New York Times Manipulates NOAA’s Climate Science Scandal

Headline: “No Data Manipulation in 2015 Climate Study, Researchers Say.” Well, not all researchers. The background of the data manipulation story revolves around accusations made by David Bates, a recently retired scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Among his several accusations is that NOAA “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris agreement on climate change,” a paper which would have been welcomed with open arms by the Obama administration. On February 4, Bates wrote a lengthy blog post at his website detailing the accusations. Here is a brief list of some of the charges:

1. Climate scientist, Tom Karl, failed to archive the land temperature data set and thus also failed to “follow the policy of his own Agency [and] the guidelines in Science magazine for dataset archival and documentation.”

2. The authors also chose to “use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95%,” and according to Bates, the authors failed to give a justification for this when pressed.

3. Karl routinely “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.” Bates adds, “[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.”

4. Experimental datasets were used that were not run through operational readiness review (ORR) and were not archived.

To sum up, the “data manipulation,” as characterize by the Mail, consisted in not following proper protocols, selecting certain data sets which had not been properly analyzed, and manipulating scientific methodology with a political and not purely scientific end.

Is Bates right? It’s far too early to tell if the apparent rush to publish compromised the actual conclusions reached from the date, but Bates’ accusations certainly raise questions worth pursuing. Yet this is not how the Times‘ Henry Fountain sees matters in his slanted article. It is not a good sign that he launches into the body of the text with a not so subtle ad hominem attack on the original author:

Mr. Rose, who has made climate-related claims in the past that did not hold up to scrutiny, said a “high-level whistle-blower,” John J. Bates, a recently retired scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, had told him that the agency “breached its own rules on scientific integrity” in publishing the study in June 2015.

What are the climate-related claims that Mr. Rose made that did not hold up to scrutiny? In a previous article for the Daily Mail Rose avers that reported record high temperatures in 2016 “may” be caused by El Niño and not human produced carbon emissions. “This means it is possible that by some yardsticks, 2016 will be declared as hot as 2015 or even slightly hotter — because El Niño did not vanish until the middle of the year.” That it is “possible by some yardstick” that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due in part to El Niño is about as modest a claim as there is. Surely it is possible. To show that this is false one would have to prove that it is not only unlikely, but impossible! And science is not in the business of proving the impossible.

What is Fountain’s evidence against Rose’s modest claim? He links to another New York Times article as evidence. Therein it is noted that reporters such as Rose have claimed “El Niño, and not climate change, was responsible for the record heat.” On the contrary, “scientists said that while the recent El Niño did contribute to the record warmth, climate change played a major role, too.” Yet notice that Rose never denied that climate change did not play a major role in the (alleged) record temperature. His claim was only that El Niño may have played a role such that there might not have been a record temperature in its absence.