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Climate Data Change: Bates and Switches
NOAA Corrects Data Inconsistent with Global Warming and Fails to Archive the Evidence Says Former Top Climate Scientist
A high-level whistleblower has told the United Kingdom's Daily Mail newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and instead that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. NOAA launched the results with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media as established fact, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
Dr. John J. Bates led NOAA's climate-data records program for 10 years with an impeccable reputation, retiring from NOAA at the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate science. In 2014, the Obama administration awarded him a special gold medal for his work in setting new, supposedly binding standards ‘to produce and preserve climate data records’.
Dr. Bates makes several serious charges against his former employer, and particularly the 2015 study's lead author, NOAA official Tom Karl, claiming that Karl in a "blatant attempt to intensify the impact" of the paper just before the conference:
Used unverified data sets
Ignored mandatory NOAA procedures
Failed to archive evidence
Dr. Bates, one of two Principal Scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), based in Asheville, North Carolina, noted that Karl was ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’. The flawed study was used to justify over $100 billion of expenses
NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – both flawed- one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas. NOAA has recently decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend. The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014.
The red line shows the current NOAA world temperature graph - elevated in recent years due to the ‘adjusted’ sea data. The blue line is the Met Office's independent HadCRUT4 record. Although they are offset in temperature by 0.12°C due to different analysis techniques, they reveal that NOAA has been adjusted and so shows a steeper recent warming trend.
Dr Bates said: ‘They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.’
The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’; every time the raw temperature readings were run through the computer, it gave different results. The results from Karl's findings found past temperatures had been cooler than previously thought, and recent ones higher – so that the warming trend looked steeper for the period 2000-2014.
The paper relied on a preliminary, ‘alpha’ version of the data which was never approved or verified. A final, approved version has still not been issued. None of the data on which the paper was based was properly ‘archived’ – a mandatory requirement meant to ensure that raw data and the software used to process it is accessible to other scientists, so they can verify NOAA results.
The paper was published in June 2015 by the journal Science. Entitled ‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus’, the document said the widely reported ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ was a myth. Two years earlier, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put forth a study showing a much smaller increasing trend over the past 15 years 1998-2012 than over the past 30 to 60 years’.
The Pausebuster paper said while the rate of global warming from 1950 to 1999 was 0.113C per decade, the rate from 2000 to 2014 was actually higher, at 0.116C per decade. The IPCC’s claim about the pause, it concluded, ‘was no longer valid’. The impact was huge, and gave impetus to those who touted the dangers of global warming in Paris and ever since.
Dr Bates revealed that the failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science. Before he retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: ‘I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure,’ meaning the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.
Dr. Bates said he decided to speak out after seeing reports in papers including the Washington Post and Forbes magazine claiming that scientists feared the Trump administration would fail to maintain and preserve NOAA’s climate records. ‘How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity – and failed.’
After Karl's paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally. NOAA argued the point that taxpayer-paid scientists don't have to disclose their E-mails with other taxpayer-paid scientists about a taxpayer-paid study.
The scandal may sound a bit like the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Both scandals suggest a lack of transparency and, according to Dr Bates, a failure to observe proper ethical standards.
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