Can the junk science-based treaty
Shortly before the Paris climate conference of December 2015, a leading US government scientist published a paper purporting to show that the Earth had not experienced an 18-year pause in rising temperatures.
The claim was contrary to every temperature dataset in existence at the time, but Tom Karl, then director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centres for Environmental Information, argued previous findings were wrong and temperatures actually were rising at an alarming rate.
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof. But world leaders, including President Barack Obama, chose to immediately get behind Karl’s startling ‘‘discovery’’, seeing it as the iron-clad evidence they needed to produce a strong climate agreement requiring sharp reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions.
Last month, however, in a much-discussed article on a prominent climate change blog, John Bates, an award-winning scientist, disclosed Karl and his team violated the agency’s rules for ensuring the quality of their research.
Prior to the publication of Karl’s paper, the NOAA had adopted a process for reviewing climate datasets to ensure they would be archived for sharing, replication and testing – key components of the scientific process.
Defying agency rules, Karl did not run his team’s dataset through the agency’s software and did not archive key datasets, Bates wrote. Because Karl failed to archive and store his datasets properly, some of the original datasets were lost when the computer used to process the data failed. How convenient for climate alarmists.
The data purportedly showing an alarming and continuous global temperature rise gets lost, but Karl and his team say, in effect: ‘‘The computer ate our homework, but trust us anyway. We’re right and everyone else is wrong.’’
Bates, in his article, castigated Karl’s research for consistently exaggerating measured warming in an effort to produce the results his team wanted. ‘‘So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets leading into [Karl’s paper], we find Tom Karl... pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximise warming and minimise documentation,’’ Bates wrote.
‘‘Gradually, in the months after [Karl’s paper] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly 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.’’
Prior to the publication of Bates’ article, much of the climatescience community had already become suspicious of Karl’s claims when it was discovered, Karl took seawater-level readings from buoys, but then adjusted them upwards. Karl used readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot, Rose explained.
As a result, the ocean temperature dataset used by Karl exaggerated the warming. Even if the science motivating the Paris climate agreement weren’t suspicious, the treaty itself is a costly farce. While the United States is expected to restrict its people’s fossil-fuel use, China, India and other major carbondioxide emitters get to keep growing their coal, natural gas and oil use. Their economies get to thrive while ours is expected to stagnate – all without any hope of a real climate benefit.
United Nations officials have admitted that even if all the parties to the agreement were to cut emissions as promised, temperature rise would still exceed the upper limit – by a substantial margin – in 2100. If disaster is in the offing, the Paris climate agreement won’t stop it. The US should withdraw.
Tribune News Service