By Julie Kelly
Tuesday, February 07, 2017
A former top scientist with the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has stepped forward to expose the malfeasance
behind a key climate report issued just before the United Nations’ Climate
Change Conference in 2015. The whistleblower, Dr. John Bates, led NOAA’s
climate-data records program for ten years and reveals stunning
allegations in a lengthy Daily Mail
exposĂ© posted February 4. His main charge is that the federal government’s
top agency in charge of climate science published a flawed but widely accepted
study that was meant to disprove the hiatus in global warming. Bates accuses
the study’s lead author, NOAA official Tom Karl, of using unverified data sets,
ignoring mandatory agency procedures, and failing to archive evidence — all in
a “blatant attempt to intensify the impact” of the paper in advance of the
conference.
The study, “Possible Artifacts of Data Biases in the
Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus,” was published in Science magazine in June 2015, just a few months before world
leaders gathered in Paris to hammer out a costly global pact on climate-change
mitigation. It refuted evidence from other climate-research groups that showed
a major slowdown in rising global temperatures from 1998 to 2012; the slowdown
was a sticky little fact that threatened to undermine the very raison d’ĂȘtre of
the conference. Climate activists were sweating over the acknowledgement by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 that “the rate of
warming over the past 15 years . . . is smaller than the rate calculated since
1951.” The IPCC walked back its own predictions from 2007 that short-term
temperature would rise between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius. The IPCC in 2013
“concluded that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller
increasing linear trend over the past 15 years [1998 to 2012] than over the
past 30 to 60 years’ and the rise in global temperatures was ‘estimated to be
around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951–2012.’”
So Karl, the former head of the NOAA office that produces
climate data, worked with a team of scientists to challenge the IPCC findings
and prove that the hiatus did not exist. He claimed to have developed a way to
raise sea-temperature readings that had been collected by buoys: He would
adjust them by using higher temperature readings of sea water collected by
ships. “In regards to sea surface temperature, scientists have shown that
across the board, data collected from buoys are cooler than ship-based data,”
said one of the study’s co-authors. It was therefore necessary, the NOAA
scientists held, to “correct the difference between ship and buoy measurements,
and we are using this in our trend analysis.”
Now get ready to be shocked. This dubious methodology
concluded that the warming trend for 2000 to 2014 was exactly the same as it
was for 1950 to 1999: “There is no discernable (statistical or otherwise)
decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and
the first 15 years of the 21st century.” The study then concluded that the
IPCC’s statement about a slower rise in global temperature “is no longer
valid.” (It takes a lot of chutzpah to out-climate the international climateers.)
The study was cheered by climate activists and their
media sympathizers around the world, but Bates says the study had major
problems. “They had good data from buoys,” he told the Daily Mail. “And they threw it out and ‘corrected’ it by using the
bad data from ships [a natural warming source]. You never change good data to
agree with the bad, but that’s what they did so as to make it look as if the
sea was warmer.” Bates also said the study ignored satellite data.
And in the most Obama-esque move, Bates said that the
computer used to process the data “suffered a complete failure” and that none
of the data had been archived or made available as required by NOAA rules,
which means that Karl’s paper cannot be replicated or independently verified.
According to Bates, the NOAA is drafting a new version of the report that will
reverse the flaws in Karl’s report. For now, Science magazine is standing by its publication of Karl’s study,
claiming it underwent “rigorous peer review” and dismissing as “baseless and
without merit” any notion that the study was rushed to coincide with the Paris
conference. (The Cato Institute has knocked Science
for its biased global warming coverage, but that’s a story for another day.)
In a separate post on the blog Climate Etc., Bates
laments that government scientists routinely fail to save their work: “The most
critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are
unwilling to formally archive and document their data.” Bates notes that the
very scientists who have failed to save data are now suddenly concerned that
the Trump administration might destroy climate data.
Bates is not fighting this fight alone. Representative
Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee,
has been asking NOAA for all communications related to Karl’s report, but the
agency has refused to cooperate. In October 2015, Smith’s committee issued
subpoenas for the documents; NOAA released some technical papers but not the
requested correspondence, arguing that taxpayer-paid scientists don’t have to
disclose their emails with other taxpayer-paid scientists about a taxpayer-paid
study.
In a statement Sunday, Smith applauded Bates’s courage
for speaking out: “Dr. Bates’ revelations and NOAA’s obstruction certainly lend
credence to what I’ve been saying all along — that the Karl study used flawed
data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the president’s climate
change agenda, and ignored NOAA’s own standards for scientific study.”
With a sympathetic administration in power, Smith should
now be able to get to the bottom of how the Karl study was conducted and who
else helped move it along. And despite the personal attacks on his character
and credibility, Bates’s actions could have long-lasting repercussions, not the
least of which could be to encourage others to speak out about what’s been
going on at federal scientific agencies. It’s long overdue.
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