Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who is leading a Congressional investigation into the infamous Karl et al 2015 “Pausebuster” study, NOAA whistleblowers have come forward, with information which cast doubt on the scientific integrity of NOAA’s global temperature reconstructions.

According to the Washington Post;

Smith told Pritzker that the whistleblowers’ allegations make it more crucial that he be provided with the scientists’ internal e-mails and communications. If NOAA does not produce the e-mails he is seeking by Friday, the chairman said, “I will be forced to consider use of compulsory process,” a threat to subpoena the commerce secretary herself. Whistleblowers have told the committee, according to Smith’s letter, that Thomas Karl — the director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, which led the study — “rushed” to publish the climate study “before all appropriate reviews of the underlying science and new methodologies” used in the climate data sets were conducted. “NOAA employees raised concerns about the timing and integrity of the process but were ignored,” he wrote.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/11/18/congressional-climate-change-skeptic-threatens-to-subpoena-commerce-secretary-to-get-noaa-documents/

Climategate email 4872.txt talks of “pressure to tell a nice tidy story”, to tell a story which omits “messy” details about deep uncertainties with global proxy temperature reconstructions.

I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.

What if this pressure grew, as the divergence between models and observations rose, until scientists finally couldn’t take it anymore?

If Chairman Lamar Smith can produce evidence to back his claims of inside information from whistleblowers, if he succeeds in forcing the release of NOAA emails, which are then discovered to contain evidence of dubious scientific procedures, the consequences will be far reaching.

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