NASA, Data, and Bloggers

You've heard this already:

(CNSNews.com) - NASA scientists this month corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1988 as the warmest year on record in the U.S., thus challenging some key global warming arguments, but the correction is being ignored, a conservative climate expert charged Wednesday.

Yet at the same time, announcements that support global warming are considered "front-page news," said H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

For his part, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has called the correction is "statistically insignificant."

Burnett challenged that assertion, saying the correction made it clear that NASA's conclusion -- that the majority of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990 -- is false.

"Time after time, Hansen and other global warming alarmists present their data as 'the facts,' and [say that] 'you can't argue with data,' " he said. "Well, it turns out their data is just wrong. And when it's wrong, they want to say it's not important.

But I hadn't heard that the temperature collection method was pointed out to NASA by some guy in his pajamas.

The controversy began on Aug. 4, when blogger Steve McIntyre of the ClimateAudit.org website, sent an email to NASA asserting that the data collected by the agency after 1999 was not being adjusted to allow for the times of day when readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations.

According to a blog posting by NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, agency analysts then "looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of U.S. temperature data."

"There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched," Schmidt said. "The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear."

Imagine that, another one of those loser bloggers actually was smart enough to show the egg-heads at NASA that they screwed up.

Shock.

The rest of the article analyzes how the Climate Change Fanatics (especially Hansen) are now saying the data isn't really that important. I wonder why it was so important before.