"1934, not 1998, the hottest year on record, NASA confirms" (Good People Better Rise Up!)

Global warming skeptics are up in arms over this story:

The hottest year on record in the United States was 1934 -- not 1998 as had long been believed -- NASA scientists announced this week.
The change to the record books came about when Canada-based blogger Steve McIntyre of the blog Climateaudit.org e-mailed NASA earlier this month to point out an unusual jump in temperature data between 1999 and 2000.

When agency scientists checked his question they found that two temperature history data sets that were incorrectly assumed to match were merged several years ago.

When the data was corrected it showed a decrease of 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit in yearly temperatures since 2000 and a smaller decrease in earlier years. That meant that 1998 went from being 0.02 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 1934 to 0.04 degrees cooler.

The agency also reduced the mean U.S. temperature anomalies for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

The reranking of the hottest year in the United States does not affect world temperature records though, where 1998 is tied with 2005 as the hottest year ever, NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. The data adjustment changes "the inconsequential bragging rights for certain years in the U.S.," he said. But "global warming is a global issue, and the global numbers show that there is no question that the last five to 10 years have been the hottest period of the last century," he added.

With the new U.S. rankings, four of the 10 warmest years in the United States occurred during the 1930s.

Rush Limbaugh in particular thinks this undermines the man-made climate change argument. The 1930s, after all, were a very long time ago, long before Gore's famous CO2 graph turns into a near vertical line.

Because, you know, there were no other forms of man made climate change going on in the mid 1930s.