Climate change error story gaining traction

It’s old news in the blogosphere, but I was very pleased to see that The Telegraph, one of Britain’s three main newspapers had as a top story (online) Steve McIntyre’s find that NASA climate information was in error:

A US blogger has caused a stir in the climate debate by forcing Nasa scientists to admit errors in some of their data showing increases in global warming.

Amateur meteorologist Steve McIntyre, who has in the past challenged “the hockey stick” model of climate change data used by green campaigners, emailed Nasa suggesting there were anomalies in their data.Mr McIntyre noticed that analysts at some North American monitoring stations were recording unexpected trends in temperature patterns.

The Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS) in New York found that this was caused by a switch between two sources of US temperature data and adjusted the figures.

Climate change sceptics in the blogosphere claim the error casts doubt on figures relied on by global warming campaigners such as Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth.

The corrected data shows 1934 to be the hottest year in the US since records began, not 1998 as had been claimed by climatologists at the GISS.

In a blog attributed to Mr McIntyre, he argues that the data, when readjusted, showed that “there was a change in the ‘leader board’ and 1934 emerged as the warmest US year.”

Admittedly, The Telegraph is the more conservative of the three papers, but it’s still something.

Here’s a screen shot showing the story’s prominence (click on thumbnail to enlarge):

If you look to the right of the lead picture, with it’s lead heading and paragraph, you’ll see right below it “US blogger spots Nasa climate change error.”