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springfeverish wrote:

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Anyway I thought this thread was about NASA declaring 2009 the 5th warmest year on record.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

Conservative blogs were alight last week when they turned up an error in NASA's methods for recording US temperatures. As a result, it has been concluded that 1934, not 1998, was America's hottest year on record.

The problem was caught when blogger, Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit, crunched the numbers from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for himself. McIntyre found that apparently an error was affecting the data for the years 2000 through 2006.

Or more accurately, after 1999, the data wasn't being fractionally adjusted to compensate for the time of day or location from where the data was being gathered. McIntyre emailed his discovery to NASA's Goddard Institute, which prompted the data review.

The data correction reduced the mean US temperature by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000 through 2006, for an average of 0.66 ºC. The news was a delight to global warming naysayers - such as the conservative blogger Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters -who claimed it refutes a key tenet of the global warming "myth" advanced by Al Gore that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995. They also claim the lack of coverage on the mistake indicates a liberal media cover-up.

The new top 10 hottest years in the US are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939.

Global warming skeptics point out that now four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/nasa_weather_error/