The math was just wrong and Al followed along?
NASA Admits Error; 1934 is Warmest Year

Steve McIntyre, a statistician and a global warming skeptic recently set an email to the Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS) noting an apparent error in the US annual temperature record. The error was due to incorrect correction for newer measurement instruments deployed in recent years. GISS acknowledged the error and now 1934 is the warmest year on record not 1998.

The error was relatively small, on the order of 0.2 degrees Centigrade. In the grand scheme of global warming that is an enormous error. Realclimate.org, a blog for climate scientists, addressed the error in a post mentioning that while the error means that the temperature records for the US will change, the global mean temperature is not affected.

The correction in the US temperature records may be minor but is creating quite a stir in the climate change debate. While real climate views this as a tempest in a teapot, the skeptics view is that more corrections are likely.

With McIntyre's latest find, an air of intrigue is added to the debate. Climateaudit.org, McIntyre's website has been attacked and access is denied to all. This is not the first attempted sabotage of the site, but thus far the most successful.

What does this mean to global warming followers? That the science may not be settled. The enormous amount a data collected to determine millions of years of climate history is now suspect. Proxy data, data from glacial ice cores, tree rings, sea sediment and other sources, are use to build pre-historical temperature reconstructions. Averaging all these proxies is a huge statistical process. Michael Mann, the climate scientist credited with the famous hockey stick chart used in the press so often to illustrate the rapid rise in global temperatures, is not a statistician.

The discovery of the error in the US historical temperature record does not mean that global warming is not happening or that man's activities have no impact on global climate. It does mean that predicting temperature and sea level rise a hundred years in the future is not a simple task. See the Realclimate and Climateaudit (once the site is online again) to follow the story.

This has been discussed in another thread,

http://z8.invisionfree.com/Al_Gore_Support...289&st=15&#last

And NO, 1998 wasn't the warmest year on record and neither was 1934, it was 2006.

http://www.newstarget.com/021422.html

2006 hottest year on record for U.S., climate experts say

Monday, January 15, 2007 by: Jessica Fraser

(NewsTarget) The year 2006 was the hottest the continental United States has seen in the past 112 years, according to climate experts from the National Climatic Data Center, who say drastic action must be taken in the next 10 years to halt catastrophic global warming damage in the coming century.

Last year topped off a nine-year streak of global warming "unprecedented in the historical record" and largely driven by burning fossil fuels, the NCDC reported Tuesday. According to the report, average U.S. temperatures in 2006 were 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average temperature across the country for the 20th century.

Last month -- which brought early blossoming of daffodils and cherry trees in the normally icy eastern states -- was the fourth-warmest December on record, while average temperatures for all 48 mainland states were above average or well above average.

New Jersey experienced its hottest temperatures ever on record, while Boston saw temperatures of 8 degrees above average and Minneapolis-St. Paul suffered temperatures 17 degrees higher than normal during December.

"No one should be surprised that 2006 is the hottest year on record for the U.S.," said climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel of public interest group the Union of Concerned Scientists. "When you look at temperatures across the globe, every single year since 1993 has been in the top 20 warmest years on record."

The warming is caused mostly by excess burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Climate scientists warn that the atmosphere has more carbon dioxide now than it has in the past 650,000 years, which is creating a blanket of the gas that traps heat on Earth. To make matters worse, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says an El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific near the equator has prevented icy Arctic air from moving south and east across the United States.

The Bush administration has rejected proposals in recent years to place limits on carbon dioxide emissions or adopt a system of carbon taxes to help curb the United States' sizeable contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

NOAA chief of climate monitoring Jay Lawrimore said he believes global warming could be seriously slowed or even solved with the development of new, clean technologies for industrial and vehicular use.

I don't think that such an insignificant (if real) difference is cause for debunking the global warming issue. Any true scientist knows that "correlation does not (necessarily) equal causation". Even Gore doesn't claim that there is 100% proof, contrary to what the media reports. I am certain of this. I have heard him present live and that is NOT what he says. You always leave the door open a crack just in case you are wrong because there is very little in this world you can prove without a doubt...even though we know O.J. "did it".

The thing is that the overwhelming majority of evidence using the best scientific methods available do show a strong correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. Heck, I don't know. Maybe the CO2 is a secondary cause of global warming and it's water vapor which is directly correlated. That means if CO2 levels go up, so does the water vapor. Any way you look at it carbon dioxide is strongly implicated in causing our planet to heat up. And here in Tennessee, we had temps. of 107 degrees several days last week. It was and is truly miserable. We're in a drought which has caused the state to become an agricultural disaster area. I live for my summer tomatoes, but they've burned up before nightfall when you can throw some water on them.

"Where there's smoke, there's fire," "If it walks like duck, talks like a duck....then it must be a duck". We must take drastic measures now to save our planet just in case the scientists who are 90-plus per cent certain that anthropogenic causes are heating up Mother Earth, are correct. We can't afford to be wrong. What else will it take to make the world adopt The Peter Principal? -- And now, all eyes on Cozumel. Ask those citizens what it's like to suffer this fate again, and so soon. Used to be a wonderful dive destination.