A quiet re-adjustment of temperature data...

... that could have profound effects on the global warming movement. Or not. Michelle Malkin has the poop including a link to this Michael Asher report at Daily Tech:

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people 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 [McIntyre ]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.

...

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 US 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.

I suspect Asher to be right so I've done my small part here and linked to the story in the hopes that you handful of readers will pass the news along and enlighten your friends.

The sky is not falling people.

Comments

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[Morgan K Freeberg]

In the "business" community, I'm thoroughly convinced the global warming propaganda effort is over, and it has succeeded overwhelmingly. I'm not talking about the upper eschelons where decisions are made about who to hire and fire. I'm talking about the upper-middle-class yuppie layer. Folks with nice homes, large dry-cleaning bills, gym memberships, stylish lunch boxes.

Global warming has taken it's place alongside the menagerie of "Thou Shalts" which senior worker-bee types observe when meeting each other for the first time, and establishing a peerage. Thou shalt be a football fan, thou shalt play golf...thou shalt believe in the global warming ManBearPig.

I've learned to be very circumspect about this. Of course, everyone has to be a chatty cathy. So if you haven't got anything to say, you'd best change the subject. But I'm really shocked sometimes at how much passion people can have about ManBearPig, without knowing a lot about it. Some of the folks on your blog, Rick, understand one of the favorite tactics of the chicken-littles is to haughtly inquire "Did you READ the IPCC report??" without specifying which report, of course. Well, the 4th assessment report predicts ocean levels will rise to a level FAR below what is prognosticated in Al Gore's movie. But when the go-along-get-along business types start shooting the breeze about what an incredibly dire threat this is, the figure that is bandied about comes straight out of AIC. And then, in my experience, is exaggerated upward from there.

Just a bunch of anti-capitalist horsesqueeze.

I don't think socialism has enjoyed such a speedy and smooth invasion into American culture since 1933. It's really insane. I've never seen anything like it.