NASA has rather quietly fixed the numbers behind a “ground-breaking” discovery: a chart that showed that 1998 was the warmest year in American history. Get that? Warmest. year. ever.

But now, we’re finding out that those numbers were wrong, something GISS head and enviromoonbat extraordinaire James Hansen, who created the graphs along with NASA’s Reto Ruedy, had no official announcement or comment to make on.

It wasn’t until Steve McKintyre, who operates the blog Climate Audit asked to see the algorythms Hansen used to generate the data, which was refused to him. So McKyntire reverse-engineered the numbers and found a Y2K bug. He notified Hansen and Ruedy of the problem, who said they would fix it.

NASA released the corrected figures, and boy, are they sure different:

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.

The really fun part is that NASA and GISS didn’t report this.

You would think that they would, considering the current global warming “debate”. But because according to the Goracle, Hansen, and other enviromoonbats like them there is a “consensus”, there’s no need to. Throw any scientific data at them you’d like to, and it won’t matter, because according to these guys, the debate is over anyways.

Agree with the Goracle and you’ll get more money.

Another interesting thought — how accurate could temperature data be in the 19th century? The 18th? The 17th? I mean, we can’t go back in time and test data from 1781 or something using the superior technology we have today to find out what temperatures were like then. So when it comes down to it, how do we really, truly know what the warmest years are? I’m no science whiz, so if there is some way to accurately find out temperatures from like, 1824 then by all means, let me know. I just find it hard to believe that, even with the corrected data, we can be certain that these years are the warmest years ever in American history.

Oh well.

Somehow, I don’t see this going onto the cover of Newsweek.

Others commenting:
Moonbattery
Iowa Voice
Newsbusters
Blue Crab Boulevard
Tigerhawk
Wake Up America
Hot Air
American Thinker
Q & O
Macsmind
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
IMAO
And of course,
Climate Audit