Thanks to the work of Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, serious anomalies were discovered in adjustments to raw climate data. The largest and most obvious were adjustments to data made starting in January of 2000. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis data is a source used by many climate researchers in doing work in the field of climate change. GISS has now re-ranked the warmest years and as a result only one year since 2000 is in the top ten warmest years.

The new top 10 warmest years are, warmest first: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

By decade, you can see that the 1930’s (dust bowl years) had 4 of the warmest years of the century while the 1990’s had three and the 2000’s has had only one year in the top ten warmest so far. in fact, once these anomalous adjustments to the raw data are corrected, many believe there has been no warming in North America since 1998 and in fact there might be some gradual cooling since then.

Anthony Watts’ work on documenting another network’s sensor locations is showing a significant number of stations in that network whose sensor locations are not within that network’s own guidelines for sensor positioning. Many are located on roofs, next to air conditioners, incinerators, parking areas, and even one in Arizona located in the middle of an asphalt parking lot.

You can find more information at Roger Pielke’s blog.