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Climate Change Debate Not Settled

Every time NASA’s James Hansen makes a global warming pronouncement, the press treats his words as if they were . When he announced that 1998 was the warmest year on record, it was front-page news. The only problem is that NASA’s “facts” were wrong.

Last fall, with no and certainly no press conference, NASA quietly rewrote the U.S. temperature history since 1880. As it turns out, 1934 is now the warmest year on record in the U.S., dropping 1998 to second. In addition, 1921, not 2006, is the third warmest year.

Indeed, according to the newly reconstructed U.S. temperature record, three of the top five warmest years since 1880 occurred before 1940, and six of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before 85 percent of the human caused greenhouse gas emissions were put into that atmosphere.

Sadly, NASA did not discover Hansen’s error. Nor did the many scientists at the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Rather it was a Canadian researcher and Internet blogger, Steve McIntyre, who caught the error and .

McIntyre worked backwards doing a regression to confirm what he suspected: NASA had not accounted for changes in the way it captured and recorded data more than a decade ago.

Evidently, no one at NASA thought to correlate the new temperature data with the old.

The facts, that only three of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade, and that the 1930s were the warmest decade of the century, certainly raise the question of whether we can most of the warming of the past century human actions.

The corrected data doesn’t mean that humans are not causing global warming. However, it does highlight that, contrary to Hansen and other scientists’ numerous claims, the science is hardly settled.

In the future, good journalists should ask hard questions anytime Hansen speaks.

Vocabulary Focus

in dispute (adj. phr) ---being doubted

occur(v) ---to happen

blow the whistle (idiom) ---to tell someone in authority about something bad that is happening so that it can be stopped

attribute (something) to (something) (phr. v) ---to say or think that something is the result of something else

Specialized terms

regression(n) ---回溯;倒退 a process of going backward through the earlier stages of something

correlate (v) ---指出或达成相互关联 to make a connection between two or more things, which often cause or influence the other