Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

Climate scientists, however, are asserting that the uproar over the data corrections is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot. NASA GISS scientist Jim Hansen, who helped devise the algorithm used to correct for the various climate factors, wrote in an Aug. 10 e-mail that the errors were introduced when the U.S. stations switched between two different datasets in 2000, with the faulty assumption that the second dataset also included the necessary corrections, an error that was recognized and fixed, Hansen said. Acknowledging that 1934 now appears to have been slightly hotter than 1998 in the United States, he noted that the difference in the mean between the two years, of 0.02 degrees Celsius, was and always had been smaller than the uncertainty, although their relative positions are now flipflopped. Globally, however, the changes had no effect on rankings, and 1998 was still by far the warmest year on record before 2005, he says. "For two days I have been besieged by rants that I have wronged the president, that I must 'step down,' or that I must 'vanish,'" he wrote.

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Although some people who have learned of the data errors are genuinely confused, Schmidt says, others "are being deliberately manipulative." The question of NASA releasing its source code is a case in point, he says, as both the raw data and the correction algorithms are actually freely available from NASA, and therefore anyone wanting to check NASA's numbers has all the necessary information to reproduce its results. As for McIntyre's question about whether NASA is concealing something by overwriting the old online data with the new, he says, "the whole analysis gets redone every month. That's a completely standard procedure."