Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data — Daily Tech

Errors in programming, and the resulting data, have been found, leading to skewed data regarding global warming. Five of the top-ten hottest years on record occurred before World War II, and 1998, the long-touted “hottest year on record,” is now in second-place behind 1934.

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.

First of all, why wouldn’t the algorithms be published? In the name of science, if that really is the goal, all data should be published to guarantee no mistakes. In this case, it took a programmer to reverse-engineer the algorithm to find out that mistakes were made. Now, only three years in the past ten make the top-ten hottest.

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.

There is still no mention of this on the mainstream media, to my complete lack of surprise. Such a skewing of the data would presumably have huge implications on the global warming propaganda machine; however, it remains to be seen if the public will be given the full information. (Don’t hold your breath, getting the correct information from the media is, at least at this point, a fantasy.)

NASA’s data corrections have been posted. A more in-depth look at the data can be found here.

For more of my opinions on “global warming,” check my ongoing global warming post.