Month: February 2017

Uncategorized 12 Feb 2017

New York Times Manipulates NOAA’s Climate Science Scandal

If you were only to read the New York Times’ latest article on the most recent Climate Change scandal first reported by the Mail and the Daily Mail, you would never know that there was any scandal to speak of in the first place.

Headline: “No Data Manipulation in 2015 Climate Study, Researchers Say.” Well, not all researchers. The background of the data manipulation story revolves around accusations made by David Bates, a recently retired scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Among his several accusations is that NOAA “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris agreement on climate change,” a paper which would have been welcomed with open arms by the Obama administration. On February 4, Bates wrote a lengthy blog post at his website detailing the accusations. Here is a brief list of some of the charges:

1. Climate scientist, Tom Karl, failed to archive the land temperature data set and thus also failed to “follow the policy of his own Agency [and] the guidelines in Science magazine for dataset archival and documentation.”

2. The authors also chose to “use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95%,” and according to Bates, the authors failed to give a justification for this when pressed.

3. Karl routinely “had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Bates adds, “[a] NOAA NCEI supervisor remarked how it was eye-opening to watch Karl work the co-authors, mostly subtly but sometimes not, pushing choices to emphasize warming.”

4. Experimental datasets were used that were not run through operational readiness review (ORR) and were not archived.

To sum up, the “data manipulation,” as characterize by the Mail, consisted in not following proper protocols, selecting certain data sets which had not been properly analyzed, and manipulating scientific methodology with a political and not purely scientific end.

Is Bates right? It’s far too early to tell if the apparent rush to publish compromised the actual conclusions reached from the date, but Bates’ accusations certainly raise questions worth pursuing. Yet this is not how the Times‘ Henry Fountain sees matters in his slanted article. It is not a good sign that he launches into the body of the text with a not so subtle ad hominem attack on the original author:

Mr. Rose, who has made climate-related claims in the past that did not hold up to scrutiny, said a “high-level whistle-blower,” John J. Bates, a recently retired scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, had told him that the agency “breached its own rules on scientific integrity” in publishing the study in June 2015.

What are the climate-related claims that Mr. Rose made that did not hold up to scrutiny? In a previous article for the Daily Mail Rose avers that reported record high temperatures in 2016 “may” be caused by El Niño and not human produced carbon emissions. “This means it is possible that by some yardsticks, 2016 will be declared as hot as 2015 or even slightly hotter — because El Niño did not vanish until the middle of the year.” That it is “possible by some yardstick” that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due in part to El Niño is about as modest a claim as there is. Surely it is possible. To show that this is false one would have to prove that it is not only unlikely, but impossible! And science is not in the business of proving the impossible.

What is Fountain’s evidence against Rose’s modest claim? He links to another New York Times article as evidence. Therein it is noted that reporters such as Rose have claimed “El Niño, and not climate change, was responsible for the record heat.” On the contrary, “scientists said that while the recent El Niño did contribute to the record warmth, climate change played a major role, too.” Yet notice that Rose never denied that climate change did not play a major role in the (alleged) record temperature. His claim was only that El Niño may have played a role such that there might not have been a record temperature in its absence.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

February 11, 2017 at 07:02PM

Uncategorized 12 Feb 2017

Christopher Booker: Will Donald Trump And The Republicans Bring An End To The Costliest Scare Story Ever Known?

Once this scandal has been properly brought out into the open, it will raise the most disturbing question mark yet over the promotion of the greatest and costliest scare story the world has ever known.

Two years ago last week, I wrote a column given the provocative heading “The fiddling of temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”. It was the second of two articles which attracted a record 42,000 comments from all over the world, reporting on the discovery by expert bloggers in half a dozen countries – led in Britain by Paul Homewood on his site “Not a lot of people know that” – that something very odd appeared to have been done to the official land surface temperature records on which, more than anything else, the entire alarm over man-made global warming has rested.

These derive from the record known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), run by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). By comparing archived data with that now being published, the bloggers claimed to have discovered that temperature records all over the world had, seemingly, been systematically “adjusted” to show older temperatures lower than those originally measured and more recent temperatures higher than those recorded: thus conveying the notion that the world is warming significantly more than the actual data justified.

This scandal has now surfaced again with accusations made by Dr John Bates, a recently retired senior scientist at the NOAA, against his former boss , Tom Karl. Bates alleges that an NOAA paper written before the historic climate conference in Paris in 2015 breached its own rules and was based on misleading and unverified data. That, to many, looks like the paper was designed to stoke up hysteria over global warming in the run-up to the conference.

The warmist lobby had no greater concern at that time than the so-called “pause”: the evidence that, for nearly 20 years, the trend in global temperatures had been failing to rise as all the official computer models had predicted it should.

Karl’s paper won worldwide publicity by purporting to show that there had, in fact, been no “pause”, and that both land and sea temperatures had continued to rise more than was previously accepted.

What Dr Bates now claims is that, in defiance of rules he himself drew up and over his (Bates’s) private objections, Karl’s paper had again been based on “adjustments” that the scientific evidence didn’t justify….

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

February 11, 2017 at 07:02PM

Uncategorized 12 Feb 2017

…

via Watts Up With That? http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

February 11, 2017 at 06:02PM

Uncategorized 12 Feb 2017

David Rose: How Can We Trust Climate Scientists If They Keep Twisting The Truth?

They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.

A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.

The response has been extraordinary, with The Mail on Sunday’s disclosures reverberating around the world. There have been nearly 150,000 Facebook ‘shares’ since last Sunday, an astonishing number for a technically detailed piece, and extensive coverage in media at home and abroad.

It has even triggered an inquiry by Congress. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House of Representatives’ science committee, is renewing demands for documents about the controversial paper, which was produced by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the world’s leading source of climate data.

In his view, the whistleblower had shown that ‘NOAA cheated and got caught’. No wonder Smith and many others are concerned: the revelations go to the very heart of the climate change industry and the scientific claims we are told we can trust.

Remember, the 2015 Paris Agreement imposes gigantic burdens and its effects are felt on every household in the country. Emissions pledges made by David Cameron will cost British consumers a staggering £319 billion by 2030 – almost three times the annual budget for the NHS in England.

That is not the end of it. Taxpayers also face an additional hefty contribution to an annual £80 billion in ‘climate aid’ from advanced countries to the developing world. That is on top of our already gargantuan aid budget. Green levies and taxes already cost the average household more than £150 a year.

The contentious paper at the heart of this furore – with the less than accessible title of Possible Artifacts Of Data Biases In The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus – was published just six months before the Paris conference by the influential journal Science.

It made a sensational claim: that contrary to what scientists have been saying for years, there was no ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the early 21st Century.

Indeed, this ‘Pausebuster’ paper as it has become known, claimed the rate of warming was even higher than before, making ‘urgent action’ imperative.

There can be no doubting the impact of this document. It sat prominently in the scientific briefings handed out to international negotiators, including EU and UK diplomats.

An official report from the European Science Advisory Council stated that the paper had ‘refined the corrections in temperature records’ and shown the warming rate after 2000 was higher than for 1950-99.

So, flawed as it was, the Pausebuster paper unquestionably helped persuade world leaders to sign an agreement that imposes massive emissions cuts on developed countries.

No wonder, then, that our revelations were met with fury by green propagandists. Some claimed the MoS had published ‘fake news’. One scientist accused me of becoming the ‘David Irving of climate change denial’ – a reference to the infamous Holocaust denier.

Yet perhaps more damaging is the claim from some in the green lobby that our disclosures are small beer. In fact, their importance cannot be overstated. They strike at the heart of climate science because they question the integrity of the global climate datasets on which pretty much everything else depends.

The whistleblower is a man called Dr John Bates, who until last year was one of two NOAA ‘principal scientists’ working on climate issues. And as he explained to the MoS, one key concern is the reliability of new data on sea temperatures issued in 2015 at the same time as the Pausebuster paper.

It turns out that when NOAA compiled what is known as the ‘version 4’ dataset, it took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations.

They did this even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.

No one, to be clear, has ‘tampered’ with the figures. But according to Bates, the way those figures were chosen exaggerated global warming.

And without this new dataset there would have been no Pausebuster paper. If, as previous sea water evidence has shown, there really has been a pause in global warming, then it calls into question the received wisdom about its true scale.

Then there is the matter of timing. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that NOAA, ignoring protests by Dr Bates, held back publication of the version 4 sea dataset several months after it was ready – to intensify the impact of the Pausebuster paper. It also meant more sceptical voices had no chance to examine the figures.

Our revelations showed there was another problem with the Pausebuster paper – it used an untested experimental version of the dataset recording temperatures on land, which had not been properly archived and made accessible to other scientists.

This was a fundamental breach of mandatory rules under NOAA’s Climate Data Records programme, which Bates had devised. Is it sharp practice? Certainly it carries the stench of ‘Climategate’ in 2009, when leaked emails showed scientists colluding to hide data and weaknesses in their arguments.

It is important to acknowledge the MoS did make one error: the caption on a graph, showing the difference between NOAA’s sea data records and the UK Met Office’s, did not make clear that they used different baselines. We corrected this immediately on our website.

The only ‘fake news’ in our revelations is the claim that they don’t matter.

In truth, they are hugely damaging, for they suggest an agreement made by figures such as Barack Obama and David Cameron rested in part on research that had not been published with integrity.

This is an age where many have come to question the role of experts. Restoring trust demands transparency.

In climate science, this means being open about the fact there are still critical uncertainties: not about the basic proposition that the world is warming, thanks in part to humans, but about the speed at which this is happening; and when it is likely, left unchecked, to become truly dangerous.

Al Gore famously said: ‘The science is settled.’ It is not.

We cannot allow such a vital issue for our future to be mired in half truths and deceptions.