I have been writing for sometime on this blog my opinion that the moderate increase in temperature we have seen over the last 100 years can more easily be attributed to solar activity than human causes. As it turns out, I was wrong, and I apologize to all of my readers for misleading them.

NorCalBlogs posted some new information yesterday, which if accurate, will convince even the most hardcore skeptic that humans are the underlying cause for the warming trend on our planet. I know some of you reading this find it hard to believe that humans can have that much of an affect on this planet, but remember what it is humans do best… we make mistakes.

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the “corrected” data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..

Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. “This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error.”

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.

He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.

Here are the 10 hottest years in order based on the new numbers released by NASA:

Year Old New
1934 1.23 1.25
1998 1.24 1.23
1921 1.12 1.15
2006 1.23 1.13
1931 1.08 1.08
1999 0.94 0.93
1953 0.91 0.90
1990 0.88 0.87
1938 0.85 0.86
1939 0.84 0.85

Thank you Steve McIntyre for proving to me that global warming is man made… as in made up!

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