A top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist says that agency deliberately faked global climate data in hopes it would scare world leaders into ratifying a United Nations climate agreement.
Dr. John J. Bates, former principal scientist at the NOAA’s Asheville, North Carolina research center, tells the Daily Mail the government produced a study intended to “debunk” scientific data showing there has been no overall “global warming” for decades.
Bates accuses the study’s authors of “insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized 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.”
He also explains how the government cherry-picked data to make it appear the world’s oceans were warming.
“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,” Bates tells the Daily Mail.
Knowing the study was falsified, the NOAA rushed to publish it without submitting it for final scientific review — timing its release with the negotiations over a UN agreement to make the United States reduce its economic activity.
Bates tried to warn his superiors of the study’s flaws and outright lies, but his objections were ignored as the Obama administration sought to build the case for the UN agreement.
“There needs to be a fundamental change to the way NOAA deals with data so that people can check and validate scientific results. I’m hoping that this will be a wake-up call to the climate science community – a signal that we have to put in place processes to make sure this kind of crap doesn’t happen again,” said Bates.
“I want to address the systemic problems. I don’t care whether modifications to the datasets make temperatures go up or down. But I want the observations to speak for themselves, and for that, there needs to be a new emphasis that ethical standards must be maintained,” said Bates.
The NOAA study was so blatantly falsified it drew immediate criticism. The U.S. House of Representative’s Science Committee sought an investigation of the study, but its subpoenas for documents were ignored by the Obama administration.
Bates’ whistle-blowing vindicates that scientific skepticism.
In a written statement, Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) said:
“I thank Dr. John Bates for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion. In the summer of 2015, whistleblowers alerted the Committee that the Karl study was rushed to publication before underlying data issues were resolved to help influence public debate about the so-called Clean Power Plan and upcoming Paris climate conference. Since then, the Committee has attempted to obtain information that would shed further light on these allegations, but was obstructed at every turn by the previous administration’s officials. I repeatedly asked, ‘What does NOAA have to hide?’
“Now that Dr. Bates has confirmed that there were heated disagreements within NOAA about the quality and transparency of the data before publication, we know why NOAA fought transparency and oversight at every turn. Dr. Bates’ revelations and NOAA’s obstruction certainly lend credence to what I’ve expected all along – that the Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the president’s climate change agenda, and ignored NOAA’s own standards for scientific study. The Committee thanks Dr. Bates, a Department of Commerce Gold Medal winner for creating and implementing a standard to produce and preserve climate data, for exposing the previous administration’s efforts to push their costly climate agenda at the expense of scientific integrity.”
Bates is hardly a right-wing activist. President Barack Obama awarded him a gold medal in 2014 for his work on climate science.