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Blogger finds Y2K bug in NASA Climate Data.
11 August 2007Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record. 1934 is.
Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. 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.
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.
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.
As an engineer I feel for NASA, bad data happens to us all.
Do you all remember Y2K? It was a fear that computer programs written well back in the last century would not be able to handle the change to 2000, because software programers usually stored the year as 58 for 1958, and 23 for 1923, so when the year 2000 rolled around the programs would store 2000 as 00, which would be treated as 1900 by the program.
This is actually the only example I’ve heard of the Y2K bug bitting anybody.
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