Wow, this is quite significant.  Apparently a blogger realized that some of the extreme temperature changes noticed around the turn of the millennium were the result of a Y2K error.  Supposedly NASA has admitted the error and has released revised numbers.

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.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

I’ve long been skeptical of the long term predictions made by global warming alarmists, mainly because of my understanding of computer simulations and the growth in prediction error as a function of time due to many phenomena.  It’s not that I don’t believe that we are harming the environment, it’s just that some of the wild claims based on computer models border on technological malpractice.  My concerns were based on the belief that the scientists would at least get their damn codes correct.

This kind of incident really makes one curious about how rigorously these codes are being peer reviewed.  Part of their inherent problem is that the results can’t be proven since you have to wait and see if the weather matches the simulation.  So who knows what other little bugs might be buried within these complicated codes.  Keep this in mind before you get too excited over someone’s computer predictions about the global weather decades from now.

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