and matters rested until Anthony Watts and the volunteers at surfacestations.org launched a concerted effort to evaluate stations in other parts of the country and determined that the problems were not only just as bad as eastern Colorado, but in some cases were much worse.

Now in response to problems with both station quality and adjustment software, Schmidt and Hansen say in effect, as NOAA did before them -

it doesn’t matter. It’s only the United States. You haven’t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the world."


But there were other enjoyable tidbits, including this response by a reader:

"The numbers don’t need to be correct to be factual and facts don’t have to be real to prove arguments. What really matters is that truthiness is equal to or greater than the sum of all claptrap.

This is just sickening. When this finally plays out it is going to leave generations of fringe groups, pseudo-scientists, quantum crystal grippers and religious wackos claiming that since the human induced climate apocalypse theory was bunk, they deserve at least as much respect for their bunk as any other science.

Just as every headcase out there claims to be the modern day equivalent of Galileo, the cry of “remember global warming” will issue from countless crackpots down through time. I always knew Al Gore would ruin the world."

Answer 2

Yes I've noticed. The figures relate only to the US and the temp difference between 1934 and 1998 was, and still is, very small indeed. When the erroneous (and corrected) figures are fed into the global picture the errors are so minute that they're of no significance and have no effect on climate models, temperature records etc - we're talking here of a variation of approx 0.0005°C.

The only effect it will have on the debate is that some skeptics with little knowledge of the insignificance of the errors will use them in an attempt to discredit the science of global warming. I'm not aware that a single credible skeptic has so much as mentioned the figures let alone used them to support his / her arguments.

If you want a slightly more technical explanation as to what happened then see my answer to this question - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AuPTkzq.aoFd2vtFZButRGnsy6IX?qid=20070812092428AAHi9Sx&show=7#profile-info-20f3291b9320a302e9070bf55325531daa (the reasons are not as reported in some sections of the media)

Answer 3

Revised Temp Data Reduces Global Warming Fever ---

By Marc Sheppard --- The American Thinker Blog --- 9 August 07

1998 was not the hottest US year ever. Nor was 2006 the runner up.

Sure, had you checked NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
website just days ago, you would have thought so, but not today. You see,
thanks to the efforts of Steve McIntyre over at
http://www.climatea udit.org/ , the Surface Air Temperature Anomaly charts for
those and many other years have been revised - predominately down.

Why?

It's a wild and technical story of compromised weather stations and hack
computer algorithms (including, get this - a latent Y2K bug) and those
wishing to read the fascinating details should follow ALL of the links I've
provided. But, simply stated, McIntyre not only proved the error of the
calculations used to interpret the data from the 1000 plus US Historical
Climatology Network (USHCN) weather stations feeding GISS, but also the
cascading effect of that error on past data.

You see, as Warren Meyer over at Coyoteblog.com (whose recent email
expressed a delight we share in the irony of this correction taking place
the week of the Gore / Newsweek story) points out:

"One of the interesting aspects of these temperature data bases is that
they do not just use the raw temperature measurements from each station.
Both the NOAA (which maintains the USHCN stations) and the GISS apply many
layers of adjustments. "

It was the gross folly of these "fudge factors" McIntyre challenged NASA on.
And won.

Today, not only have the charts and graphs been modified, but the GISS
website includes this acknowledgement that:

"the USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of
USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by
comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to
thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment
is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000.)"

But, as only the Gorebots actually believe the hype that recent year to year
temperature shifts are somehow proof of anthropogenic global warming, why is
this significant?

As explained by Noel Sheppard over at Newsbusters:

"One of the key tenets of the global warming myth being advanced by
[GISS head James] Hansen and soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore is that nine of the ten
warmest years in history have occurred since 1995."

Additionally, as broken by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show this afternoon,
Reuters is now reporting in a piece entitled Scientists predict surge in
global warming after 2009 that:

"A study forecasts that global warming will set in with a vengeance
after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be
hotter than 1998, which was the warmest year on record."

As so deftly observed by El Rushbo, who wonders how long NASA has been aware
of the errors, many greenies have spread their nonsense using 1998's bogus
distinction to generate angst amongst the weak-minded.

Yet - thanks to a Blogging Scientist -- that's all changed now - check the
newly revised GISS table.

1934 is now the hottest, and 3 others from the 1930's are in the top 10.
Furthermore, only 3 (not 9) took place since 1995 (1998, 1999, and 2006).
The years 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 are now below the year 1900 and no longer
even in the top 20.

So, we're not really on a roller-coaster to hell, then?

Of course, eco-maniacs will argue that it's the global readings that count,
not those of the USA alone. Nuts to that. It's nearly impossible to
believe that when put to similar close scrutiny, global mechanisms will
stand the heat any better than ours.

Besides, as GISS hosts the reference database of choice for all manner of
enviro-mental- cases, one would think such a significant content correction
itself would spark huge news and greenie-card reevaluation, right?

Well -- as Noel asked and answered his readers:

"Think this will be Newsweek's next cover-story? No, I don't either."

Perfect.

Answer 4

the reason why you are giving a blogger site as a source is because it is not an issue. Notice that your blog says "US temperature data"-and its only one piece of US temperature data. This is a classic example of data manupulation by the right wing denier movement:

2005 is still the hottest year on record
1998 is still second, then:
2002
2003
2004
2006

and 1934 is still not in the top 25.

campbelp2002 sums it up pretty well.

Answer 5

This question has already been asked a dozen times. It's been asked so frequently that I devoted a question to explaining how wrong the Rush Limbaughs of the world got it:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgCxBALgHOtjhactMX_WFDjsy6IX?qid=20070810115452AAYt0LI

It's got no effect on global warming data.

Answer 6

Oh dear, not this again.

Ok, here's what actually happened. Recently, Stephen McIntyre found a very minor flaw in one data set from one US temperature station. He alerted James Hanson and Reto Ruedy of NASA of the error, which was subsequently fixed; McIntyre was accredited and thanked for the find. Immediately after, the story took hold among radio pundits and Bloggers, who blew the whole thing out of proportion (surprising no one in the process), claiming that it was a fraud, that warming had stopped in 1934, and that the entire temperature record was a fake.

Stephen McIntyre himself has posted a message on his Blog, ClimateAudit.org, saying the whole thing, while significant in his view, wasn't nearly as important as people were making it out to be. You can read the post here:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1885#more-1885

RealClimate, a Blog run by thirteen climate scientists, has also posted an article explaining the issue. You can read that here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/

And James Hanson, the NASA scientist who fixed the problem, has also written a response, which you can read here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_LightUpstairs_70810.pdf

As RealClimate says, the whole thing is a classic case of trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Answer 7

It won't affect the global warming issue at all. IF you read the whole story--the revison is that 1934 was the hottest year --but only for the United States. The world figures are essentially unchanged--and this is about GLOBAL warrming, remember?

Answer 8

You are misreading the data. I went to the corrected figures that NASA has now silently released by following the link in the blog. It took me here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
That is a tabular version of one of the graphs here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs
That table is year to year differences, not actual temperatures. (And by the way it is only U.S. average differences, not global) It says that 1934 was 1.25 degrees warmer than 1933 and also that 1998 was only 1.23 degrees warmer than 1997. But that does NOT mean that 1934 was 0.02 degrees warmer than 1998. To determine if 1998 was cooler than 1934 you would have to add up all the year by year changes from 1934 to 1998. 1935 was 0.04 degrees warmer than 1934, 1936 was 0.21 degrees warmer than 1935, 1937 was 0.13 degrees cooler than 1936, and so on. Adding up the first 3 years I mentioned says that 1937 was 0.12 degrees warmer than 1934 for example. Adding up all the year by year changes in excel tells me that 1998 was 5.66 degrees warmer that 1934, USING THE CORRECTED DATA REFERENCED IN THE BLOG.

Answer 9

It's going to fuel the anti-GW propaganda machine. Rush Limbaugh was spouting about it on Friday.

The fact is, energy conservation is good and the government's role should be to provide incentives. Fossil fuel energy is a finite object. It will be going away sooner or later and it will become a burden on our economy sooner. Whether global warming is happening or not is not going to be decisively answered anytime soon, but it could provide the impetus to a new way of thinking about energy.

Answer 10

Being a scientist myself, it is embarrassing and disheartening.

It's going to hurt the debate because it always looks bad when an entity that can send a man to the moon and back can't do basic math. It looks bad when scientists who want to keep their jobs twist numbers to please the agenda of a politician who is wanting votes.