Climate
What on Earth Is Happening to Our Temperature?

What on Earth Is Happening to Our Temperature?

In the great climate debate, some scientists say that Earth’s temps have remained flat for two decades, while others claim that we are setting records each year. Who’s right? ...
Ed Hiserodt

Is 2016 the hottest year on record? It’s a hard question to answer, especially with the latest nail in the Climategate coffin. Retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientist-turned-whistleblower Dr. John Bates dropped a bombshell on February 5, revealing to the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday that a groundbreaking NOAA study grossly exaggerated global warming and erroneously influenced the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The Mail quoted Bates accusing the agency of having timed publication of its flawed report in order to make “the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron.” NOAA’s research supposedly contradicted claims of a pause in global warming since 1998, hence the name “Pausebuster Paper.” But Bates’ evidence shows that the agency knowingly overstated the speed of warming and falsely reported inaccurate high temperatures. Bates says his NOAA superiors ignored his vehement objections to publication of the faulty data.

Bates, a 40-year career meteorologist and climate scientist, explained that NOAA had replaced the readings gleaned from highly accurate Argo ocean buoys with temperature measurements from ships. The latter are notoriously inaccurate and undependable due to variability in measurement depth and because of heat from ships’ propulsion systems. “They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and ‘corrected it’ with bad data from ships,” complained Bates. “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.”

A second manipulated dataset was based on NOAA’s land records (the Global Historical Climatology Network, or GHCN), with records from about 4,000 weather stations. Bates told the Mail on Sunday that NOAA reported past temperatures as cooler than previously thought, and recent ones higher, so the warming trend looked steeper.

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