Friday, August 10, 2007

Talk About A Delayed Reaction


It looks like Y2K has had an impact after all, albeit a little later than expected. NASA has just revealed that due to a Y2K bug in the algorithms used to calculate global temperatures over the past century, the data output from those models, the very data that environmentalists have been using to beat us over the head about how we’re killing the planet, is incorrect. The problem has been corrected, and the resulting data has been silently released by NASA. Why silently? Because of the negative impact the corrected data would have on the Global Warming™ Hysteria Movement. Although the differences are not major, they could have a profound PR impact.
Some of the interesting changes: 1998 is no longer the “hottest year on record.” That honor now goes to 1934. In fact, it turns out that 5 of the 10 hottest days of the year all occur before World War II, which actually makes sense statistically. WWII occurred about halfway through the last century, so it would make sense for half of the 10 hottest days of the year to occur in the first half of the century, and the other five to occur in the second half. I’m no statistician, but that seems like a fairly normal random distribution. Whereas if Global Warming™ were actually happening, you would expect to see most or all of the 10 clustered in the latter part of the century. Clearly, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty here, but lets just go ahead and wreck our entire economy because of a theory we can neither prove nor disprove. That sounds like a rational idea.

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