The deceit here is contained very clearly in the headline “Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record.” This headline is very cleverly deceptive, as it makes two false statements by implication. These are: (1) NASA claimed that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the U.S. (in reality NASA never made that claim); (2) the correction of the data has resulted in 1998 no longer being a global record (in reality the data is from the U.S. and has no effect whatsoever on the global records of warmest years).
So the deception has the intention of confusing people by a simple bait-and-switch ploy: bait them with U.S. data, then surreptitiously switch the context to global data. Then condemn NASA and demand that they fire Jim Hansen (or worse), who is justifiably pissed off. Anybody would be.
The main people responsible for spreading the bait-and-switch are Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio hosts like Amy Oliver, who picked it up from bloggers like those linked to in this thread (Anthony Watts and Michael Asher, but hundreds of others spread it around too like Michelle Malkin). Counter to what many folks want to believe, the story is covered in detail in the mainstream media, as a visit to Google news or Lexis shows. And of course it is all over the internet:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%2219...ient=firefox-a
It has apparently fooled a lot of people.
But what has NASA
actually claimed about U.S. temperature records? Here is their position, from a peer-revewied 2001 paper by lead author James Hansen himself:
Quote:
The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 in the GISS analysis (Plate 6). This contrasts with the USHCN data, which has 1998 as the warmest year in the century. In both cases the difference between 1934 and 1998 mean temperatures is a few hundredths of a degree. The main reason that 1998 is relatively cooler in the GISS analysis is its larger adjustment for urban warming. In comparing temperatures of years separated by 60 or 70 years the uncertainties in various adjustments (urban warming, station history adjustments, etc.) lead to an uncertainty of at least 0.1 degree C. Thus it is not possible to declare a record U.S. temperature with confidence until a result is obtained that exceeds the temperature of 1934 by more than 0.1 degree C.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, M. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl (2001), A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change, J. Geophys. Res., 106(D20), 23,947-23,964.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/...ansen_etal.pdf
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In other words, NASA never believed that 1998 was the warmest in the U.S., NASA has always believed that it’s a statistical tie between 1934 and 1998. We can’t say which is higher, because the uncertainty in the data is about 10 times the observed difference. And the recent correction of the data doesn’t change that fact whatsoever, it’s still a statistical tie. That’s because there’s a lot of random noise there in the annual data, and it still swamps the correction.
But all this is irrelevant to the most important point by far, namely that the
global record years haven’t changed one iota and the top five are in the last 10 years. You can still find the story on NASA’s website:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/...2006_warm.html
Astute readers will note the word “worldwide” here.