Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records | Hacker News Reader

Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records

science.house.gov

24 pointsdanjoc15 comments

John Bates has an extensive blog post describing his allegations on Judith Curry's well-known blog: https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus...

It was submitted to HN yesterday but got 4 points and 0 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13574012

Posts submitted to HN in the last month about the effort to back-up climate data from a suspected erasure by the Trump administration got 448 and 85 points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13487843

[EDIT]

Bates:

> I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data. I spent the last decade cajoling climate scientists to archive their data and fully document the datasets. I established a climate data records program that was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs), which accurately describe the Earth’s changing environment.

[EDIT2]

Rebuttal post by Peter Thorne, who was in Karl's group, although was not an author on the key paper:

http://icarus-maynooth.blogspot.ca/2017/02/on-mail-on-sunday...

If I may summarize the blog post to characterize the allegations more accurately than the House press release:

NOAA scientist used as the basis for a major climate paper a data set which was in an alpha stage in terms of post-processing. This preliminary data should have been at least indicated as such but was not done in the paper submission. The exact differences between the alpha version and released version is not documented, and the dataset used for the paper hasn't apparently been located, so finding the differences is difficult.

Notably, Bates doesn't seem to be accusing Karl et. al. of actually manipulating the data to get spectacular results. Rather, the allegation is that the rush to put out the paper induced Karl et. al. to bypass transparency rules designed to prevent, well, suspicion of the data being manipulated.

Worth a read for some background on this:

http://www.popsci.com.au/science/the-house-science-committee...

"The source of their evidence, according to Committee spokesperson Thea McDonalds, was a Daily Mail article."

This is not politics, this is trolling and it takes trolling to a whole new level. It feels as if the wildests redditors are in charge in the US.

"Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth independently developed an updated version of Figure 2 in Karl et al 2015. The black line shows the new NOAA record, while the thinner blue line shows the results from raw land stations, ships, and buoys with no corrections for station moves or instrument changes. The two are quite similar over the last 50 years; over the last 100 years the corrected data [the one Karl uses] actually shows less global warming."

http://www.popsci.com/regardless-house-science-committee-cla... is another view of the record which is certainly more detailed than the original press release, which contains a single quote and 0 context.

The wording in the linked article is surprising and disconcerting:

"This fact has always been a thorn in the side of climate change alarmists, as it became difficult to disprove the slowdown in warming."

That is some fairly loaded language, including "climate change alarmists."

I am disappointed that taxpayer dollars are being used to put out official government writings that improperly vilify people with no context.

Someone who is concerned about climate change is not a de facto alarmist.

Given the source of this release, I am incredulous, and suspect that the internal disagreements referenced were more akin to bikeshedding or perhaps just entirely fabricated for the purpose of political ax-grinding.

Probably to do with the current administration's agenda to discredit climate change...

Agood account of this can be read on Ars Technica [0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/article-names-whistl...

The actual Karl paper:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full

All I have to say is look at the source... .gov might as well be .ch or .ru or .tk links anymore. Since Trump took office it's quite hard to believe anything is more than actual propaganda.

quietly removed from front page

Edit: Not [Flagged], but not getting karma from further upvotes to story.

Edit2: Down voting comment has begun.

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Please stop with the conspiracy innuendos. You're likely getting downvotes just for that, and now for commenting on downvotes.

>Please stop with the conspiracy innuendos.

Simply documenting. Last time I pointed out a post had been "shadow flagged" (because it didn't say [Flagged]) I got told off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473904

I'm sparing someone else from being told off if they notice my post before it is [Flagged]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com