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Oops! Hottest U.S. years in 1930s
NASA's error correction fuels global-warming skeptics

Was 1998 the hottest year in United States history, as most reporting on climate change has presumed? Or was that record set back in 1934 before "global warming" became a scary household phrase?

A corrective tweak to National Aeronautics and Space Administration's formulation shows that the hottest year on record in the United States indeed was back during the Dust Bowl days.

But does this mean that all the concern about global warming being a relatively recent phenomenon tied to carbon-belching power plants and hulking SUVs is a bunch of Al Gore hooey?

Climate change skeptics and their cheering section among conservative bloggers and radio shoutmeisters think so -- even though most scientists say, no, the tweak is not a big deal and overall trends are in the direction of toastier days around the globe.

The controversy began "when Steve McIntyre of the blog Climateaudit.org e-mailed NASA scientists pointing out an unusual jump in temperature data from 1999 to 2000," reports The Los Angeles Times.
"When researchers checked, they found that the agency had merged two data sets that had been incorrectly assumed to match. When the data were corrected, it resulted in a decrease of 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit in yearly temperatures since 2000 and a smaller decrease in earlier years. That meant that 1998, which had been 0.02 degrees warmer than 1934, was now 0.04 degrees cooler."

Put another way, the new figures show that 4 of the 10 warmest years in the United States occurred during the 1930s, not more recently. This caused a stir among those critical of the push to stem human-induced climate change.

"Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used reports of the revisions to argue that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists with liberal agendas," reported The Washington Post.
"We have proof of man-made global warming," Limbaugh said on his show. "The man-made global warming is inside NASA. The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data."

Blogger Steve McIntyre, who started the controversy, lives in Canada. His hometown newspaper, The Toronto Star, headlined its story "Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder."

"They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces."

Still, McIntyre called his finding "a micro-change," and others agree. For one, the reranking didn't affect global records, and 1998 remains tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record, the Los Angeles Times notes, quoting climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"The data adjustment changes 'the inconsequential bragging rights for certain years in the U.S.,' he said. But 'global warming is a global issue, and the global numbers show that there is no question that the last five to 10 years have been the hottest period of the last century.' "

A main target of criticism over the data shift is James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute at NASA and a frequently quoted expert on climate change. On his Web site, Hansen explained the reasons for the change, and he played down its importance.
"How big an error did this flaw cause? ... The effect on U.S. average temperature is about 0.15°C beginning in 2000. Does this change have any affect ... on the global warming issue? Certainly not. ... What we have here is a case of ... contrarians who present results in ways intended to deceive the public into believing that the changes have greater significance than reality. They aim to make a mountain out of a mole hill."

Meanwhile, evidence of global warming continues to mount. Citing a new study by researchers at the University of East Anglia, The Guardian newspaper reports that "some tipping points for climate change could be closer than previously thought."
"In drawing together research on tipping points, where damage due to climate change occurs irreversibly and at an increasing rate, the researchers concluded that the risks were much greater than those predicted by the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

Is the issue settled? Far from it, says Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama, who describes himself as "skeptical of the claim that global warming is mostly manmade."

Blogging on TCSDaily.com, Spencer writes:
"In case you hadn't noticed, the global warming debate has now escalated from a minor skirmish to an all-out war. ... In the last year or so, more and more scientists have been coming out of the closet and admitting they've had some doubts about this whole global warming thing."

Even though this is fairly old news be rehashed I posted it because when I was listening to the Weather Channel ( a strong advocate for global warming ) I heard an interesting statement being made. The statement was made by a meteorologists during a current live broadcast, not some time before this news came out. The person still gave 1998 as being the hottest year on record and was still advocating it as proof of global warming. Then commenced to give a forecast with below average temperatures for this time of year.

It is quite laughable how scientists refuse to let go of a theory (and that is all it is) even when they have been proven wrong.

Strong Evidence Points to Earth's Proximity to Sun as Ice Age Trigger
August 27, 2007

 When do ice ages begin? In June, of course. Analysis of Antarctic ice cores led by Kenji Kawamura, a visiting scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, shows that the last four great ice age cycles began when Earth’s distance from the sun during its annual orbit became great enough to prevent summertime melts of glacial ice. The absence of those melts allowed buildups of the ice over periods of time that would become characterized as glacial periods.
Results of the study appear in the Aug. 23 edition of the journal Nature.

Jeff Severinghaus, a Scripps geoscientist and co-author of the paper, said the finding validates a theory formalized in the 1940s but first postulated in the 19th Century. The work also helps clarify the role of carbon dioxide in global warming and cooling episodes past and present, he said.

“This is a significant finding because people have been asking for 100 years the question of why are there ice ages,” Severinghaus said.

A premise advanced in the 1940s known as the Milankovitch theory, named after the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, proposed that ice ages start and end in connection with changes in summer insolation, or exposure to sunlight, in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. To test it, Kawamura used ice core samples taken thousands of miles to the south in Antarctica at a station known as Dome Fuji.

Scientists studying paleoclimate often use gases trapped in ice cores to reconstruct climatic conditions from hundreds of thousands of years in the past, digging thousands of meters deep into ice sheets. By measuring the ratio of oxygen and nitrogen in the cores, Kawamura’s team was able to show that the ice cores record how much sunlight fell on Antarctica in summers going back 360,000 years. The team’s method enabled the researchers to use precise astronomical calculations to compare the timing of climate change with sunshine intensity at any spot on the planet.

Kawamura, a former postdoctoral researcher at Scripps, used the oxygen-nitrogen ratio data to create a climate timeline that was used to validate the calculations Milankovitch had created decades earlier. The team found a correlation between ice age onsets and terminations, and variations in the season of Earth’s closest approach to the sun. Earth's closest pass, or perihelion, happens to fall in June about every 23,000 years. When the shape of Earth's orbit did not allow it to approach as closely to the sun in that month, the relatively cold summer on Earth encouraged the spread of ice sheets on the Northern Hemisphere's land surface. Periods in which Earth passed relatively close in Northern Hemisphere summer accelerated melt and brought an end to ice ages.

“When we start to come to the point of closest approach in June, that’s when the big ice melts off,” said Severinghaus.

Kawamura said the new timeline will serve as a guide that will allow researchers to test climate forecast models of the effects of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The team found that the changes in Earth’s orbit that terminate ice ages amplify their own effect on climate through a series of steps that leads to more carbon dioxide being released from the oceans into the air. This secondary effect, or feedback, has accounted for as much as 30 percent of the warming seen as ice ages of the past have come to an end.

“An important point is that climate models should be validated with the past climate so that we can better predict what will happen in the future with rising CO2 levels,” said Kawamura. “For that, my new timescale can distinguish the contribution to past climate change from insolation change and CO2.”

In addition to Kawamura and Severinghaus, authors of the report included Takakiyo Nakazawa, Shuji Aoki, Koji Matsumoto, and Hisakazu Nakata of Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan; Frederic Parrenin of Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l’Environment in Grenoble, France; Lorraine Lisiecki and Maureen Raymo of Boston University; Ryu Uemura, Hideaki Motoyama, Shuji Fujita, Kumiko Goto-Azuma, Yoshiyuki Fujii, and Okitsugu Watanabe of the National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo, Japan; Manuel Hutterli of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England; and Francoise Vimeux and Jean Jouzel of Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Strong Evidence Points to Earth's Proximity to Sun as Ice Age Trigger (http://www.physorg.com/news107447240.html)

I thought this was interesting, who would have thought that proximity to the sun would affect the temperature.

A lot more believable than the global warming theory.

ABB
 
Air Products
 
Alcan
 
Alcoa Inc.
 
American Electric Power
 
Bank of America
 
Baxter International Inc.
 
BP
 
California Portland Cement Co.
 
CH2M HILL
 
Citi
 
Cummins Inc.
 
Deutsche Telekom
 
DTE Energy
 
Duke Energy
 
DuPont
 
Entergy
 
Exelon
 
GE
 
Georgia-Pacific
 
Hewlett-Packard Company
 
Holcim (US) Inc.
 
IBM
 
Intel
 
Interface Inc.
 
John Hancock Financial
 
Lockheed Martin
 
Marsh Inc.
 
Novartis
 
Ontario Power Generation
 
PG&E Corporation
 
Rio Tinto
 
Rohm and Haas
 
Royal Dutch/Shell
 
SC Johnson
 
Sunoco
 
The Boeing Company
 
Toyota
 
TransAlta
 
United Technologies
 
Weyerhaeuser
 
Whirlpool Corporation
 
Wisconsin Energy

http://www.pewclimate.org/companies_leading_the_way_belc/company_profiles/
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These 44 corporations with a combined total of 3.8 million employees and $2.8 trillion in market capitalization are all members of the Business Environmental Leadership Council (BELC).

It would appear self-evident that they have the resources and technical expertise to make an informed decision - which as one might suspect, directly contradicts the "uninformed" conclusions of Rush Limbaugh.

In addition to recognizing "global warming" as a reality, the BELC also believes it can provide leadership for the business community in order to provide "effective solutions."
(Business Environmental Leadership Council)
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"We (BELC) also believe that companies taking early action on climate strategies and policy will gain sustained competitive advantage over their peers."

Members of the BELC believe that from a business perspective, those competitors who continue to remain in a "state of denial" over the existance of "global warming" may be among its first victims.

 

I see you're still at it jgarden, just wanting to argue on the side of the tree huggers which have been proven wrong many times already. I suppose that you are an ardent fan of Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth".

Next, it was not "the "uninformed" conclusions of Rush Limbaugh". Rush was not the source of the "conclusions" on this. He just reported them. The person that found this NASA error has nothing to gain either way in this finding other than to be right or wrong.

The majority of those companies that you mentioned serve to make a lot of money off of carbon offsets which has already been proven to be nothing more than a money making scheme and does nothing to actually reduce carbon levels. A number of those companies also support many other liberal agendas such as same sex marriages, illegal immigration, and I wouldn't doubt if there are at least a couple there that support a few terrorists organizations.

As I've told you before, be careful, be very careful who you support. It is better to support God than it is to support false science.

AMEN PR!!!!

Amen PR.

AMEN brother AMEN!!!