Facetious solution;
Maybe we could all invest in a giant dry-ice factory? It is after all very cold stuff,AND it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere even more efficiently than trees![grinz]

The difference was due to switching between two sources of US temperature data not Y2K.

the USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets.

Props to Craig for the link.

Still getting "Access forbidden!" message when attempting to go to McIntyre site directly. Is anyone else getting this?

As I understand it, Craig, prior to the recalculation as much as 50% of the variation could be attributed to the variations in total solar irradiance so the graphs you're pointing to may not be quite as dispositive as you seem to think.

This is incorrect on two counts:

(1) The 50% figure isn't supported by actual data, and
(2) The graphs I linked strictly show the effects of the correction on GISS data. They do not show the effects on measurements of global warming, which is what you're referring to (given that you mention solar radiation).

GISS is for the U.S. and only for the last 130 years or so. The effect on measured global warming are relatively smaller (the U.S. being a rather small part of the globe and other measurements being not affected by the GISS-specific correction and the last 130 years being only the end of the timeframe for which scientists are confident of measurments of global temperature anomolies).

The claims by some that this affects the "hockey stick" graph are egregiously wrong both for the reasons above and because the introduction of the error post-dates Mann, et. al.'s paper by several years.

There's an implicit notion in some of the non-scientific discussion of this correction that finding an error in a calculation, no matter how trivial, is sufficient to draw a scientific conclusion. But errors are not conclusions; they're just errors. To draw a conclusion you have to re-run the experiment with the errors corrected and see if the results differ.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/

Note that as I suggested in my comment above I very much believe that we should be pushing for greater efficiencies. That's just good sense but, unfortunately, we've got so many subsidies for so many things these days that the market is very, very distorted.

Mr. Verdon if your out there, I'm still waiting on the source code and data set for the climate calculations you claimed to have done.

Unfortunatly Floyd, if you want to make this type of criticism, you need to establish that the same type of criticism doesnt apply to you too.

It seems blindingly obvious for people like Floyd, and the other GW deniers that post here, or anywhere else, that they:

have "left the realm of science and entered the realm of dogma."

"can not be swayed."

and "will continue unaffected by observation or evidence, pro or con."

Am I wrong here? Is there any set of evidence that will convince you Floyd? Nothing that you say gives anyone the slightest confidence that your mind is open on this question. Nor is there any sense of that from others in the denial camp.

So the best that you can hope for is to say that GW supporters are as unscientific and obstinate and dogmatic as you are. Now, granted, that is a pretty damning charge. But still, it just represents playing for a tie. Why not play to win? Why not be the real rationalist with integrity? Concede the points that are well-supported. Focus your criticism on areas that may harbor legitimate questions. Dispense with all the ad hominems and conspiracy theories.

When I follow this debate I see almost none of this responsible, honest criticism from the denial camp, - just a lot of the ususal Rush-wannable rhetoric. Dont you realize how easy that makes it for everyone to dismiss your points?

Still, WRT Steve Verdon's consistent assertion that all source code to mathematical models be available or else we're frozen in place, what McIntyre did is *precisely* how science in this area progresses. No one needed the source code to do this recalculation. What happened was the results were checked in the analog of performing another experiment (i.e. creating one's own model and doing the calculations) and coming up with a different result.

Just for future reference, Steve, this is how it's done. Even bringing up the silliness of "code" and whether it's available is obscuring the debate. Doing science is hard and takes work - which is, of course, why "code" is valuable and is almost exclusively proprietary.

So, next time, can we just drop that whole argument and focus on the observables and act like real scientists instead of trying to deal cards from the denialist's deck?

Even today I'm hearing about scientist "tweaking" a computer model because we've cooled for the last two years and they needed an explanation for that. In my book "tweaking" is the same as manipulating.

Those who can't see the global warming movement as an attempt to modify western values and behavior are naive.