Looks like 1998 wasn’t the hottest year, after all. But it took a blogger to figure it out:
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, 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. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.
Guess the trend wasn’t as trendy as they thought.
Hansen should have egg on his face. Someone from the MSM should ask him about it. But I doubt if they will. It’s another one of those stories that’s too good to check.
Now that they have the data right (assuming they do) they should rerun the correlation analysis for hurricane frequency and intensity.
[Update late afternoon]
Maybe I should have titled this post “An Inconvenient Truth.”
[Saturday update]
Since there seems to be some confusion in comments as to why Dr. Hansen should have egg on his face, Coyoteblog explains (with a lot of other commentary).
When a scientist refuses to reveal his algorithms or models, but simply insists, ‘trust me, the numbers are right,” and someone else has to go through the trouble of reverse engineering them, and finds that the numbers are in fact wrong, said scientist should indeed have egg on his face. As the blog notes, that’s not how science is supposed to be done. Research is supposed to be replicable. Hiding the ball makes this difficult, and it’s one of the reasons that those promoting (and often deliberately overhyping) climate change aren’t trusted. And it brings into question all of the data and casts doubt on all of the researchers, even the best ones.