Another climate change scandal

When you really, really want something to be true it’s easy to find evidence and “reasons” which match your desired belief. This may be another case:

Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data

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.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, 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.

NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.

Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now 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 land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.

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 sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade. Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error was an upwards ‘adjustment’ of readings from fixed and floating buoys, which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so affecting temperature readings.

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.’

ERSSTv4 ‘adjusted’ buoy readings up by 0.12C. It also ignored data from satellites that measure the temperature of the lower atmosphere, which are also considered reliable. Dr Bates said he gave the paper’s co-authors ‘a hard time’ about this, ‘and they never really justified what they were doing.’

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12 thoughts on “Another climate change scandal

  1. Irrelevant. The “climate change” sheep are the same sheep who don’t care about all the other facts they conveniently ignore because they don’t like them.
    The few people in power who are using the issue to get richer and increase their
    power have known all along the data was garbage. The people that support them
    enjoy being duped. Nothing has changed, nothing will change. Expect the charade to continue. Expect the graft and corruption to continue. The insanity of
    “climate change” is, has and always will be the largest grifters scheme in history….surpassing even the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security.

    • Useful idiots power the climate change hoax and keep voting in the idiot politicians who believe in it and propose legislation to enforce it.

      My challenge to environmental wackos is to put up or shut up. If you believe that man is destroying the Earth via carbon dioxide levels than I demand that you kill yourself to end your carbon footprint and to prove your devotion. Otherwise, you’re just spewing hot gases out of your pie hole.

  2. And of course the retractions and honest data will never be given as much publicity as the original flawed papers and incorrect data “corrections”.

    I was sceptical of the “data corrections” when they said in announcing them that they were preferring the automated buoy-collected data over the shipboard manually-collected data that showed lower temperatures while simultaneously saying that the shipboard manually-collected data was more accurate.

    • Just the fact that every “correction” they make always has the effect of increasing the trend by lowering old temps or increasing more modern temps, so it increases the threat, the need to DO SOMETHING ™!!! should make you suspicious. Genuine errors are randomly distributed; government-favoring adjustments represent 100% of the mods made to the raw data.

  3. NOAA and the scientist in question are both located here in Asheville. So far no mention of this latest scandal on either the local leftist newspapers web site, or the local leftist TV station website. I’m not holding my breath.

  4. Any activity that doesn’t provide the raw data, undoctored, uncorrected, unmodified, isn’t a science at all. This appears to apply across the board for warmism. The fact that any request for original data is strenuously resisted is especially damning.

    I once found what I thought would be an interesting database, reporting temperature observations from stations all around the world, going back in many cases a century or even more. Then when I read the description more carefully, I found out that it had been “adjusted for seasonal variations”. That made it useless for scientific work.

    • I wonder – could Trump issue an executive order that directs all non-national-security science agencies (like NOAA) to post and make readily available in standard format ALL raw data in unadjusted, un modified, un-homogenized form? Post all data-sets two ways, the “raw” and the “made nice” numbers, with appropriate descriptions why, when, and where the alterations were made. If the mods are reasonable it will likely be borne out by independent analysis.

      If not…. Well, actions have consequences.

      • That sounds reasonable. After all, those agencies are part of the executive branch, so they are under his authority.

  5. Relating to the headline of this article: the WSJ has an op-ed today about a lawsuit by the perpetrator of the “hockey stick graph”. He’s suing its critics for slander.

    Science is about facts, and if your theory is supported by facts it doesn’t matter if someone disputes it. Einstein’s theory of relativity was strongly questioned for a long time after it came out. Einstein didn’t need lawyers; all he needed was experimental facts that supported his work, and refuted earlier theories. Conversely, if you bring in lawyers to deal with those who question your publications, you’re a shaman, not a scientist.

    • Yup. Michael Mann is suing Mark Steyn and others for verbally pummelling him.

      The funny part is this is really a lose-lose for warmists and lefties. If Steyn wins, it’ll wreck Mann’s credibility (not that he has much).

      But if Mann wins, it’ll set a hellish precedent for legal action against news and opinion outlets who have, thus far, hidden behind the 1st Amendment and NY vs Sullivan while spinning moonbeams and bullshit.

      Buy popcorn, this is gonna be interesting.

      • One other fun angle is that the defendant has the right to do discovery. I wonder if Mann realizes how badly discovery could hurt him.

  6. Another climate change scandal, in a long line of climate change scandals. I believe it was in elementary school in the early 1960s when I was first taught to live in morbid fear of the coming ice age, brought on by strip mining and logging and the asserted resulting increase in Earth’s albedo. Since then I of course saw the pattern of attacking human endeavor (which the Progressive Marxists refer to derisively as “capitalism”).

    Anything they can do to get in the way, and grab other people’s money, they’ll do, and what better excuse to falsify than the impending destruction of the biosphere?

    We’ve heard some of the horrible things people will do for a few thousand dollars. What would some do for billions or trillions? Lies and threats are all the authoritarian system has to rely on, and once we stop allowing ourselves to be influenced by them they’re done. They have nothing else to offer.

    The sooner the climate hoaxers are put in their place the better. Once we stop feeding them they’ll have to resort to petty crime, and we know now to deal with that.

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