Posted 7February 2017
"The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change." David Rose reports latest corrupt practice.
Read Mail story here
NOAA scientist blew whistle: here
Matt Ridley comments:
Matt Ridley: Politics And Science Are A Toxic Combination
The Times, 6 February 2017
Alternative facts have no place in climate-change research. Greater integrity is essential if the scandals are to stop Fake-Climate
Back in December, some American scientists began copying government climate data onto independent servers in what press reports described as an attempt to safeguard it from political interference by the Trump administration. There is to be a March for Science in April whose organisers say: 'It is time for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.'
Well, today they have a chance to do just that, but against their own colleagues who stand accused of doing what they claim the Trump team has done. Devastating new testimony from John Bates, a whistleblowing senior scientist at America's main climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alleges that scientists themselves have been indulging in alternative facts, fake news and policy-based evidence.
Dr Bates's essay on the Climate Etc. website (and David Rose's story in The Mail on Sunday) documents allegations of scientific misconduct as serious as that of the anti-vaccine campaign of Andrew Wakefield. Dr Bates's boss, Tom Karl, a close ally of President Obama's science adviser, John Holdren, published a paper in 2015, deliberately timed to influence the Paris climate jamboree. The paper was widely hailed in the media as disproving the politically inconvenient 18-year pause in global warming, whose existence had been conceded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) two years earlier.
Dr Bates says Mr Karl based the 'pausebuster' paper on a flawed land-surface data set that had not been verified or properly archived; and on a sea-surface set that corrected reliable data from buoys with unreliable data from ship intakes, which resulted in a slightly enhanced warming trend. Science magazine is considering retracting the paper. A key congressional committee says the allegations confirm some of its suspicions.
Dr Bates is no 'denier'; he was awarded a gold medal by the US government in 2014 for his climate-data work. Having now retired he writes of 'flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards', of a 'rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy' and concludes: 'So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the data sets leading into [the report], we find Tom Karl's thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation.'
This is more than just a routine scientific scandal. First, it comes as scientists have been accusing President Trump and other politicians of politicising science.
Second, it potentially contaminates any claim that climate science has been producing unbiased results. Third, it embarrasses science journalists who have been chronicling the growing evidence of scientific misconduct in medicine, toxicology and psychology, but ignored the same about climate science because they approve of the cause, a habit known as noble-cause corruption.
Colleagues of Mr Karl have been quick to dismiss the story, saying that other data sets come to similar conclusions. This is to miss the point and exacerbate the problem. If the scientific establishment reacts to allegations of lack of transparency, behind-closed-door adjustments and premature release so as to influence politicians, by saying it does not matter because it gets the 'right' result, they will find it harder to convince Mr Trump that he is wrong on things such as vaccines.
Besides, this is just the latest scandal to rock climate science. The biggest was Climategate in 2009, which showed scientists conspiring to ostracise sceptics, delete emails, game peer review and manipulate the presentation of data, including the truncation of a tree-ring-derived graph to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent cooling ('hide the decline'). The scientists concerned were criticised by two rather perfunctory inquiries, but have since taken to saying they were 'exonerated'.