DELINGPOLE: NOAA Scandal Gives Trump The Perfect Excuse To Drain The Climate Swamp

Avaaz activists protest during the COP21 United Nations climate conference
DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty

So NOAA deliberately fiddled the climate data to hide the “pause” in global warming in time for the UN’s COP21 Paris talks.

Really, this whistleblowing revelation couldn’t have come at a better time for Donald Trump.

In the field of energy and climate, President Trump has said that there is a massive swamp that needs draining.

But his efforts are being resisted at every turn by all those lying scientists, bent politicians, rent-seeking businessmen, and Soros-funded activist groups who  insist: “What swamp? What crocodiles? What leeches? Nothing to see here!”

What the whistleblowing NOAA insider John Bates has just done is prove beyond reasonable doubt what some of us have long claimed: that from NASA GISS and NOAA across the pond to the UEA and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, the world’s leading temperature data sets have been hijacked by climate activists and abused to advance a political agenda.

Here at Breitbart we smelt a rat from the moment NOAA released its dodgy, “Pause-busting” study two years ago.

As we reported, with perhaps a hint of snark, in ‘Hide the Hiatus!’. How the Climate Alarmists Eliminated The Inconvenient Pause In Global Warming the paper seemed to have been produced by two alarmist shills at NOAA – Tom Karl and Thomas Peterson – with the express purpose of confounding sceptics in the run up to Paris.

The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening.

And how did Karl et al notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.”

Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along.

Karl’s paper makes much of the fact that the methods used for gathering sea temperature data have changed over the years: in the old days it used to involve buckets; more recently, engine intake thermometers. Hence his excuse for these magical “adjustments”. Apparently (amazingly, conveniently), the measurements used since 1998 have been “running cold” and therefore needed correcting in a (handy) upward direction in order to show what has really been happening to global warming. Once you realise this – global warming turns out to be as real and present and dangerous as ever it was.

In October 2015, we followed up with a story headlined: NOAA Attempts To Hide The Pause In Global Warming: The Most Disgraceful Cover Up Since Climategate.

This reported on how NOAA had refused to give up its documents in response to a subpoena by Rep Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who also smelt a rat – and just needed some raw data to prove it.

Now, NOAA insider John Bates has provided the smoking gun to Mail on Sunday reporter David Rose.

In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised 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’.

Dr Bates was one of two Principal Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.

Official delegations from America, Britain and the EU were strongly influenced by the flawed NOAA study as they hammered out the Paris Agreement – and committed advanced nations to sweeping reductions in their use of fossil fuel and to spending £80 billion every year on new, climate-related aid projects.

Bates enlarges on this at Judith Curry’s blog. His critique is generally quite arid, measured and scientific. (Bates is a proper scientist; this is what scientists are like…) But then he delivers the killer blow here: [by K15 he means the paper by Karl et al]

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.

What does this all mean in terms of science? Not much. As we’ve seen above, there have been strong suspicions about Karl et al’s paper since the moment it was published.

In terms of the climate propaganda wars, on the other hand, it is huge: this is a blow from which the Alarmist establishment may never recover for it gives the Trump administration just the excuse it needs to sweep clean the Augean of corrupt climate science once and forever.

Trump is now in the perfect position to demand that climate-related scientific bodies in receipt of government funding (ie all of them) make their code and data available to the public. This will mean that the truth about all the data manipulations at NASA and NOAA will finally be exposed to the world – making it impossible for global warming propagandists to use the Appeal to Authority “But the experts at NOAA and NASA say…” Any time soon, now, those fake experts at NASA and NOAA will be out of a job, replaced by honest scientists who actually cleave to the scientific method.

This will be a particularly delicious irony for all those honest sceptics who, over the last few decades, have been branded “anti-science” for questioning the global warming “consensus.”

Michael Crichton once said: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

We now have a US president who gets this.

Great news for science.

A disaster for the global warming industry.

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