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August 7, 2007: A discontinuity in station records in the U.S. was discovered and corrected (GHCN data for 2000 and later years were inadvertently appended to USHCN data for prior years without including the adjustments at these stations that had been defined by the NOAA National Climate Data Center). This had a small impact on the U.S. average temperature, about 0.15°C, for 2000 and later years, and a negligible effect on global temperature, as is shown here.

This August 2007 change received international attention via discussions on various blogs and repetition by some other media, with no graphs provided to show the insignificance of the effect. Further discussions of the curious misinformation are provided by Dr. Hansen on his personal webpage (e.g., his post on "The Real Deal: Usufruct & the Gorilla").

Fox, Washington Times, and their like have gone bananas over a flaw discovered in the computer program that produces global temperatures at GISS each month. They have even managed to get Congress and NASA Headquarters involved. Now we know what mom meant when she said “don’t make a federal case out of it.” Hey, what is really going on here?
The said computer program is rerun every month as new meteorological station data and new satellite sea surface temperature data are reported. The program produces a global surface temperature field using an analysis scheme documented by Hansen et al. (2001) http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_etal.pdf The flaw affected temperatures only in the United States (by about 0.15°C) and only in 2000 and later. We corrected the flaw in the program, thanked the fellow who pointed it out, and thought that was the end of it.

How big an error did this flaw cause? That is shown by the before and after results in Figure 1. The effect on the global temperature record is invisible. The effect on U.S. average temperature is about 0.15°C beginning in 2000. Does this change have any affect whatsoever on the global warming issue? Certainly not, as discussed below.
What we have here is a case of dogged contrarians who present results in ways intended to deceive the public into believing that the changes have greater significance than reality. They aim to make a mountain out of a mole hill. I believe that these people are not stupid, instead they seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story. They seem to know exactly what they are doing and believe they can get away with it, because the public does not have the time, inclination, and training to discern what is a significant change with regard to the global warming issue.
The proclamations of the contrarians are a deceit, but their story raises a more important matter, usufruct. It is the most important issue in the entire global warming story, in my opinion. The players in the present U.S. temperature story, we scientists included, are just bit players. The characters in the main drama are big fish, really big fish.

Instead of showing the impact of the flaw in our analysis program via a graph such as Figure 1, as a scientist would do (and as would immediately reveal how significant the flaw was), they instead discuss ranking of temperature in different years, including many false statements. We have thus been besieged by journalists saying “they say that correcting your error caused the warmest year to become 1934 rather than a recent year, is that right!?”
Hardly. First of all, many journalists had the impression that they were talking about global temperature. As you can see from Figure 1a, global warming is unaffected by the flaw. This realization should be enough to make most journalists lose interest, as global warming refers to global temperature.
But what if you are a chauvinist and only care about temperature in the United States? Did correcting the flaw in the program change the time of calculated maximum temperature to 1934? No. If you look at our 2001 paper, and get out your micrometer, you will see that we found 1934 to be the warmest year in the United States, by a hair, of the order of 0.01°C warmer than 1998, the same as the result that we find now. Of course the difference in the 1934 and 1998 temperatures is not significant, and we made clear in our paper that such years have to be declared as being practically a dead-heat.

Let’s look (Figure 2) at the temperature anomalies in the four years that yield the warmest U.S. in our analysis. The U.S. mean temperature anomalies that we obtain range from 1.25°C in 1934 to 1.13°C in 2006. Thus the total range among these four years is just over a tenth of a degree. The uncertainty in the U.S. temperature is at least that large (see our published papers), so we can only say that these four years were comparably warm and the warmest year was probably either 1934 or 1998.
Note, however, that the 1998 and 2006 temperature anomaly maps differ fundamentally from the 1934 and 1921 temperature maps. In 1998 and 2006 the world as a whole has become warmer, 1998 being aided by a very strong El Nino, but 2006 by only a very weak El Nino. In 1921 and 1934 the United States happened to be a relatively hot spot compared to the world as a whole. The next time that the U.S. temperature happens to be unusually high relative to the globe, it may be quite a barn burner.

If I get taxed $1000 on a carbon tax and then get it back through income tax, why would I as a consumer change my buying habits at all? I am not put in any better or worse off position. For this carbon tax to have the impact on consumer demand, Dion must be lying and we will all take a tax hit.

Of course the difference in the 1934 and 1998 temperatures is not significant .

Now is it not significant ?

But the Mole Hill was a mountain before the errors were discovered.

The rich and most corperations will be taking a hit