New row looms over ‘cooked’ warming data

Two years ago last week, I wrote a column given the provocative heading “The fiddling of temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”. It was the second of two articles which attracted a record 42,000 comments from all over the world, reporting on the discovery by expert bloggers in half a dozen countries – led in Britain by Paul Homewood on his blog Not a Lot of People Know That – that something very odd appeared to have been done to the official land surface temperature records on which, more than anything else, the entire alarm over man-made global warming has rested.

These derive from the record known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), run by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). By comparing archived data with that now being published, the bloggers had discovered that temperature records all over the world had been “adjusted”, to show temperatures from earlier years as lower than those originally recorded, while those for recent years had been increased: thus suggesting that the world was warming more than was justified by the original data.

This scandal has now surfaced again with accusations made by Dr John Bates, a recently retired senior scientist at Noaa, against his former boss, Tom Karl. Bates alleges that a Noaa paper written by Karl before the historic climate conference in Paris in 2015 breached its own rules and was based on misleading and unverified data; he further claims that the paper was timed to stoke up alarm over global warming in the run-up to the conference.

The warmist lobby had no greater concern at that time than the socalled “pause”: the evidence that, for nearly 20 years, the trend in global temperatures had been failing to rise as all the official computer models had predicted it should.

Karl’s paper won worldwide publicity by purporting to show that there had, in fact, been no “pause”, and that both land and sea temperatures had continued to rise more than was previously accepted.

What Dr Bates now claims is that, in defiance of rules he himself drew up and over his (Bates’s) private objections, Karl’s paper had again been based on “adjustments” that the scientific evidence didn’t justify.

The paper, widely quoted by President Barack Obama and others, played a key part in persuading the Paris conference to sign a “historic” (but non-binding) agreement to take all sorts of hugely costly measures to prevent global temperatures rising by “more than two degrees”.

Dr Bates’s claims could not be more timely; the word from Washington is that a high priority of Donald Trump’s administration, and the House Science Committee in the US Congress, is that they now want a full investigation of all this temperature “adjusting”, which – contrary to the satellite data – looks like it has been giving such a dangerously unscientific picture of just how far and fast the world has in reality been warming. Once this scandal has been properly brought into the open, it will raise the most disturbing question mark yet over the promotion of the greatest and costliest scare story the world has ever known. Vanishing: hedgehog numbers have declined from 30 million in the Fifties to about 1.5 million today – though populations have doubled in areas where badgers are culled