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

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Right?

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Right, I did not know he'd written a Climate Etc blog post as well. If you want to take this chance to post laugh emojis and bail, go on.

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The piece was written by John Bates, but not Bates himself?

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Do you know what "hearsay" is? I mean the dictionary definition, not the legal standards.

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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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This is Bates telling us what other, anonymous people said about Karl's choices in writing the paper. Since Bates' statements to the AP were about his own views, and not the views of these anonymous sources, there is no contradiction between the blog post and the AP article.

Would it be like you quoting a non-substantive part of the post and not replying to the meat of it?

Probably not but it's getting damned annoying.

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This is Bates telling us what other, anonymous people said about Karl's choices in writing the paper. Since Bates' statements to the AP were about his own views, and not the views of these anonymous sources, there is no contradiction between the blog post and the AP article.

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Unless you can show me where Bates says the data was tampered, changed, or maliciously trumped-up, there's no contradiction between the AP's quotes and the CE blog, since the AP quotes him as saying "no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious" and "It's not trumped up data in any way shape or form."

Boy we know not to frick with YOUR religion

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- 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

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ouch RIP this thread

None of that is a quote, that's my cynical summary after a close reading of the Mail article, the AP article, and several other accounts (including Peter Thorne's, which you already linked, Zeke Hausfather, who did the BEST study replicating K15, and this Ars Technica article quoting Tom Peterson, a co-author of K15). I didn't see the ClimateEtc posts until NC_T posted them but they're pretty consistent with those bullet points.

Additionally, Science, which published K15, has come out with their own comment, which also quotes a third interview Bates has apparently given to E&E (not linking it since E&E is subscriber-only and also trash):

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ScienceInsider found no evidence of misconduct or violation of agency research policies after extensive interviews with Bates, Karl, and other former NOAA and independent scientists, as well as consideration of documents that Bates also provided to Rose and the Mail.

Instead, the dispute appears to reflect long-standing tensions within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), based in Asheville, North Carolina, over how new data sets are used for scientific research. The center is one the nation’s major repositories for vetted earth observing data collected by satellites, ships, buoys, aircraft, and land-based instruments.

In the blog post, Bates says that his complaints provide evidence that Karl had his “thumb on the scale” in an effort to discredit claims of a warming pause, and his team rushed to publish the paper so it could influence national and international climate talks. But Bates does not directly challenge the conclusions of Karl's study, and he never formally raised his concerns through internal NOAA mechanisms.

Tuesday, in an interview with E&E News, Bates himself downplayed any suggestion of misconduct. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was,” he told reporter Scott Waldman. And Bates told ScienceInsider that he is wary of his critique becoming a talking point for those skeptical of human-caused climate change.

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Love that last sentence. He gives an interview to the Daily Mail, to David fricking Rose no less, and now doesn't want it to become a talking point? He's lucky Rose didn't use his interview as evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. (Rose was one of the window-lickers quoting everything Chalabi said as gospel. Basically pick an issue and Rose has probably written at least three wrong articles about it.)

If I wanted to be a nice, agreeable frickboy who only posted about issues where the board was on the same page as me I'd change my name to SlowFlowPro

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If I wanted to be a nice, agreeable frickboy who only posted about issues where the board was on the same page as me I'd change my name to SlowFlowPro

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To sum this up, he questioned whether the paper should have been released without also, simultaneously providing supporting data to allow peer review?

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All the data was made public, more than enough to allow peer review. Hausfather published a replication study in January. But Bates was precious about people using his specific procedures and format for the data and Karl apparently blew him off.

This whole dispute is about a half-step up from fighting about font size on TPS reports.

Pretty much