1998 was not the hottest year on record. 1934 was.

Environazis often site NASA's claim that 1998 was the hottest on record as proof that our increased SUV-driving ways are causing man-made global warming.

However, Toronto blogger and skeptic Stephen McIntyre redid the math and submitted his findings to NASA. (From the Toronto Star:)

A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures.

This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average.

Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations.

McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review.

"They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces."

I wonder how the optics of Canada signing onto the Kyoto Accord around that time would have been if 1998 wasn't so trumped-up as the hottest on record. It now appears that the political air was.