Y2K's Last Gift and FUD Fertilizer

Many of us recall the "Y2K Crisis" and the enormous computer-programming expenditures made at that time. Cynics knew that a good deal of that money was wasted--Big Consulting did a fine job of spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) Fertilizer (TM) throughout boardrooms, making calendar-year 2000 bonuses the last good thing to happen to the economy before the 2001 recession took hold.

Anyhoo.

Seems as though NASA also had a Y2K crisis and reprogrammed its weather-recording stations.

Inaccurately.

Thus, the AlGore "hockey stick" of temp spikes, and the Industry of Global Warming blossomed.

Naturally, it is also fed by FUD Fertilizer.

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..

Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.
He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

The presence of FUD Fertilizer has always resulted in abandonment of Common Sense, going back to the first recorded instance (see Genesis, the Garden Story.)

HT: Clayton Cramer