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Blogger Finds Bug in NASA Global Warming Study?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II." The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
Now really, that's taking it a bit far. I'm strongly opposed to young earth people, and what they claim is far and away more extreme than global warming deniers, who usually suggest something to the tune of natural climate cycles.
Gamertag: WyleType
Um, yeah. Hansen from NASA refused to release the algorithms he used, funded by public money.
The blogger reversed engineered them from the data. Hardly the open scientific process you are ascribing to it.
Also, NASA has very quietly updated the numbers, replacing the old ones without reference. No transparency there.
Try again, pollyanna.
Numbers used in the debate about global warming were never questioned. The person who put together the algorithm never made the workings of the algorithm public (why not?). Yet there was no questioning the numbers.
Someone goes to the trouble of reverse engineering the algorithm, and finds a pretty obvious error. Yet you are picking on one sentence? Sheesh. I'd think you'd be jumping on the closed-sourced original scientist instead.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"but this year has been pretty cool."
Global warming is just that - GLOBAL
You are making the common mistake of confusing weather with climate.
Thanks for the link to the blog article. It's a lot more interesting and substantial than the somewhat embarassing DailyTech article.
A lot of people have been criticizing the DailyTech article for the line "Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media." It should be noted that the original blog entry does not contain this or other indications of paranoia, and attributes the people involved in the discovery.
No, the numbers speak for themselves.
It took ten seconds to create a plot in gnuplot with the corrected data.
I was surprised at the results. They show a random scattering of occasional really warm years, and a massive, unmistakable, consistent warming trend since 1980.
This was not at all what I expected to see after reading TFA. Maybe that's why they don't plot the corrected data.
Look more closely at that (corrected) graph. In particularly, look at the year-on-year variability. The hot years in the 30's did indeed get very hot, but they were interspersed with cold years. No such thing happens in the late 90's and early 2000s - cold years in this latter period are all a lot warmer than almost any other cold years and in fact warmer than most years prior to 1930! This is another way of looking at what another poster was saying about ranking the 5 year running means, and is in fact the reason those running means are higher.