Y2K rears its head again...

[kickaha]

http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

Summary: The NASA study that had 1998 as the warmest year on record, and a sharp upturn in US temps in '99/'00? Bad software doing the analysis. At fault? A Y2K bug. Ouch.

Authors of study have conceded the bug, and released new results.

Warmest year was actually 1934, and 5 of the 10 warmest years are now *before WWII*.

I would hope that this would get the same sort of mainstream coverage as the original study, since it's a valid correction by the original authors, but my bet is that those sites that *do* cover it are screamed into submission as oil industry apologists. Fox News is going to be all over this like white on rice, of course, which isn't going to help any sort of rational discourse.

Regardless of one's position in the climate change sectarian violence of words, bad data is bad data is bad data. Trend is still upwards, but I'll be shocked to see if "1998 warmest year on record" stops getting used in the mainstream press as gospel. No one wants to admit they were wrong - kudos to the study authors on fessing up and modifying their results. That's good science in action. Too bad the general public gestalt can't work a bit more like that. :P

Comments

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Ayup.

Sad when people's own insecurities about being Right or Wrong are projected onto what is an ongoing process of discovery.

The spike in the last few years is quite a bit lessened, but the trend *is* still upwards. As it was in '28-'44, and '50-'58, so it's not exactly a smoking gun. The effect of the reanalysis on the global situation was less, it only altered it by a couple of percentage points down, which is interesting - is something else taking up the slack, is the global data reliable, or do we simply haven't a solid clue how to work with this data yet?

Given the *stunningly* bad data gathering in some areas of even this country, (when a weather station is moved from a grassy plain to the middle of a parking lot, do you *really* think the sudden upturn in temperature is from global, or local effects?) I am highly skeptical of even the base data. We're just all over the map.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

I've said from the beginning (as in, the early '90s) that arguing about whether human activities are the (or even *a*) primary causal factor is disingenuous at best and deliberately destructive at worst.

Yes, if it turns out that things we are doing (the significant imbalance between carbon release into and capture from the environment, deforestation, marine pollution, ozone-depleting emissions) are contributing to the trend, then yeah, we should see what we can do to reduce the impact. But first arguing that climate change isn't happening, and then that people aren't causing it, and using those arguments to block significant other work on the question, has stolen decades now from our ability to plan on how we're going to react to it. Those decades of arguing are going to turn out to have killed people, maybe a lot of people.

There are many other measures of climate change--the growth of the Sahara, the shrinking of the polar ice caps, the upward trend in frequency and strength of tropical storms. But to a certain extent, even all that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are millions of people (and other species) living on the margins of potentially-affected areas, and billions of people dependent on food production that is susceptible to even fairly minor changes in temperature and (more importantly) rainfall distribution. We have to figure out how to move people out of threatened areas, and how to buffer our food production against disaster.