DON'T YOU HATE IT WHEN EVIDENCE GETS IN THE WAY OF "SCIENCE"?:

An Inconvenient Truth (MARK STEYN, August 13, 2007, NY Sun)

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's web site and look at the "US surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48, you might notice something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for US temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top Ten altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century — 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 — plummeted even lower down the Hot One Hundred. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and Oughts has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top Ten hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow called Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible, and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings — albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.

Speaking of invaluable Canadians, we've been watching Due South, which is out on DVD, and features Paul Gross as the dreamy Mountie Benton Fraser.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2007 8:33 AM