During her August 16 broadcast, 1310 KFKA host Amy Oliver stated that “facts come out that [are] possibly damaging to those drinking the global warming Kool-Aid ... [b]ecause as it turns out, NASA backtracks on 1998 warmest year claim.” Oliver added, “1934 is now the hottest year on record. Then it goes to 1998, then 1921.” But Oliver did not inform listeners that NASA's revision affected annual temperature rankings for the United States only; it had no effect on the annual global temperature rankings. According to NASA climate modeler Gavin A. Schmidt, 2005 remains the warmest year globally in the instrumental record, followed by 1998.

Citing a blog posting on DailyTech.com, Oliver later stated that “five of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.” However, this statement is true only for temperatures in the United States; according to NASA, all 10 of the warmest years globally in the instrumental record have occurred after 1989.

NASA recently corrected its climate figures after the discovery of inconsistencies in its U.S. temperature data. According to Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and a contributor to the RealClimate blog (posting as “gavin”), the correction resulted in a rearrangement of NASA's ranking of the warmest years in the United States. Whereas 1998 was previously ranked as the warmest year for the United States, it is now ranked second, behind 1934. According to Schmidt, the temperature difference between 1934 and 1998 in the United States -- both before and after the correction -- is not statistically significant.

According to Schmidt, the effects of the correction on annual global and hemispheric temperature data are “imperceptible”:

Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. There were in fact a number of small offsets (of both sign) between the same stations in the two different data sets. The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear.

This was duly done by Tuesday, an email thanking McIntyre was sent and the data analysis (which had been due in any case for the processing of the July numbers) was updated accordingly along with an acknowledgment to McIntyre and update of the methodology.

The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15° C for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).

There were however some very minor re-arrangements in the various rankings (see data). Specifically, where 1998 (1.24°C anomaly compared to 1951-1980) had previously just beaten out 1934 (1.23 °C) for the top US year, it now just misses: 1934 1.25 °C vs. 1998 1.23 °C. None of these differences are statistically significant.

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More importantly for climate purposes, the longer term US averages have not changed rank. 2002-2006 (at 0.66 °C) is still warmer than 1930-1934 (0.63 °C -- the largest value in the early part of the century) (though both are below 1998-2002 at 0.79 °C). (The previous version -- up to 2005 -- can be seen here).

In the global mean, 2005 remains the warmest (as in the NCDC analysis). [emphasis added]

From the August 16 broadcast of 1310 KFKA's The Amy Oliver Show:

OLIVER: So, facts come out that possibly damaging to those drinking the global warming Kool-Aid -- apparently it wasn't sweet enough. Because as it turns out, NASA backtracks on 1998 warmest year claim. NASA has to correct 120 years' worth of bad data. So now let me, let me give you the new years, and then the new years that are the warmest. 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record, but it is the second hottest. 1934 is now the hottest year on record. Then it goes to 1998, then 1921, then 2006, then 1931, then 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939. So, of the top 10 -- what is it? -- [counting] one, two, three, four, five -- one, two, three -- well, let's see, one, two, wait, one, two, three, four, five before World War II, one after World War II, and then you have '98, '99. You have '90, '98, '99, and 2006. Yeah, I would say that's a big deal. But here's -- you know how that happens? Because the question is, how does something like that happen? Well, here's how it happened. The graphs that were created that tracked global climate change, or temperature change, created by two people from NASA -- and, of course, this of course in type that is so tiny -- Reto Ruedy, I think his name is, and James Hansen -- of course, we've all heard of James Hansen. He is the one [audio skip] accusing the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change, change. Turns out, you know what? He probably wished they had 'cause now he looks a little bit silly.

Here's the problem: When somebody asked him, asked Robert Hansen -- it's a, a, a man named Steve McIntyre and he operates a website called Climate Audit. And, while inspecting the historical temperature graphs, he noted a strange sort of a discontinuity or in a massive jump in many locations all occurring around January 2000. Remember Y2K and the Y2K bug? Remember all of that? The hype? So this, this guy who, again, he operates ClimateAudit.org -- ClimateAudit.org, guy named Steve McIntyre. So he gets a hold of Robert Hansen and says, “You know what? Listen, can I see the algorithm used to generate the graph data?” Hansen says, “No. No, you can't see it.” Now, it's pretty standard operating procedure when you put out information -- it could be different in the scientific community, I'm talking about in the academic world, at least where I live, when a -- think tank world -- if somebody asks to see your data and wants to know how you did it, you let them know.

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OLIVER: So McIntyre decides, “You know what, I -- just 'cause he says no, I'm going to figure it out myself. Doesn't matter.” He reverse-engineered the algorithm, and the result appeared to be a Y2 -- Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. Bad math. McIntyre notified the pair of the problem. One of them replied and acknowledged the problem as an oversight that would be fixed in the next data refresh. NASA has now silently -- did you get the press release on it? Who got the press release? Major media get the press release? I don't think so -- released corrected figures and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934, not 1998 -- of course, long trumpeted by the media as the record-breaking warmest year ever. Oh, my gosh, proof that we are dumping so much greenhouse gas, so many -- you know, the greenhouse gas is being dumped in the atmosphere, it's getting hotter, polar ice caps are all melting. Are they melting? Yeah, apparently we are seeing some melting. I attribute that to normal cyclical climate change. When I say “normal,” the Earth has periods of warming and cooling. Could greenhouse gases have an effect? Maybe. Probably. But I'm not willing to alter the economy and come down with a bunch of government mandates because of the theory of what's behind, quote, global warming, unquote.

NASA's now silently released the corrected figures. This is, by the way, according to Tech, or DailyTech. If you go to www.DailyTech. 1998, remember, OK, “the record-breaking year, moved to second. 1921 takes third place. And, in fact, five of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.” Oh, God. This is unbelievable. “Now, the effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor, but the effect on the U.S. global warming” -- I like this -- “propaganda machine could be huge.”