If the Panic Pushers Prevail

The Executive Suite at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in darkness:  Dr. John Bates, Principal Scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina recently retired and tossed a couple of well-aimed truth grenades at the bowels of the bureau and results are not pretty.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, said it will review Bates allegations researchers rushed a study claiming the world was warming faster than previously published to panic policymakers.  The data actually confirm there has been a decline for 18 years where NOAA claims there has been a significant increase for the last 15 years.

NOAA is charged with providing peer-reviewed data to the American public and stands behind its world-class scientists,” the NOAA spokesman said, but  "peers" are not supposed to be scientists working for the bureau.

Dr. Bates documented flaws with the "Karl Study" after author Tom Karl,  said it had not been archived in accordance with NOAA policy. “I later learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure, leading to a tongue-in-cheek joke by some who had worked on it that the failure was deliberate to ensure the result could never be replicated,” Bates noted in the blog "Climate Etc."

Bates claims NOAA scientists made a “blatant attempt to intensify the impact” of global warming to eliminate the “pause” in temperature rise since 1998, and made “decisions and that maximised warming..." in advance of a major United Nations climate summit in Paris, France.

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, welcomed Bates’ public statements, arguing it bolstered a controversial investigation his committee launched into the Karl paper after it was published in 2015.

Some in the science community defended the Karl study. The American Geophysical Union, AGU, commented, “...these reports do not change our fundamental understanding of climate change,” and “the main results of that study have since been independently replicated by later work.”

University of California-Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather recently co-authored a paper supporting the Karl study claiming it was more accurate than the NOAA data it replaced. 

Hausfather defended the data in the Karl study, adding it “strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years,” but offered no reason why, or how, he had drawn that conclusion.

Hausfather also noted the data in the Karl study was available on “NOAA’s FTP file site in June 2015, but admitted “it would have been nice for them to publish their full analysis code online as well as the data.”  This is a critical point as it is where manipulation is done as in Michael Mann's programming "trick" documented in the East Anglia Climate Research Unit email scandal.  The only way you know no trickery or error inducing, like rounding, routines are in the analysis program is to see the code.  Without that statements like those of Hausfather are purely political.

The Irish Climate Analysis and Research Unit responded to Bates’ accusations in a blog post saying Bates’s claims are a “misrepresentation of the processes that actually occurred,” but failed to cite any basis for their defense of the Karl study.

Jeremy Berg, editor-in-chief of the journal SCIENCE, stood behind the Karl study, which they published in June 2015 saying the Karl study data “were deposited and are readily accessible according to our policy.”  This is patently hollow as it does not confirm anything.  Not everyone was convinced by the Karl study’s defenders.

“It is not good enough to say that one believes the researchers would probably have released their computer code if they were asked for it, or to say the data was archived because it was available on an ftp file site, or that procedures put in place were bypassed because they were inconvenient,” wrote Dr. David Whitehouse, Science Editor at the Global Warming Policy Forum.


Where billions of Dollars in grants, bureaus, staff and project money are dependent on NOAA and other such bureaus keeping the level of climate panic high and the issue in the public eye the Bates criticisms are a serious blow and crack in the holy grail of global warming. The nation has already lost $1 trillion on this skam with much more to come if the panic pushers prevail. 

Adrian Vance