NASA tweaks temperature data, but it says global warming skeptics are way out of line

WASHINGTON - NASA has slightly revised its record of average annual temperatures in the United States since 2000 -- modifications that researchers say are insignificant but that some conservative commentators and bloggers have seized upon to assert that global warming has been hyped as a problem.

Last update: August 14, 2007 - 9:06 PM

The revisions, by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, stemmed from an error noticed by Canadian blogger and global warming skeptic Stephen McIntyre. James Hansen, director of the institute, said that McIntyre brought the error to the institute's attention and that the error was corrected.

Hansen said the error involved adjustments to average annual temperatures after 2000 and that the corrected figures show that the past six years were 0.15 degrees centigrade cooler than reported. Hansen said that the change is insignificant in terms of global warming and changed the overall global mean temperatures by 1 one-thousandth of a degree.

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used reports of the revisions to argue that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists with liberal agendas.

"We have proof of man-made global warming," Limbaugh said on his radio show last Thursday. "The man-made global warming is inside NASA. The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data."

Hansen said that the critics were "making a mountain of a molehill."The change does nothing to our understanding of how the global climate is changing and is being used by critics to muddy the debate," he said.

WASHINGTON POST