The Political Climate: an ongoing commentary on the NH Primary and Climate Change

NASA’s revision of the top ten hottest years in the U.S. does not alter the climate change debate whatsoever.  TPC usually does not waste time engaging in disputes about the legitimacy of climate change.  Oh well, we are today.  Canadian blogger Stephen Mcintyre of Climate Audit discovered a mistake in the yearly U.S. temperature calculations conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences.  The error was corrected and the new calculations found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in America.

Global warming skeptics seized upon this error as proof of their usual charge that global warming is a hoax.  What they conveniently did not mention (it could have just been another case of acute amnesia) was that NASA’s miscalculation was fairly insignificant on a global scale.  In no way does this debunk the legitimate climate change evidence found in scientific reports like the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change.  James Hansen explained that the correction in U.S. temperatures only altered global averages by one-one-thousandth of a degree.

To quote a favorite Mitt Romney tag line: ”They don’t call it America warming, they call it global warming.” -July 2 Blog

Blogging skeptics, like Noel Sheppard of Myth Busters, were shocked to hear that “a government agency is actually participating in a fraud against the American people by withholding information crucial to a major policy issue now facing the nation.”  What a shock!

But wait, this sounds all too familiar…government withholding information from the nation…hmm.  That sounds similar to something else I heard in the news recently about how Dr. Richard Carmona, the former Surgeon General was not allowed to talk about the danger climate change poses to public health.  The past twenty years of strategic global warming denial is comprehensively outlined in a Newsweek article “Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine.”