Is This The Beginning Of The End For The Goracle’s Religion?

13 Aug, 2007 by John Hawkins

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Mark Steyn’s latest column touches on the new NASA data that should, by all rights, be causing even the most rabid believers in manmade global warming to think again,

“Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the “U.S. surface air temperature” rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They’re not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The “hottest year on record” is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century — 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 — plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he’s not even American: He’s Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won’t do, even when they’re federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings — albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don’t shine.”

If the warmest year on record in the United States was in 1934, not 1998, then it undercuts the whole idea of manmade global warming.

Why?

Well, there were less greenhouse gasses in the air back then, yet it was warmer in the US. Let me put it another way: for all the talk about how it’s getting hotter, the hockey stick graphs, and all the wild claims about everything from polar bears to hurricanes, it’s not as warm today in the United States as it was in the thirties — and guess what? After that warming period, it got colder and it’s entirely possible that it may get colder over the next decade or two this time, too.

Speaking of that, do you notice that the second hottest year on record in the US is 1998, not 2006? So, in other words, despite the non-stop hysteria the Al Gore crowd has been trying to drum up about global warming, it’s entirely possible that the temperature in the US will not have gone up at all in a whole decade by the time our next President takes office in early 2009.

Since that’s the case, isn’t it time to ramp the global warming panic down several notches?