Everyone knows that there was a Y2K bug…a programming error that didn’t correctly recognize years starting in 2000 and beyond. Apparently this has affected NASA’s climatology data baseand no one knew. One result is, as Gaius says, yearly heat rankings have changed:
How badly has this changed things? Well the “warmest year on record” is not 1998 as was originally claimed. The warmest year was 1934. In fact the ranks have really changed a lot.
How much have things changed?
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.
Here’s the new results from Watts:
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations 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. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)
One wonders what the Left will say now.
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“One wonders what the Left will say now.”
Oh, no need to wonder, they’re already saying it on the various comment threads I’ve seen. “This is only the US data! 1998 was still the hottest year GLOBALLY!”
It’s not just a river in Egypt…