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Saturday, August 11, 2007

1934: The Hottest Year on Record

Here is why I am skeptical on all the doomsday claims of global warming. We all have heard how 1998 was the hottest year on record and some of the 2000s come close. Well, that is not quite true. The US temperature data had a Y2K bug in it and NASA released a corrected version. Now 1934 is the hottest year on record and five of the ten hottest years occurred before World War II.

Now there is still a warming trend but the moral of the story is to keep an open mind before you commit to radical action.

Meanwhile Coyote Blog has this piece of wisdom: "The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat."

Be sure to check out Coyote Blog's updated chart of temperatures

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting news. I've been using the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) for my thesis...and I'm unable to pull any data at the moment. I suppose they have taken it down while they work to correct any errors.

I think it is also important to realize that when it was reported that "1998 was the warmest year on record" I always heard this in reference to the global average. Just because the U.S. average has changed, does not necessarily mean that 1998 was not the warmest year globally...we'll have to see how the numbers shake out.

A regression line on the current NASA data shows a slope of 0.0046°C/year (warming of 0.46°C/century) for the contiguous 48. It is highly significant with a p of <0.01. Just food for thought...

Catholicgauze said...

Good point Judd. However, remember the other blog's quote on how temperature measuring stations were not global back then and as high caliber either.

And as you do show, there does seem to be a warming trend (something I do not dispute)