Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder
August 14, 2007
DANIEL DALE
In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math.
After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.
Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.
More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.
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Don't forget about NASA's data calculation error that made the Mars Climate Orbiter a $125M lawn dart, slamming into the martian soil back in '99.
Or their 2010 claim that the glaciers in the Himalayas were melting and would be gone (disproved by researchers in India).
However one interesting article on the NASA supports positive correlation between sunspots and global temperature, only affected by volcanic activity.
earthobservatory.nasa.gov...
Volcanic Eruptions Interfere with the Effect of Sunspots on Global Climate
June 11, 2002
STUDY OF DUST IN ICE CORES SHOWS
University at Buffalo scientists working with ice cores have solved a mystery surrounding sunspots and their effect on climate that has puzzled scientists since they began studying the phenomenon.
The research, published in a paper in the May 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots -- blemishes on the sun's surface indicating strong solar activity -- do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can completely reverse those influences.
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"Knowing the mechanisms behind past climate changes is critical to our understanding of possible future changes in climate, such as global warming, and for assessing which of these changes are due to human activities and which arise naturally," explained co-author Michael Stolz, doctoral candidate in the Department of Physics in UB's College of Arts and Sciences.
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"By carefully studying the timing of other volcanic eruptions, we found that they coincided with all of the correlation reversals between sunspots and climate," said Ram.
A chart in the paper shows how six major volcanic eruptions between 1800 and 1962 occurred during precisely the same years when there were reversals in the correlation between sunspot activity and climate.
That revelation provided a further insight into how sunspots affect climate.
"All energy comes from the sun, but the change in visible radiation from the sun during any one solar cycle is less than one half of a percent," explained Stolz. "Scientists have said it's impossible that so small a change could influence any signal in the climate. But here we have evidence to show that it's not just radiation energy from the sun that is affecting climate, it's the solar-modulated cosmic rays that have a strong influence because of their impact on cloud cover."
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