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NOAA Whistleblower Starts Firestorm on Climate Data
Power line posted an article from the UK’s Daily Mail that could turn out to be as explosive as the East Anglia climate change scandal of a few years back. Thus far, none of the US MSM have taken up this breaking news, but Judith Curry has the whistleblower’s entire story posted on her site along with her thoughts.
The whistleblower, Dr. John Bates (recently retired), is highly respected, and per the Daily Mail “…retired from NOAA at the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate science. As recently as 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’.”
The reporter intends to go more into depth in this rapidly evolving story in the next few days.
In 2015, Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas questioned the NOAA data that was used to justify the US support of the Paris Accords. Looks like he was ahead of his time. He’s still chairman of the Science Committee, and it may be time for another hearing to blast this thing “out of the water” (particularly ironic considering how NOAA doctored its data).
Published in General
I am not even surprised anymore!
Wow, not surprising, but wow.
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
Will this temperature set pall.
Cold at beginning, warm today.
Makes our government dollars stay.
Here’s a clickable link:
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
Thanks for posting this. Great news.
Will this guy, John Bates, lose his retirement? Remember it’s a Whistleblower only when you are on the left. If done against the left Bates transforms into a Rat or a Snitch.
How many mentions will this get on NPR this week.
Absolutely devastating article. This field is so politicized it’s sickening.
I agree with Glenn Reynolds. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.
To elaborate, NOAA isn’t nearly as warm as NASA’s data, but in this instance they produced a study in 2015 that basically had the intent to “bust the Pause”. Probably they got jealous of all the attention NASA gets. So, they changed some data methods, which warmed the Pause period slightly. Congress has been after them ever since. This whistleblower confirms that their data methods were dodgy as they were desperate to warm that period.
It doesn’t seem like a huge deal on its own….unless it leads to further investigation of NASA.
I haven’t read the newspaper story on it, and I’m skeptical of the Daily Mail’s reporting, but I did read most of Bates’ post on Judith Curry’s website, which is pretty detailed. I haven’t followed all of the ins and outs of the procedures he documents, but he lays it out in pretty good detail.
Although I am a scientist myself, an astrophysicist, I’ve been skeptical of the work done in climate research because its results are so politicized that I don’t believe that the data, methodology, or conclusions are treated in the proper way that we’d expect out of other areas of the natural sciences. You need people to play the devil’s advocate on these complex, model-dependent studies, but who is willing to? Too many honest mistakes can hide unseen, unintentional biases go unaccounted for, and of course, intentional biases can be subtly slipped in, as they seem to have been in this case.
I don’t think that intentional biases occur in most of the work, but because everyone is very conscious of what the outcome is “supposed” to be in that field, unconscious biases can accomplish the same thing.
This is mostly accurate but incomplete. There’s also an understanding that money flows when the answers come out right and the money will stop when they don’t. Hal Lewis, among others, pointed to the “money flood” years ago. Most of these folks are smart enough to know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
Edit: Also, there are penalties for saying the wrong things. Look what happened to Henk Tennekes. Freeman Dyson has also had to suffer attacks. There’s a reason why people tend to speak out when they are near- or post-retirement.
The above mentioned link is the best article. And it is written by Bates, the whistleblower. He concludes with these recommendations:
The last point refers to the “flagrant manipulation” he says occurred.
Bates colleague writes “He [Bates] submitted an earlier, shorter version of this essay to the Washington Post, in response to the 13 December article (climate scientists frantically copying data). The WaPo rejected his op-ed, so he decided to publish at Climate Etc.”
Washington Post killed the story.
Yes it is. I follow Watts Up With That (climate skeptic site) as a lay reader. Here are a few non-political, scientific conclusions: 1) There has been some warming of the earth. 2) This warming may be in part due to worldwide industrial activity, including the urban heat island effect. 3) We do not know how much this activity contributes to warming, nor whether it is harmful or beneficial. 4) Computer models that attempt to define and extrapolate warming have been abyssmal failures. 5) The earth’s climate is non-singular, complex, and always in flux. Man’s understanding of it is in its infancy. 6) Good science would require promotion of different hypotheses and debate.
Kudos to Bates for speaking out but he’s naive if he believes that ethics training is going to help. All the players know the difference between right and wrong; they don’t need training. Rather, they have made a choice to sacrifice scientific integrity for what, in their view, is a higher principle. That principle may be saving the planet, anti-capitalist, or something else.
There’s already been plenty of discussion about ethics in the scientific community because of various data fabrication scandals of decades past. More talk is not the answer. Now it’s time to expose and punish the transgressors.
It’s guys like Dr. Bates who will save science from the rampant politicization that’s been going on for years.
Thanks and God bless Dr. Bates. People who care about truth and scientific exploration owe you.
A quick check of ‘NOAA’ in my Sent mailbox shows me that I have been screaming about this since 2011. NOAA has been adjusting temperatures since at least then. Look at this graph. It looks like Global Warming has exploded recently if you don’t know what the graph measures. What it actually shows is the “adjustments” that NOAA has done, starting in 2008, when all their “Global Warming” computer models started failing and people were starting to blow them off. They stopped creating new models and just started ‘adjusting’ the raw data. They give no valid reason why they have been adjusting temperatures DOWN (blue) before 1970, and adjusting temperatures UP (red) after 1970.
This is how they are able to claim that last year was the hottest year on record, and the year before that was the hottest, and the year before that. We are well below the blazing temperatures of the 20’s and 30’s, IF you use unaltered data.
Here is the chart:
I subscribe to the InsideClimateNews.org newsletter. It’s “A Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment,” if they do say so themselves. It’s lefty and suffers from the usual TDS, but except for a couple of outstanding members of Ricochet I don’t trust the people here on the science of it. I trust the climate alarmists even less on the politics of it, but I wanted this organization’s take on this story.
I typed the words “John Bates” into their search box and got the message, “Your search did not return any results. Try using less specific keywords.”
I didn’t want to give up that easily, so I went to their “Whistleblowers” tab. There was nothing about John Bates there, but I saw these headings: “How Whistleblowers Can Contact InsideClimate News: Want to share your story and documents with ICN’s journalists? These steps will go a long way to protecting you.”
They recommend using snail mail, but I’m traveling right now and don’t have a printer with me to send them a copy of this article. Maybe somebody else can do it.
It can’t be that the organization is not interested, because on their home page is a link to an article titled, “Trump’s EPA Is Removing Climate Change Information From Website.”
Speaking of a data suppression, if I give Google the words “John Bates climate” I get links to articles about this story at the Daily Mail, Washington Times, and Breitbart. If I click for “more” I get a couple of additional links to web sites I’ve never heard of, plus one to Ricochet.com.
Please try this one. Start on page one and read, or at least, scan, every article. keep clicking ‘older posts’ and keep reading. Don’t stop until you get to the original page one. It’s plainly obvious we have been lied to since about 2009.
https://realclimatescience.com/
EDIT: Then start on this one:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
Doesn’t that tell you something?
Seriously? Au contraire. They are explicitly not interested because it does not fit their narrative. As you noted yourself, “It’s lefty and suffers from the usual TDS.”
Spoiler alert: you will find minimal or zero coverage of this in the MSM. Again, do you really need to wonder why?
Fair enough. But you should trust people like Judy Curry, whose credentials are impeccable and who has been very fair-minded throughout. Also, Henk Tennekes knows more about atmospheric physics than a dozen of the usual suspects. Steve McIntyre and McKitrick, have made well-documented, significant contributions to challenging the orthodoxy. You might need to broaden your horizons.
The alarmists have had the floor forever and have shouted down all skeptics. Since skepticism is at the very heart of scientific inquiry, this is a problem.
Yup. This is what I see to be the big problem. We have our own version of Lysenkoism.
Yes, this is unscrupulous behavior done with clear malicious intent with regard to data and science. And they cover themselves by calling all others science deniers. That’s what people who have the whip hand do. They don’t have to debate nor do they have to argue — they are right and we are wrong. This is totalitarian commie stuff.
Interestingly enough, not only did Lysenkoism hold back Soviet science, but some climate activists apparently have decided the comparison between Lysenkoism and the politicization of climate science is a little too close for comfort. It looks like they redefined Lysenkoism on Wikipedia:
And this is the summary that Google uses when you search for Lysenko, and is all that you’ll see if you search using Google but don’t go to the article itself.
That term “science-based” is a tell as to where this sentence came from. There is no such thing as a science-based activity. Anyone who says that doesn’t know what science is.
And this article speaks of Lysenkoism as a rejection of things, using a type of language often used when denouncing “climate deniers.” But Lysenkoism was not primarily a rejection of things; Lysenko proposed doctrines and a politicized science that were agreeable to the Soviet ideology and practice. But describing it more accurately the way it’s done at RationalWiki would make it sound a lot like climate activism. I presume that’s the reason why the article starts out with a distorted definition. Lots of people won’t read further.
Um, you mean do the sort of thing the climate activists are trying to do to suppress speech?
It won’t unfortunately affect the true believers. I just mentioned this story to my vegan, animal loving, environmentalist roommate. I clearly noted that scientists in NOAA has used dodgy data for the Paris accords. At first she ready to blame Trump but I clarified that this happened in 2015 and she quickly fell silent. I noted that the key was that whatever the findings it was important to have science backed up by proven data not manipulated data or else people will no longer trust the scientists. I noted that the updated report based on raw data might actually show a cooling trend and she just could not accept this. She went on a stating that global warming is true, we (humans) are killing the planet, we are overpopulating the earth, etc. Just like anti-vaccine people no matter what is shown her religion is environmentalism and the cognitive dissonance cannot be accepted. Her reaction doesn’t surprise me. I just wanted to see how deep she was in the green cult and I got my answer.
I don’t see how you got that from what I wrote. People who commit fraud are not merely exercising free speech. Climate activists are free to say what they want. They are not free to fabricate or tamper with data. You seem confused.
You are welcome to explain what you meant by expose and punish. I posed a question. It was not a rhetorical question.
And yes, climate activists are free under the law to fabricate or tamper with data. And the community of science, in order to maintain its credibility, is free to expose and denounce people who do that. And universities are free to fire researchers who commit fraud, as Emory University did with Michael Bellesilles. (I guess he resigned, but Emory wanted him to.)
The joke I heard in fifth grade or so comes to mind:
We need to hear some moaning from the climate “scientists.”
I thought it was clear enough what the reason for punishment would be: speech is constitutionally protected, fraud is not. The topic of the OP is fraud, as is my comment, which you very selectively quoted.
You are mistaken. Scientific fraud is punishable under the law if government funding is involved, as it was in this case. Furthermore, there are other forms of punishment besides by exercise of the law.
In any case, you asked if I was advocating suppression of speech. I answered that question already. I quote myself:
They are free to express any opinions they wish. Clear enough answer?