Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
- The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
- It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
- America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
- The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
Data Science,Climate and satellites Consultant John J Bates, who blew the whistle to the Mail on Sunday
The
Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation
that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a
landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to
influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A
high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own
rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but
flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world
leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate
conference in Paris in 2015.
The report
claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period
since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that
world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected.
Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across
the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy
makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John
Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The
Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on
misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.
His
vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were
overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant
attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster
paper.
His disclosures are likely to
stiffen President Trump’s determination to enact his pledges to reverse
his predecessor’s ‘green’ policies, and to withdraw from the Paris deal –
so triggering an intense political row.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, US President Barack Obama, French
President Francois Hollande and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at
the world climate change conference
The PM, the Prince and 'the pause':
David Cameron and Prince Charles attended the historic 2015 Paris
climate change conference with 150 world leaders. Cameron committed
Britain to an EU-Wide emission cut as a result. And Charles, writing in
this paper last month, stated there was no pause in global warming,
influenced by the flawed NOAA paper that made this claim
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.
A blatant attempt to intensify paper's impact
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.
The scandal has disturbing
echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN
climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between
climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some
were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the
University of East Anglia.
Both
datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now
decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially
revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable
methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will
show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming
trend.
The land temperature dataset
used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that
rendered its findings ‘unstable’.
The paper relied on a preliminary, ‘alpha’ version of the data which was never approved or verified.
A
final, approved version has still not been issued. None of the data on
which the paper was based was properly ‘archived’ – a mandatory
requirement meant to ensure that raw data and the software used to
process it is accessible to other scientists, so they can verify NOAA
results.
Dr Bates retired from NOAA at
the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate
science. As recently as 2014, the Obama administration awarded him a
special gold medal for his work in setting new, supposedly binding
standards ‘to produce and preserve climate data records’.
Yet when it came to the paper timed to influence the Paris conference, Dr Bates said, these standards were flagrantly ignored.
The
paper was published in June 2015 by the journal Science. Entitled
‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming
hiatus’, the document said the widely reported ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ was
a myth.
Less than two years earlier, a
blockbuster report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), which drew on the work of hundreds of scientists around
the world, had found ‘a much smaller increasing trend over the past 15
years 1998-2012 than over the past 30 to 60 years’. Explaining the pause
became a key issue for climate science. It was seized on by global
warming sceptics, because the level of CO2 in the atmosphere had
continued to rise.
WHY OBAMA'S GREEN GURU WILL MAKE TRUMP SEE RED
NOAA’s
climate boss Thomas Karl, below left, had a hotline to the White House,
through his long association with President Obama’s science adviser,
John Holdren.
Karl’s
‘Pausebuster’ paper was hugely influential in dictating the world
agreement in Paris and sweeping US emissions cuts. President Trump,
above right, has pledged to scrap both policies – triggering furious
claims by Democrats he is a climate ‘denier’ and ‘anti-science’.
Thanks to today’s MoS story, NOAA is set to face an inquiry by the Republican-led House science committee.
Some
scientists argued that the existence of the pause meant the world’s
climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought,
so that future warming would be slower. One of them, Professor Judith
Curry, then head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, said it suggested that computer models used to project
future warming were ‘running too hot’.
However,
the Pausebuster paper said while the rate of global warming from 1950
to 1999 was 0.113C per decade, the rate from 2000 to 2014 was actually
higher, at 0.116C per decade. The IPCC’s claim about the pause, it
concluded, ‘was no longer valid’.
The
impact was huge and lasting. On publication day, the BBC said the pause
in global warming was ‘an illusion caused by inaccurate data’.
One American magazine described the paper as a ‘science bomb’ dropped on sceptics.
Its
impact could be seen in this newspaper last month when, writing to
launch his Ladybird book about climate change, Prince Charles stated
baldly: ‘There isn’t a pause… it is hard to reject the facts on the
basis of the evidence.’
Data changed to make the sea appear warmer
The
sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended
Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled
the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just
0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade.
Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by
about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall
global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this
increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error
was an upwards ‘adjustment’ of readings from fixed and floating buoys,
which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from
a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates
explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves
sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of
water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so
affecting temperature readings.
Dr
Bates said: ‘They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and
“corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good
data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look
as if the sea was warmer.’
ERSSTv4
‘adjusted’ buoy readings up by 0.12C. It also ignored data from
satellites that measure the temperature of the lower atmosphere, which
are also considered reliable. Dr Bates said he gave the paper’s
co-authors ‘a hard time’ about this, ‘and they never really justified
what they were doing.’
Now, some of
those same authors have produced the pending, revised new version of the
sea dataset – ERSSTv5. A draft of a document that explains the methods
used to generate version 5, and which has been seen by this newspaper,
indicates the new version will reverse the flaws in version 4, changing
the buoy adjustments and including some satellite data and measurements
from a special high-tech floating buoy network known as Argo. As a
result, it is certain to show reductions in both absolute temperatures
and recent global warming.
The second
dataset used by the Pausebuster paper was a new version of NOAA’s land
records, known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), an
analysis over time of temperature readings from about 4,000 weather
stations spread across the globe.
The unstable land readings: Scientists
at NOAA used land temperature data from 4,000 weather stations
(pictured, one in Montana, USA). But the software used to process the
figures was bug-ridden and unstable. NOAA also used 'unverified' data
that was not tested or approved. This data as merged with unreliable sea
surface temperatures
The 'adjusted' sea readings: Average
sea surface temperatures are calculated using data from weather buoys
(pictured). But NOAA ‘adjusted’ these figures upwards to fit with data
taken from ships – which is notoriously unreliable. This exaggerated the
warming rate, allowing NOAA to claim in the paper dubbed the
‘Pausebuster’ that there was no ‘pause’
This
new version found past temperatures had been cooler than previously
thought, and recent ones higher – so that the warming trend looked
steeper. For the period 2000 to 2014, the paper increased the rate of
warming on land from 0.15C to 0.164C per decade.
In
the weeks after the Pausebuster paper was published, Dr Bates conducted
a one-man investigation into this. His findings were extraordinary. Not
only had Mr Karl and his colleagues failed to follow any of the formal
procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a
‘highly experimental early run’ of a programme that tried to combine two
previously separate sets of records.
This
had undergone the critical process known as ‘pairwise homogeneity
adjustment’, a method of spotting ‘rogue’ readings from individual
weather stations by comparing them with others nearby.
However,
this process requires extensive, careful checking which was only just
beginning, so that the data was not ready for operational use. Now, more
than two years after the Pausebuster paper was submitted to Science,
the new version of GHCN is still undergoing testing.
Moreover,
the GHCN software was afflicted by serious bugs. They caused it to
become so ‘unstable’ that every time the raw temperature readings were
run through the computer, it gave different results. The new, bug-free
version of GHCN has still not been approved and issued. It is, Dr Bates
said, ‘significantly different’ from that used by Mr Karl and his
co-authors.
Dr Bates revealed that the
failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only
violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science. Before he
retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came
the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: ‘I learned that the computer used
to process the software had suffered a complete failure.’
The
reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper
can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.
The
flawed conclusions of the Pausebuster paper were widely discussed by
delegates at the Paris climate change conference. Mr Karl had a
longstanding relationship with President Obama’s chief science adviser,
John Holdren, giving him a hotline to the White House.
The red line shows the current NOAA
world temperature graph - elevated in recent years due to the ‘adjusted’
sea data. The blue line is the Met Office's independent HadCRUT4
record. Although they are offset in temperature by 0.12°C due to
different analysis techniques, they reveal that NOAA has been adjusted
and so shows a steeper recent warming trend.
They were forced to correct it: 18
months after the ‘Pausebuster’ paper was published in time for the 2015
Paris climate change conference, NOAA’s flawed sea temperature dataset
is to be replaced. The new version will remedy its failings, and use
data from both buoys and satellites (pictured) – which some say is the
best data of all. The new version will show both lower temperatures and a
lower warming trend since 2000
Mr
Holdren was also a strong advocate of robust measures to curb
emissions. Britain’s then Prime Minister David Cameron claimed at the
conference that ‘97 per cent of scientists say climate change is urgent
and man-made and must be addressed’ and called for ‘a binding legal
mechanism’ to ensure the world got no more than 2C warmer than in
pre-industrial times.
President Obama
stressed his Clean Power Plan at the conference, which mandates American
power stations to make big emissions cuts.
President Trump has since pledged he will scrap it, and to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Whatever
takes its place, said Dr Bates, ‘there needs to be a fundamental change
to the way NOAA deals with data so that people can check and validate
scientific results. I’m hoping that this will be a wake-up call to the
climate science community – a signal that we have to put in place
processes to make sure this kind of crap doesn’t happen again.
‘I
want to address the systemic problems. I don’t care whether
modifications to the datasets make temperatures go up or down. But I
want the observations to speak for themselves, and for that, there needs
to be a new emphasis that ethical standards must be maintained.’
He
said he decided to speak out after seeing reports in papers including
the Washington Post and Forbes magazine claiming that scientists feared
the Trump administration would fail to maintain and preserve NOAA’s
climate records.
Dr Bates said: ‘How
ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash
climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose
responsibility it was to maintain its integrity – and failed.’
NOAA
not only failed, but it effectively mounted a cover-up when challenged
over its data. After the paper was published, the US House of
Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its
Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding
internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar
Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the
paper internally.
Last night Mr Smith
thanked Dr Bates ‘for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth
about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in
order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion’. He added: ‘The
Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to
support the President’s climate change agenda, and ignored NOAA’s own
standards for scientific study.’
Professor
Curry, now the president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network,
said last night: ‘Large adjustments to the raw data, and substantial
changes in successive dataset versions, imply substantial
uncertainties.’
It was time, she said, that politicians and policymakers took these uncertainties on board.
Last
night Mr Karl admitted the data had not been archived when the paper
was published. Asked why he had not waited, he said: ‘John Bates is
talking about a formal process that takes a long time.’ He denied he was
rushing to get the paper out in time for Paris, saying: ‘There was no
discussion about Paris.’
They played fast and loose with the figures
He
also admitted that the final, approved and ‘operational’ edition of the
GHCN land data would be ‘different’ from that used in the paper’.
As
for the ERSSTv4 sea dataset, he claimed it was other records – such as
the UK Met Office’s – which were wrong, because they understated global
warming and were ‘biased too low’. Jeremy Berg, Science’s
editor-in-chief, said: ‘Dr Bates raises some serious concerns. After the
results of any appropriate investigations… we will consider our
options.’ He said that ‘could include retracting that paper’.NOAA
declined to comment.
It's not the first time we've exposed dodgy climate data, which is why we've dubbed it: Climate Gate 2
Helena Christensen addresses demonstrators in the center of Copenhagen on climate change
Dr
John Bates’s disclosures about the manipulation of data behind the
‘Pausebuster’ paper is the biggest scientific scandal since
‘Climategate’ in 2009 when, as this paper reported, thousands of leaked
emails revealed scientists were trying to block access to data, and
using a ‘trick’ to conceal embarrassing flaws in their claims about
global warming.
Both scandals suggest a lack of transparency and, according to Dr Bates, a failure to observe proper ethical standards.
Because of NOAA ’s failure to ‘archive’ data used in the paper, its results can never be verified.
Like
Climategate, this scandal is likely to reverberate around the world,
and reignite some of science’s most hotly contested debates.
Left,
blowing up the graph show is disappears in 1961 artfully hidden behind
the other colours. Right, the reason? Because this is what it shows
after 1961, a dramatic decline in global temperatures
Has
there been an unexpected pause in global warming? If so, is the world
less sensitive to carbon dioxide than climate computer models suggest?
And
does this mean that truly dangerous global warming is less imminent,
and that politicians’ repeated calls for immediate ‘urgent action’ to
curb emissions are exaggerated?
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