Amateur corrects NASA’s statistics
The Guardian has reported how meteorologist Stephen McIntyre noticed errors in NASA’s calculations of global warming trends which were used to enforce the idea of climate change in Al Gore’s environmental film An Inconvenient Truth.
It claimed that 1998 was the hottest day in US history when in fact 1934 was two hundredths of a degree warmer. NASA put the error down to a change in data collection systems back in 2000. The correction however only accounts for statistics in the US and does not disprove the general trend of global warming.
As a result of Stephen McIntyre’s calculations, climatologists at the Goddard Institute of Space Science in New York now accept that 1934 was historically the United States’ hottest year since records began, not 1998 as they had claimed. It also turns out that five of the 10 warmest years on record in the US occurred before 1939, and only one is from the 21st century…
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Now 1934 is the hottest year on record in the US at an average of 1.25C higher than normal; 1998 is second at 1.23C, and 1921 in third place at 1.15C. Under the old system, 1998 was the hottest at 1.24C above normal, with 1934 at 1.23C. 2006, newly relegated to fourth place, was also at 1.23C.Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate change expert at GISS and author of the website realclimate.org, said: “The idea that Nasa is faking things or that it hasn’t got warmer at all is nonsense. There were some minor rearrangements in the various rankings [but] … the longer term US averages have not changed.”