Oops. NASA Y2K bug discovered; climate data quietly changed

The only people who are really going to be affected by this (and subsequently whine that the "global warming deniers" are behind it) are the Goracle's minions. But Charles Johnson points out that a blogger discovered the bug, and that NASA has corrected it's data:

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 U.S. 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.

Mr. Asher, who wrote the above post, is correct. The MSM isn't touching this one at all. But Charles isn't the first one to jump on this. Ace at Ace of Spades takes note of an interesting twist in this little revelation, courtesy of Coyote blog:

Cuffy Meiggs, who I often think of as "Drew," says "dig deeper" into that Tech blog site TigerHawk links. Here's the thing: James Hansen, who accused Bush of politicizing global warming science, is responsible for the bugged algorithms that produced the erroneous figures. Furthermore, he refused to release his algorithms so that they could be checked. The bug was discovered by someone who took the time to reverse-engineer Hansen's flawed algorithm, and then, having accurately done so, proved NASA's numbers were wrong. Thus causing the revision.

So James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves.

Wow. Sound familiar? Sounds vaguely like the people who still swear to this day that the "THEORY of evolution" is "settled" science. I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to this sort of science, I'm at a loss. It's just not my cup of tea. But I can smell BS a mile away, and the idea that's being peddled that we are the cause for the rise in temperatures is bull. Weather patterns and climate patterns do run in a cyclical manner. To put it succinctly, the Earth has warmed and cooled since it's birth, and will continue to do so for years. There's no way we could significantly alter the way these patterns run. This goes back to the same meme perpetuated by the anti-nukes crowd back in the 1980s.

Then, they claimed that if we detonated every nuclear weapon on the planet, we'd blow it up. Um, no. We'd end all life on the face of the planet, but there's no way we could blow up the Earth. We don't have the technological genius to do such a thing. (And the last time I checked, Karl Rove hadn't built a Death Star, yet.)

Are we affecting our temperatures? It is a possibility that we are, but the actual affect is not in the dire predictions the Goracle's minions make it out to be. We will not burn up in the next decade, or in the next ten decades. Fluctuations are normal, and nominal, at best. The global warming cult out there right now is running around like Chicken Little, and predicting this and that, but Mother Nature just won't cooperate with them. For the second year in a row, hurricane experts have had to adjust their initial predictions because they just aren't occurring at the pace they suggested.

I'd also like to point out to the global warming crowd that we are in the summertime. Arizona has had a particularly mild summer, so far. I still maintain that we probably won't see a 120 degree temperature this summer. I won't make that a prediction because I could be wrong. I'm not a climatologist, and no I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn last night. But I have lived here since 1981, and we've seen some nasty summers, and we've seen mild ones. This is a mild one so far.

I can't buy the global warming crowd because their theory doesn't pass the smell test. It makes little sense, and when they go out on limbs to try and prove their point (going into the distant past for temperature records when I was unaware that those in Biblical times even had a way to measure temperature) it leaves me feeling like I'm dealing with an Amway salesman, and not a climatologist. For that matter, I can't believe so many people are falling for Al Gore's theory when the guy isn't even a scientist, let alone a climatologist.

Publius II