Were alarmists calling 1998 an "outlier year" in 1999? Or were they trumpeting the "warmest year on record?"

Question

Has their story changed since time has passed and we haven't had any years warmer than 1998?

Answer 1

For Richard:

    NASA Corrects 120 Years Worth of Bad Data, Notes NCPA Expert

    DALLAS, Aug. 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The warmest year on record is no longer 1998 and not because it has been overtaken by a recent heat wave. NASA scientist James Hansen's famous claims about 1998 being the warmest year on record in the U.S. was the result of a serious math error, according to H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). NASA has now corrected the error, anointing 1934 as the warmest year and 1921 as the third warmest year, not 2006 as previously claimed.

    "Hansen's conclusions that the majority of the 10 hottest years

occurred since 1990 are false," Burnett said. "While Hansen's original

declaration made headlines, NASA's correction has been ignored."

    According to NASA's newly published data:

    -- The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;

    -- The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;

    -- Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and

    -- Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.

    NASA's ground based temperature records for the past 120 years, which have been the basis for most of the claims that global warming is happening at an unprecedented rate, almost entirely due to human actions, have now been corrected to show that much of the warming occurred before CO2 emissions and concentrations began to rise significantly.

    "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," said Burnett. "Now that NASA, without fanfare, has cleaned up his mess, Hansen has been silent -- I guess we can chalk this up to self-censorship."

    The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D. C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. We depend on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share our mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants.

Answer 2

Oh yeah, they were opening bottles of Dom in celebration, and refining the hockey stick.

Answer 3

"According to NASA's newly published data:

-- The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;

-- The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;

-- Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and

-- Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred. "

Here, I will fix the quote so that it is actually correct

"According to NASA's newly published data:

-- The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998 in the U.S.;

-- The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006 in the U.S.;

-- Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940 in the U.S.; and

-- Six of the top 10 hottest years in the U.S. occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred."

Sadly, BB, your source is ignorant at best.

Answer 4

The number of data points is one determining factor in whether you can assign one particular data point as an outlier.  

Thus it would not be scientifically or statistically invalid to change the assignment of an outlier as more data points are collected.

Edit: In addition, if one is looking at trends it would be invalid to exclude the last data point (deem it an outlier), since you cannot determine if that last data point follows the trend, a new trend starts, or is simply an anomoly.  It actually would have been improper to call 1998 an outlier in 1999.

Edit: One final thing.  I do not see 1998 as an outlier.  It looks like the natural noise in the system.  Too many people chime in on these things when they have no idea how to deal with noisy data or even general data analysis.

Answer 5

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temper...

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/rese...

I think "alarmists" were trumpeting 1998 as the warmest year on record just as much as the "deniers" trumpet 1999 or 2008 as years that we "gave back" all global warming.

James W Early - Please show us where NASA updated the warmest year on record for the globe to 1934. I posted the NASA GISS link.

Answer 6

But it is a lie that 1998 was the hottest year on record, NASA recently revised some altered records back to match what they had been originally showing 1934 as the warmest in the last 100 and that there were years in the medieval optimum that were significantly warmer. It might be when all the altered figures they have found in the NASA records are restored 1998 might only be the hundredth warmest year in recorded history instead of the warmest as the alarmists would have us think. What the lie is comes from deliberate alteration of temperature records from two periods. The period from 1921 to 1945 was adjusted lower to fit the early part of the hockey stick graph because they were higher than the 1990 through 2005 period. Next they raised the 1990 to 2005 temperatures above what they really were to help give the significant blade part of the graph. Then all the historical data back to the year 1000 was adjusted to stay well below the 1998 portion of the altered graph so they could claim 1998 was the hottest year in the history of the earth while in actuality there are several hundred years that were significantly hotter.

So reality shows that 1998 was the second hottest year in the last 100 years and that 5 out of 10 of the hottest years in the last 100 were in the 1920s and 1930s. If you were to create a new hockey stick graph based on real world temperature averages you would find that the blade would end in its rise at about 1939 and look like a very rough horizontal saw blade from that point to today with no peak in the saw teeth higher than the 1934 peak. And with parts of the wiggly handle significantly higher than the 1934 peak temperature average.

Now let us get to the money trail and the key persons responsible for this con game. After the flop of the 1973 oil embargo con the oil companies were stuck with large amounts of oil and refined product in storage that they were having a hard time selling so they reduced prices to move product. This cut their profits in half and made them very unhappy. Another thing that made them unhappy was the building of nuclear power plants and the plans being made to build massive solar power plants in orbit. The oil companies elected Jimmy Carter as president in 1976 to curb or eliminate these programs that would competes with oil and coal at lower cost.

The first presidential order stopped the recycling of all nuclear materials and forced the costly storage of them instead. This in itself made nuclear power plant operations a hundred time more costly than before. Then another order opened the construction of new plants and refurbishment of old plants to litigation without merit. Thus any group could tie up the construction or repair of a plant for 20 to 30 years in court without needing to prove up front their suit was valid. And when that suit was tossed out of court another would be made strictly to prevent the construction of nuclear plants. Who benefited from this, only the trial lawyers and the oil companies.

Now to overturn a presidential order requires the sitting president to sign a request to congress to remove it as Bush did recently on Carters off shore oil drilling ban. Then it requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of congress same as overturning a presidential veto does. Because the oil companies own the majority of the democrats in congress lock, stock and soul this will never happen even though both Bushes and Reagan tried several times. Now with a democrat running for president that is as firmly in the pockets of big oil as Carter was it is very unlikely nuclear will stand a chance in the near future unless by some miracle McCain gets in and brings with him a republican majority big enough wit independents and anti big oil democrats of which there are very few to overturn the Carter big oil orders.

Answer 7

According to this graph the data are extremely "noisy":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instr...

People see patterns even in random data, and a random sequence of numbers can have an upward slope or downward slope, depending on what slice of the random sequence you use.

I'm also suspicious of greatly exaggerated vertical scales (and graphs that don't start the y axis at zero).

It looks like the natural variance in the data are about 0.4C that is about the same amount of the change purportedly being measured.

So seeing the temp anomaly drop 0.4C in the next couple of years ... would not be unusual to see in this graph (since it has occurred in the past).  

Maybe we can get back to the tried-and-true ice age scenario that worked for so many years.  People don't like cold weather and saying we are headed to to seeing New York City under a mile of ice would get some attention.

Answer 8

This is a good question, Randall and although I do not know for certain, I suspect that at the time, we - for, as you know, I am an AGW proponent - probably did trumpet it as a vindication of man-made climate change. Goes to show you that the issue is complex. there are no black-and-white answers and constant study is required.

However, it does not demonstrate that AGW as a theory or climate change as a fact is wrong. As beren says it would have been statistically incorrect to call 1998 an outlier in 1999.

I'm not sure what oracle is getting at though - the link he provides shows a clear upward trend from 1900 and 1940, the vertical scales are not exaggerated and when a y-axis is showing variance from a mean, it is common practice to show the mean in the middle of the axis (else half the values don't show up) - the zero point is somewhat arbitrary (i.e. it doesn't refer to a specific temperature).

As for James - this answer I really don't get: He makes a lot of statements without citations and that are negated by the graph oracle provides. As someone who does not get their data from populist American politicians I've never seen this infamous "hockey stick" graph - I prefer sound scientific research - so cannot enter into that debate. He then drifts off into an American political diatribe-conspiracy going back 30 years...

James: It is GLOBAL warming, not AMERICAN. Facts, not politics is the issue here - I do not see the relevance of a US presidential order stopping the recycling of nuclear waste is relevant to a discussion on GW and whether AGW proponents thought 98 was an outlier in 99...

Answer 9

Isn't it funny that NASA was misleading when it reported that the hottest year on record for the last century was 1998 for two reasons.

1) if it was truly so hot, why didn't Algore jump on the Global Warming Bandwagon then?  Where was he..oh yeah, he was hanging around the Oval Office waiting for Clinton to finish his "business" .  

2) The study by NASA was wrong..The hottest year was 1934...and five of the hottest record years were before WWII.  

The climate on Earth has been changing ever since the "Big Bang" occurred or at least until Eve gave the apple to Adam and they were banished from Paradise.