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

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

The general public gestalt thinks scientific knowledge is either Gospel truth (because it's Science, duh!) or a bunch of lies concocted by the Godless liberal conspiracy (because they have their own Gospel truth, duh!).

Peer review, experimental design, reexamination of evidence in light of new discoveries, these things don't even enter into the worldview.

Huh, with data dating back to 1880, 5 of the ten warmest years show up in the first sixty years, 5 show up in the 66 years since then? Sounds about right. Wonder what that does to the projections--is the average trend less steeply upward than they thought?

It also calls out the gotchas in calling the phenomenon "global warming" instead of referring to global climate change, which is what's really happening, and what's really important--the redistribution around the calendar and around the globe of rainfall and dangerous storm activity, and the resulting effects on our ability to produce enough food to feed us all.

[ssandv.livejournal.com]

Much as I'd like to jump on this bandwagon, there are still something like 30 different indicators that show fairly rapid change in the global climate profile over the past 30 years. Making this the basis for a counterargument would be like a creationist saying "but C-14 isn't consistent!" True statement in the correct context, but massively misleading.

My primary concern with the way the global warming thing is playing out is that we're not going to get people out of poverty without industrializing them, and we're not going to industrialize them without polluting. People with life expectancies less than 40 can't really wait until 2050 for us to get the pollution thing figured out so that we can let them start actually producing things on an industrial scale. All the shrill screaming and lack of genuine discourse on both sides of this issue may have economic effects here, but it has life-threatening effects other places.

I'm kind of a fan of realclimate.org on this subject--they're good about dotting i's and crossing t's when it comes to explaining what various refutation attempts do well, do poorly, and just flat out fail to understand. If this has legs, I would expect them to address it within the next couple days (though they haven't updated much lately, dang it.)

As far as the "producing enough food to feed us all" meme, that hasn't been a problem in a *very* *long* *time*. There's fairly strong evidence that pretty much every famine in the past 500 years has predominantly political causes. The problem is in distributing food, not producing it. Distributing food is very, very hard compared to producing it.