You'll also be pleased to hear that 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. Which is also meaningless. Unfortunately, "2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements" (ie. since 1880.) Now that's a sample size.
This is ALL you need to know about global warming / global colding / climate change / whatever this is called this day: http://www.petitionproject.org/gw_article/Review_Article_HTML.php An extract: The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. Publicists at the United Nations, Mr. Al Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few “skeptics” remain – skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global warming emergency. It is evident that 31,478 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs, are not "a few." Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is evident that these 31,478 American scientists are not “skeptics.” These scientists are instead convinced that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.
I thought I read somewhere that those data had been revised, and the warmest years were in the 1990's. Whatever. I realize you are an endless source of irrelevant factoids. It takes too long to try to verify them, and most are pointless anyway.
While the world as a whole warmed about 1 oF over the entire 20th century, parts of the Arctic have warmed by 4-5 oF just since the 1950s. The Arctic continues to warm at a rate about twice as fast as rest of the world. Scientists, as well as the indigenous people of the Arctic, have noticed dramatic changes in the Arctic environment that has affected ecosystems and wildlife, human settlements and infrastructure, and the way of life of indigenous peoples. Wait until the massive methane and CO2 start coming out of the northern and southern permafrost. So far we have been lucky. But a lot of permafrost is already thawing. The amount of greenhouse gases released could rise by several hundred %. Many world glaciers and ice fields are reduced dramatically. Snow covered peaks like Mt. Kilimanjaro are quickly becoming snow free Mountaintop species in places like the Rockies are being pushed to the top and eventual extinctions, one example is the pika. Some species have already become extinct. "Old ice" in the Arctic has declined rapidly, the more ice we lose, the less heat is reflected into space. This cycle is growing rapidly. Continued denials of this are similar to:
NASA Admits that 1934, Not 1998, was the Warmest Year on Record August 14, 2007 by Brant McLaughlin In one more devastating blow against the global warming or "climate Apocalypse" supporters such as former Vice President Al Gore, NASA stated today that it was wrong when it release a report that 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded in modern history. According to H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), NASA scientist and famous man-made global warming proponent James Hansen's well-known claims that 1998 was measured as the warmest year on record in the U.S. were the result of a serious mathematical error. NASA has now corrected that error, and 1934 is now known as the warmest year on record, with 1921 the third warmest year instead of 2006 as was also previously claimed. Moreover, NASA now also has to admit that three of the five warmest years on record occurred before 1940-it has up until now held that all five of them occurred after 1980. And perhaps most devastating of all to the man-made global warming backers, it is now admitted that six of the 10 hottest years on record occurred when only 10% of the amount of greenhouse gases that have been emitted in the last century were in the atmosphere. NASA has been forced to correct calculations for temperatures of the last 120 years taken from ground-based measuring facilities. Critics of the man-made global warming theory have long been vocal that these measurements are distorted because the ground, and even more the urban ground where most of these measurements took place, is warmed considerably by human activities and cannot accurately represent atmospheric conditions. "Much of the current global warming fear has been driven by Hansen's pronouncements, and he routinely claims to have been censored by the Bush administration for his views on warming. Now that NASA, without fanfare, has cleaned up his mess, Hansen has been silent -- I guess we can chalk this up to self-censorship," said Burnett. Critics of the man-made global warming theory, including a growing number of scientists who either feared to speak before or else have had to change their opinions in the wake of new and mounting data, have been growing more vocal in recent months. These critics have railed against the perpetuated notion, which they say is the darling of the media, that there is any scientific consensus on what is driving climate change. It turns out there are plenty of scientists and researchers who are far more interested in solar dynamics as an explanation than they are in human-caused carbon dioxide or methane emissions, which they say are so relatively minute that they cannot possibly make a difference on the grand scale of the planetary atmosphere. What's more, they point out, only one-half of the glob is experiencing any warming, and that is only taking place in large but isolated pockets. The critics of the "panic mongering", as they call it, say that there has been rampant statistical manipulation and faulty computer modeling that only reflects the modeling principle of "garbage in, garage out". http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/347541/nasa_admits_that_1934_not_1998_was.html?cat=58
James Hansen's Hacks By Michael Fumento on 8.16.07 @ 12:08AM In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking U.S. temperatures. So perhaps it shouldn't have come as a big surprise when it was revealed that NASA committed a bit of an oopsie regarding data constantly used by the mainstream media and other global warming proponents. If you follow the global warming debate, one thing you "know" is that to even call it a "debate" is to whisk yourself away to the land of the Flat Earth Society and Holocaust deniers and to be on the take from Big Carbon. Another is that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the U.S. lower 48 since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the very hottest being 1998. Regarding the first, all you need to see is the cover of the current Newsweek, promising to expose "the well-funded naysayers." (Discussed in the Aug. 9 TAS.) I know about such smearing firsthand in that there's a "fact sheet" on me from a group called EXXONSECRETS.ORG that claims it's "documenting ExxonMobil's funding of climate change skeptics." Yet I've never received a petro-penny from ExxonMobil or anybody in the fossil fuel industry. As to the stuff about the hottest years...Well, whaddya know! Turns out that's wrong, too. Figures from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) now show the hottest year since 1880 was 1934. Nineteen-ninety-eight dropped to second, while the third hottest year was way back in 1921. Indeed, four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, while only three were in the past decade. The real 15 hottest years are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before the chief "greenhouse gas," atmospheric carbon dioxide, began its sharp rise; seven occurred afterwards. Rush Limbaugh was incorrect in saying the new figures are "just more evidence" that "this whole global warming thing is a scientific hoax." Conversely, global warming hotheads are also wrong in insisting the revelation deserves no more mention than the back of a Trivial Pursuit card. The GISS, which is directed by global warming guru James Hansen, is saying likewise. He's wrong. Part of the importance is in the data and part is in how Hansen's agency behaved, which might be labeled a cover-up. In pooh-poohing the revision, the GISS ignores the tremendous emotional impact it's had in practically claiming each year is hotter than the one before. Instead it observes (correctly) since the U.S. accounts for merely two percent of global land surface, a relatively small adjustment in its figures doesn't meaningfully impact the global picture. But, notes Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre, who exposed the false figures, "The Hansen error . . . has a significant impact on the GISS estimate of U.S. temperature history"... (Emphasis added.) Is this important because we're a major world power or that we produce the best fried chicken? No, it's important because we have a far more sophisticated system of temperature monitoring than countries with far larger land masses. Hence, data from each of these nations affect the global model more than the American data. "Many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing)," observes McIntyre. This can produce hotter temperatures, yet some of the major trackers of the data from these countries, including the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, make no attempt to adjust for monitor placement errors. In any event, for some reason "the U.S. history has a rather minimal (warming) trend if any since the 1930s," while the ROW [rest of the world] has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s. Thus if the U.S. model, by far the most accurate one, became the model, it would be a gut punch to those claiming we must take drastic, horrifically expensive measures right now to ameliorate warming. Therefore, for the GISS to say this "only" affects the U.S. data is rather like a used car salesman insisting, "This automobile defect is trivial; it only affects steering and braking." Then there's the whole issue of how the revised data came about and came to light. Perhaps you noticed that in writing "it was revealed" I appear to have violated a cardinal rule of grammar in using the passive voice right there in the first paragraph where my third grade teacher couldn't possibly miss it. This was actually dramatic foreshadowing because, you see, NASA didn't change the figures without being pushed and once it did it refused to publicize them. McIntyre was already the bane of the hotheads for debunking the infamous "hockey stick" graph promulgated by University of Virginia geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues beginning in the late 1990s. Mann's calculations, using new imputs, showed temperatures to be flat over the last thousand years like a hockey stick shaft before suddenly angling up like the blade in the last half of the 20th century. This statistically wiped out both the Medieval Warming Period (c. 900-1300), which unleashed the Vikings, and Little Ice Age (c. 1250-1850), even though historical information for both is overwhelming. Yet the highly-politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) eagerly adopted the hockey stick graph in its 2001 Assessment Report. But then McIntyre and fellow Canadian economist Ross McKitrick showed Mann's methodology produces hockey-stick shapes even when applied to random data -- bringing back those scary Scandinavians and ice-skating on the McIntyre's latest debunking was the discovery of an error in GISS records for the years 2000 through 2006. In simplest terms, they hadn't been adjusted to compensate for the location or time of day where the data was gathered. But nobody correlated those newer figures with the older ones until McIntyre did, even though later Hansen admitted it was "easy to fix." McIntyre published the data on his own website (which is currently down because it's overloaded with traffic) and got the agency to admit it was wrong and post new figures. It even sent him a thank you note. Yet the GISS did absolutely nothing to alert scientists or the public to the new figures. This though it has publishedfive global warming press releases so far this year, each one alarming. It took the blogosphere and radio talk show hosts to publicize the new figures even as the mainstream media essentially ignored it. (The Washington Post finally ran an article a week after the controversy began, siding with the GISS and describing McIntyre as nothing more than a "blogger." All the presidential candidates have blog sites, but somehow the Post refrains from tagging them as bloggers.) Ultimately the greatest importance of all of this is that it strongly appears to substantiate the intuitive belief that, with scientist-politician Hansen at the helm the GISS, whose data are far more important to modeling global temperatures than it lets on, is not a neutral collector and disseminator of statistics but rather a politicized mouthpiece. http://spectator.org/archives/2007/08/16/james-hansens-hacks