The Gaia Code

You know that pesky global warming problem we've been hearing about every once in a while over the past decade and a half? Well, it turns out that that horde of climatologists that drank Al Gore's Kool-Aid were drinking a methodologically spiked beverage:

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, five of the ten warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

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 doubt it. The "US global warming propaganda machine" has always been spinning hysterical BS, the bigger the BS the more hysterical. This piano-casing-sized "inconvenient truth" isn't going to slow their shrieking down a whit, though it may have some impact on the degree of public gullibility in accepting their assembly-line chicken-littleism. And it's guaranteed the Enemy Media won't be of any help in truth-dissemination.

Still, you gotta love some of the ass-biting embedded in this story, as Ace details:

Here's the thing: James Hansen, who accused Bush of politicizing global warming science, is responsible for the bugged algorithms that produced the erroneous figures. Furthermore, he refused to release his algorithms so that they could be checked. The bug was discovered by someone who took the time to reverse-engineer Hansen's flawed algorithm, and then, having accurately done so, proved NASA's numbers were wrong. Thus causing the revision.

So James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing global warming, refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves.

Hansen sounds like an environmentalist answer to Scott Thomas Beauchamp, doesn't he?