Whoops!

August 10, 2007 on 8:29 pm

Are we still permitted to discuss the issue of global warming? Or have Al Gore and Robert Kennedy — members of the party of tolerance — ended all discussion with the flat-Earthers*?

In any event, a pretty significant story broke recently that’s been virtually ignored by mainstream media. NASA** has corrected its historical figures on warming temperatures. A dramatic correction that deserves, at the very least, some discussion. The warmest year on record is now 1934, not 1998, which has been incessantly pointed to as a major indicator of global warming. It’s second. Now 1921 takes third. As Daily Tech reports, “5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.” From a superb post by Coyote Blog:

Climate scientist Michael Mann (famous for the hockey stick chart) once made the statement that the 1990’s were the warmest decade in a millennia and that “there is a 95 to 99% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years.” (By the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, though you can watch him say these exact words in the CBC documentary Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off). Well, it turns out, according to the NASA GISS database, that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century. This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards.

What are the ten warmest years on record:

1934

1998

1921

2006

1931

1999

1953

1990

1938

1939

Now, I realize this correction in itself doesn’t disprove the theory of man-made global warming, but if NASA’s numbers were corrected to trend upwards, you better believe we’d all hearing all about it.

(Understanding that my Gang of Four co-blogger David Sirota has probably not taken the time to read all the way to the previous paragraph, I eagerly await his 650,000-word missive taking down the vast, almost unimaginable, cabal of big business/conservative journalists/Oil Barons/SeriousWashingtonPeople who hate this country, hate the poor, hate the environment and want to destroy America.)

*I do my share by living in a “green” home*** — meaning, I’m sweating in the Summer, freezing in the Winter and flushing the toilet 10 times to make it work.
**NASA is not run by Grover Norquist or neoconservatives.
***Not by choice.

(Cross-posted at Gang of Four.)