Yes it is man made by a political partisan at NASA:
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 McKintyre 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.
McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an “oversight” that would be fixed in the next data refresh.
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.
So of you out there may be wondering what the big deal is about this. Here is what the big deal is:
All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely. What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man. In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.
The discovery of what could be argued was an intentional error by Hansen to support his political beliefs means that global warming now matches prior natural warming periods such as the one that happened in the 1930’s.
The global warming religionists are down playing this by saying that Hansen was only responsible for producing US climate numbers, which is true, but US climate numbers were long considered the most reliable in the world. If Hansen’s incorrect numbers were considered highly reliable than how bad are everyone else’s numbers? Something else I learned from all this is that when looked at in five year blocks the globe is undergoing global cooling now:
More importantly for climate purposes, the longer term US averages have not changed rank. 2002-2006 (at 0.66 ºC) is still warmer than 1930-1934 (0.63 ºC – the largest value in the early part of the century) (though both are below 1998-2002 at 0.79 ºC).
Temperatures in the past five years have actually dropped from the previous five year block and temperatures now are comparable to the temperature average during the last global warming period in the 1930’s. This revelation is a huge danger to the global warming religion, associated industries, and their socialist allies.
But then again what do these facts matter when global warming has long ago become a matter of faith?
You can read a whole lot more over at Ace and Malkin’s sites.
