2010 Might be the Warmest Year on Record?

NASA is touting the likelihood that 2010 may be judged the warmest year on record, moving past 1998, which previously held the record.

First of all, NASA had to retract that 1998 was the warmest year on record after it was discovered that a Y2K error in the NASA models caused it to be just a little warmer than 1934. NASA, to their discredit, then decided to go regional on us, claiming 1934 was the warmest year in the United States, but not in the world. Imagine the difficulty involved in that determination... that 1934 was the warmest year in America, but the rest of the planet, no so much. For that matter, the whole idea of taking the temperature of planet Earth, which is ever changing, with weather stations that are ever changing, by people and nations that are ever changing... and then claiming this year is a half a degree warmer than that year is just downright silly.

Secondly, NASA has delayed and outright refused freedom of information requests to release the math they use to arrive at these claims. NASA doesn't record the temperatures, they take others' data and post-process it with fudge factors they refused to release to the public (even though we pay for it) and then claim it's getting hotter.

Thirdly, as I've said before, in 1990, NOAA started eliminating all weather stations at high altitudes and in rural areas from their recording lists -- these, of course, were all stations which recorded cooler temperatures, on average -- so NOAA now favors more easily visited stations in warmer areas. Where they used to look at 7500 weather stations, now they only look at 1500 or less. The temperature immediately started to rise (surprise, surprise).

Lastly, though I'm sure there are other complaints, let's get someone to tell us how this determination of "warmest December," "warmest winter," "warmest year" is being determined. In England, for example, their NOAA, called "The Met" records the highest temperatures and lowest temperatures of each day. They then take the highest 15 readings between November and March and average them to determine how warm the winter has been... if you can see how silly that is, why can't they? In early January 2010 the Met announced that the winter of 2010 was the warmest on record -- and they hadn't even gone through January, February and March! All because November 2009 had been a warm month -- all 15 of the warmest days were in November of 2009. Of course it escapes them that a winter could easily be both the warmest and coldest on record in the same year.

Just remember, when these warmest years and coldest years claims come out... the temperature ranges on Earth between -90 degrees Celsius to +60 degrees Celsius and that has not changed throughout 30 years of global warming. There is no average temperature on Earth, we do not have the monitoring technology to determine the average temperature on Earth. The temperature where you are when you read the thermometer averaged with the temperature in Alaska or Mongolia or Australia or Chad -- is meaningless.