By Stevie Smith Aug 17, 2007, 14:22 GMT
A diligent weather-loving blogger has this week applied liberal amounts of egg to the rather embarrassed face of the Nasa Goddard Institute of Space Science following its use of incorrect temperature statistics to gauge long-standing effects related to global warming.
Officials at Nasa have now conceded that they have been relying on the wrong temperature information during their assessment of global warming – for the last seven years.
However, the individual responsible for uncovering the prolonged statistical inaccuracies was not an eagle-eyed employee, but rather a member of the wide-ranging blogosphere, which duly prompted Nasa into adjusting its skewed figures.
Despite the gaff, members of the scientific community have offered that Nasa’s faulty data, which only covered US temperature changes since 2000, is unlikely to have a significant impact on amassed statistics centring on the effects and trends of global warming. Nasa’s reliance on incorrect data revealed that its temperature figures from as far back as 2000 were overstated to the tune of around 0.15 Centigrade or 0.27 Fahrenheit.
Global warming sceptics are currently using Nasa’s hiccup as an opportunity to point fingers at the scientific community and raise the notion that statistical evidence cannot always be trusted. However, climate scientists point out that the adjusted US figures bearly register on an othewise worrying set of ‘global’ temperature trends that still reveal long-term warming. It’s worth noting at this juncture that the US equates to some 2 percent of the Earth’s entire surface area.
"The effect is so small that you couldn’t see it on a graph," commented David Parker of the Met Office Hadley Centre in a Times Online report. "They were of the order of a thousandth of a degree. It really has no impact."
Other statistical adjustments and interpretations related to US heat trends throughout the years have also been applied during 2007 – though admittedly not after innaccuracies exposed by a blogger – which include blistering 1934 changing over with 1998 as the hottest recorded year in the US, while a scorching 1921 moved up into third and dislodged a hot but disgruntled 2006.
Your Talkback on this Story