Here’s Some Good News…

…which has nothing to do with baking and pastry or even food. I just thought you needed a picker-upper.

Remember Y2K? The doomsday computer bug that never did much of anything? Well it turns out seven years later that in addition to causing the breakdown of a dog licensing computer in Colorado, it also diddled with the data at the NASA/Goddard GISS database. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself normal. The NASA/Goddard GISS database, among other things, is the most authoritative repository of global temperature data in the world.

Well it seems that Y2K caused a series of errors in the database that made global temperature readings for the last decade or so appear too high. The data has been recently revised, and now shows that contrary to what some scientists have been saying, 1998 was not the warmest year in the last millennium. In fact it wasn’t even the warmest year of the century (that distinction belongs to 1934). According to the new data, fully half of the warmest years of the last century occurred before World War II.

The upshot is that while global warming is probably happening, it isn’t happening as fast or as severely as once thought. Have a nice day.