Claims in the Mail on Sunday that global warming data had been exaggerated in order to secure the Paris climate change agreement have been criticised by the UK’s press regulator.

The Independent Press Standards Organisation censured the newspaper for publishing a story in early February that was flawed in key aspects. The news story suggested that data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the world’s gold-standard sources of weather and climate research, had been treated in such a way as to suggest greater warming than had really occurred.

The research hinged on the “pause” in global warming that had been seized on by dismissers of climate change as evidence that the concerns of mainstream scientists had been overblown. The so-called pause or hiatus has long been a contentious issue in climate science. The outlier year of 1998 was exceptionally hot, owing to a strong El Niño, and these record temperatures were not surpassed for several years.

This allowed sceptics to claim that global warming had stopped until 2013. However, as mainstream scientists pointed out, the years following 1998 still exhibited an upward temperature trajectory compared with the long-term average, so while the upward march of temperatures was slightly slower, and some years were cooler than others, talk of a “pause” that suggested an end to global warming was misleading.

NOAA published research shortly before the Paris climate change negotiations suggesting the pause was less than had been claimed. Subsequent research backed up NOAA’s findings.

The Mail on Sunday article alleged that the NOAA had taken data that was “unverified” and used it to suggest the pause had not happened.

Ipso ruled that the Mail on Sunday had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article and had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements”. Further, a graph published with the article that purported to show large differences between NOAA’s published data and data on warming from other sources was found to be wrong, owing to the newspaper’s “failure to plot the lines correctly”.

Some of these examples were deemed to constitute breaches of the editorial code to which newspapers sign up.

The expert community must continue to fight back against the deluge of propaganda from climate change deniers Bob Ward, Grantham Research Institute, LSE

David Rose, the author of the original story, frequently writes on global warming, often reporting on sceptics’ views on climate science. He is a respected journalist and won the British Press Awards’ prestigious reporter of the year title for 2015. He writes frequently on issues such as police corruption and miscarriages of justice.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, pursued the Ipso claim against the newspaper. He said: “Fake news stories about climate change are a significant threat to the public interest in the UK, US and other countries. The expert community must continue to fight back against the deluge of propaganda from climate change deniers.”

He said several other media outlets had repeated the false claims, and they had even been cited in a letter to NOAA from a leading committee chairman in the US Congress. He called the Ipso ruling “a significant victory”.

A spokesman for the Mail on Sunday said: “The subject of the rate of climate change is fiercely debated, with reputable scientists taking positions on both sides. The Mail on Sunday has published articles that challenge some widely held opinions. The complainant in this case is a professional spokesman for two academic institutions involved in the debate. He has complained to the press regulator on three previous occasions about our articles on climate change, but those complaints were rejected.”

The spokesman added: “This newspaper is fully committed to the principle of independent press regulation and is a member of Ipso. We are disappointed with this finding, but we accept it and are publishing the adjudication with prominence in the newspaper and online.”

Not all of the complaints made by Ward against Rose’s article were upheld, and some of those upheld reflected narrow technical points, for instance over the archiving of data.