re: NOAA Whistleblower: How world leaders were duped over manipulated AGW data

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Pure gold! Just the kind of brilliance required to settle science.


Pure platinum! Just the kind of brilliance required to deny science.

See how useless your comment is?

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LINK

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Bates said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that he was most concerned about the way data was handled, documented and stored, raising issues of transparency and availability. He said Karl didn't follow the more than 20 crucial data storage and handling steps that Bates created for NOAA. He said it looked like the June 2015 study was pushed out to influence the December 2015 climate treaty negotiations in Paris.

However Bates, who acknowledges that Earth is warming from man-made carbon dioxide emissions, said in the interview that there was "no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious."

"It's really a story of not disclosing what you did," Bates said in the interview. "It's not trumped up data in any way shape or form."

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So:
- Bates designed a new, complicated set of procedures (20 steps!) for climate data archiving which required changes in documentation and software
- There were delays in implementation because of the usual software problems that crop up when a bureaucracy changes things
- Papers were published before their underlying data conformed to these procedures (not to the degree that other scientists couldn't replicate them, just not to Bates' standards)
- Bates retires and stews over this a bit while finding sympathetic ears at the House Science Committee and the Daily Mail, to whom he gives an interview
- They then publish and hype a story taking his complaints about data archiving and making them sound like "CLIMATEGATE II OR MAYBE III I'VE LOST COUNT"
- Bates then realizes what he's done and gives a second interview to the AP affirming this is about how to properly archive the data, not about the provenance or accuracy of the data itself
- Nobody reads the second interview and the first interview is posted twice a day by people who don't read carefully and think it proves AGW is a hoax

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The Karl study looked mostly at ocean temperature records several decades old and determined that those older readings skewed too warm when compared to modern monitoring from buoys and other devices because they were taken in ships' engine rooms.

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Rather than guess what you're getting at here

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Yes, but this board isn't exactly known for its ability to process information.

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So I'm guessing from the fact that you're seizing on a 100% irrelevant error

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But let's assume you're right. Let's assume this imprecision is sufficient cause to suspect that the substantive parts of the story are fabricated. After all, if he mixed up "engine room" vs "engine room intake" he could've mixed up "data tampering" and "no data tampering," right?

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When I pressed the co-authors, they said they had decided not to archive the dataset, but did not defend the decision. One of the co-authors said there were ‘some decisions [he was] not happy with’.

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Gradually, in the months after K15 came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly 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.

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I questioned another co-author about why they choose to use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95% — he also expressed reluctance and did not defend the decision. 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.

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Gradually, in the months after K15 came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly 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.

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If you're not going to grant the veracity of Bates' statements in the AP based on irrelevant errors, I'm certainly not going to grant the veracity of any of those given the far more relevant errors in the Mail.

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Unless you personally have a recording of your conversation with him, you got them from the Mail.

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Climate scientists versus climate data
by John Bates
February 4, 2017

A look behind the curtain at NOAA’s climate data center.

I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data. I spent the last decade cajoling climate scientists to archive their data and fully document the datasets. I established a climate data records program that was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs), which accurately describe the Earth’s changing environment.

The most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no ‘hiatus’ in global warming in the 2000s (Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause”). The study drew criticism from other climate scientists, who disagreed with K15’s conclusion about the ‘hiatus.’ (Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown). The paper also drew the attention of the Chairman of the House Science Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, who questioned the timing of the report, which was issued just prior to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan submission to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.

In the following sections, I provide the details of how Mr. Karl failed to disclose critical information to NOAA, Science Magazine, and Chairman Smith regarding the datasets used in K15. I have extensive documentation that provides independent verification of the story below. I also provide my suggestions for how we might keep such a flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards from happening in the future. . . .

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