[ExI] Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data

[Neil Halelamien]

Hm... this is interesting. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet:

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

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record
... 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<http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1868>and acknowledged the
problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the
next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected
figures<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt>,
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*.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070809/7633df07/attachment.html>