NASA Quietly Admits that its Global Warming Data was Wrong; Worldwide Global-Warming Industry Mysteriously Fails to Collapse
The global-warming scaremongers experienced a setback recently when NASA admitted to an error in its data on temperatures in the continental United States. Mark Steyn explains:
The “hottest year on record” is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top Ten altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century—2000, 2002, 2003, 2004—plummeted even lower down the Hot One Hundred. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and Oughts has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top Ten hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow called Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible, and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he’s not even American: He’s Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won’t do, even when they’re federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings—albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don’t shine.
We will probably never really know whether this was malicious or accidental, but it hardly matters. The keeping quiet about it is most certainly intentional. And that silence is further proof, if any were needed, that global warming and most other eco-fears are primarily political in nature, and only secondarily scientific—if at all.
Theories abound as to why so many people are eager to peddle eco-scares like global warming, and why those stories appeal to so many people. On the seller’s side there is certainly some profit incentive, e.g. NASA knows that it’ll receive more government money if it provides support for global warming. But I don’t think profit alone adequately explains it. A desire for power is probably also a big factor. Not necessarily power in a political sense, but also the interpersonal power of being able to terrify people, and thereby make them eager to believe and do whatever you say. This is why eco-scaremongering’s natural home is on the Left, along with all the other groups that hope to seize power and wield it over the nation.
On the buyer’s side, Mark Steyn has a reasonable theory on why people are so eager to scare themselves with these types of stories. After recounting the recent debunking of the New Republic’s lurid tale of war atrocities, Steyn concludes:
As Pogo said, way back in the 1971 Earth Day edition of a then famous comic strip, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Even when we don’t do anything: In the post-imperial age, powerful nations no longer have to invade and kill. Simply by driving a Chevy Suburban, we can make the oceans rise and wipe the distant Maldive Islands off the face of the earth. This is a kind of malignant narcissism so ingrained it’s now taught in our grade schools. Which may be why, even when The New Republic’s diarist goes to Iraq and meets the real enemy, he still assumes it’s us.
UPDATE: Drudge has picked up the story, so it’s going to get some general circulation. And the Washington Times reports on the following headline from the Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1922: “Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.”