Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who is leading a Congressional investigation into the infamous Karl et al 2015 “Pausebuster” study, NOAA whistleblowers have come forward, with information which cast doubt on the scientific integrity of NOAA’s global temperature reconstructions.
According to the Washington Post;
Smith told Pritzker that the whistleblowers’ allegations make it more crucial that he be provided with the scientists’ internal e-mails and communications. If NOAA does not produce the e-mails he is seeking by Friday, the chairman said, “I will be forced to consider use of compulsory process,” a threat to subpoena the commerce secretary herself.
Whistleblowers have told the committee, according to Smith’s letter, that Thomas Karl — the director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, which led the study — “rushed” to publish the climate study “before all appropriate reviews of the underlying science and new methodologies” used in the climate data sets were conducted.
“NOAA employees raised concerns about the timing and integrity of the process but were ignored,” he wrote.
Climategate email 4872.txt talks of “pressure to tell a nice tidy story”, to tell a story which omits “messy” details about deep uncertainties with global proxy temperature reconstructions.
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.
What if this pressure grew, as the divergence between models and observations rose, until scientists finally couldn’t take it anymore?
If Chairman Lamar Smith can produce evidence to back his claims of inside information from whistleblowers, if he succeeds in forcing the release of NOAA emails, which are then discovered to contain evidence of dubious scientific procedures, the consequences will be far reaching.
That Washington Post article was painful to read and gives a pretty clear indication of how no amount of bad science and stonewalling is going to make any difference when journalists seem clueless what the real issues are. Demonstrated bad science from NOAA? Stonewalling congressional oversight? It seems that the author of the article couldn’t care less and went out of their way to imply the attempt at oversight is somehow political. Disgraceful.
The Orwellian money quote from NOAA:
“The notion that NOAA is ‘hiding something’ is also false.”
You refuse congressional oversight but you are not hiding anything? How is it that such brutal doublespeak garners no outrage? Even if the worst is proven true in this investigation, the media will show a similar disinterest. Journalism is no longer a profession.
Journalism is now the oldest profession…
opluso,
Hmmm . . . .
The 3 oldest professions in order of their first appearance are:
1st came the witch doctor (shaman or medicine man)
Then there arrived simultaneously both the prostitute (not necessarily the sexual kind) and the journalist, but . . . on second thought they might have been the same person.
John
The issues must be framed and expressed in terms simple enough to impress an eighth grader.
Bring forth the 10,000 ton steam roller destroyer of hard drives. But be sure to request high priority status for the request since the equipment and IT team are in high demand these days.
It is time for NOAA to be closed down.
NOAA is obviously so corrupt and compromised and politicized that it has no credibility to offer the scientific community or the public.
NOAA is just a waste of space and money. Close NOAA down and fire everybody now.
Sasha,
Pardon me, but don’t be a fool & throw the baby out with the bathwater. The daily operational aspects of NOAA (NWS & NESDIS) do a good & valid service to the public. Don’t say that it could be contracted out to the likes of Accuweather or the Weather Channel & such.
Guess where they get their observations from? (NOAA/NWS).
Guess where they get their forecast models from? (NOAA/NWS).
Guess where they get their doppler NEXRAD radar from? (NOAA/NWS).
Guess where they get their wx satellite data from? (NOAA/NESDIS).
Guess where the rest of the world meteorological organizations get the majority of the western hemisphere data from? (NOAA/NWS/NESDIS).
Do you really expect the general public to have to subscribe & pay for their tornado/hurricane/severe thunderstorm/blizzard watches & warnings when it is already paid for by their tax dollars? There is no profit in general operational meteorology & there is no incentive for private meteorology to develop new technology without a profit motive.
The NOAA/NESDIS facility that tracks & processes the NOAA POLAR & GOES East/West wx satellite raw data & distributes it to the NWS & public consumption (the wx sat imagery animation used everywhere) operated 24hrs/day in all critical weather with 99.8% data throughput on 10-15 *million* dollar annual budget…10-15 MILLION – not 100’s of millions or billions! That is chump change compared to what some agencies go through. Gee, that’s a rounding error with some agencies.
Now, granted, there are areas in NOAA that could stand to be trimmed, reigned in & even eliminated but I believe the majority of the problem is in upper management & I’m sure if the Dept of Commerce, NOAA & NESDIS administrators who are appointed by the administration had the full backing of the strong leadership of the administration, they could go through & clean house….and that could apply to any of the executive agencies.
The problem is that the rot has spread so far now that the taxpayer cannot trust NOAA’s temperature takers. Citizen and independent records all over the country now diverge significantly from the bogus figures being reported as “data” by the trough-feeding bureaucratic swine we have so foolishly trusted to practice science rather than self-interest.
JKrob,
you make some good points which should be considered carefully.
The trouble here is that when the rot sets in, it is the credibility of the organization that is destroyed which makes any work under their logo suspect. A prime example of this is the University of East Anglia, who used to be all over the British media but have all but disappeared from it today. NOAA is the new UEA.
Sasha begins:
…and after a round of responses suggesting temporization (“… don’t be a fool & throw the baby out with the bathwater”) he continues:
I’d go with that premise. The beneficial functions of NOAA stipulated by JKrob can be readily absorbed by other agencies of civil government. The dismemberment and eradication of NOAA would be of great benefit if only in the “pour encourager les autres” sense.
The Congress telling agencies of the executive branch: “We brought you into this world, and we can sure as hell take you out of it!”
Figure it out. If you work for the goobermint, if you’re funded by the goobermint, then you are the goobermint’s b*tch. Period, end of story. So if the goobermint has decided that Anthropogenic Weasels are threatening a Global Catastrophe, don’t whine that you can’t find enough weasels. STFU and go out and find them, b*tch, or GTF out.
House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, in his second letter to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, wrote “NOAA employees raised concerns about the timing and integrity of the process but were ignored . . .”
In the same letter Smith called those NOAA employees whistleblowers. Use of that specific term invokes some levels of protection for them against a vindictive upper management at NOAA.
Show me all the whistleblowers’ statements, please.
John
If I understand what’s going on here correctly, NOAA made adjustments to temp data that does away with the pause. What does this do to all the studies that used the previous measurements? If the original measurements were “bad”, how long has NOAA been making and using “bad” measurements? I’m no scientist, but these are the first questions that come to mind for me.
Brian,
I have used the questionable Karl data as an example of the rubbish that is so often lauded at Australian ABC type websites which are very favourable to the GW theme.
Naturally my status is declared by the site respondents as that suited to the village idiot employment spectrum and The Appeal To Authority comments come up like sea level rise deluge over the next few years.
That is not the issue as it amuses me no end.
I am seeking some feedback and I do not seek a hippy lovefest or agreement about everything as is the wont of the luvvie sites.
Your post reflected similar thought to mine upon perusing this study once I was able to settle down after trying to compute that the old fashioned method- Sea Water Engine Intake Temperature method- was made superior to the more modern Water Buoys. These more technical Buoys, I assume, were created to enable better or more accurate temperature assessment outside the limited range of shipping lanes but over time ran some .12 cooler.
Buckets of varying type are also mentioned but surely Karl and Others are not claiming that buckets, manually tested for temperature, are part of this better dataset?
So Karl adjusts the data to favour the warmer Sea Engine Intakes measure and like a David Copperfield act the Pause disappears in front of us.
However does not the paper claim this creates a recent decadal rise of about .10 to .12 which relates to a century rise of about 1.2c
I am nowhere near versed on this subject and am way open to correction but I thought that .2 was the Schellnhuber horror per decade which led to the 2C per century Armageddon.
So even when a seemingly blatantly phony adjustment occurs it stills produces an end result lower than the IPCC lower estimate of 1.5 per century.
Does Karl now expect all the other alarmist organisations and individuals to denounce their previous data and studies and actually admit they were wrong and make even further mockery of that most anti science statement that ‘The Science Is Settled’?
Help me out here Brian or other posters,as so often, as a person without academic qualification, I read alarmist data and try to make sense of so much that comes across as illogical. So am I on the right bus if I speculate that this Karl study is very dodgy to both alarmist and sceptic alike in that it blatantly adjusts based on unsound reason and, if accepted by warming advocates, it questions and refutes most of their previous data and the conclusions drawn from that data?
And The Buckets everyone. Can someone explain these buckets in relation to the Engine Intake data or otherwise?
Even if your name is not Liza and you ain’t got holes in them.
Whilst the engine room is a warm environment and therefore has potential to warm the sea water/water used for engine cooling interchange, what people fail to appreciate is that ship’s do not draw SST, but rather that the sea water is drawn from depth.
As one knows, the temperature profile of the oceans varies with depth, and the depth at which the sea water is drawn varies between perhaps 3 to 13 metres 9it could even be more than that). Materially, the draft between vessels is a moveable feast, even the draft of the same vessel varies as stores and consumables are used, and with commercial ships cargoes are loaded and discharged etc.
So ships are never drawing sea water from a constant depth, and materially they are not drawing SST. Thus the seawater drawn into the engine room is cooler than SST.
The question here is whether the heat of the engine room is sufficient to warm the cooler than SST water up to SST temperatures, or above SST temperatures.
Account of the fact that ship’s do not draw SST but rather water from depth is not sufficiently taken into account. In fact, it would not surprise me if ship log data under recorded SST even though the warm environment of the engine room has no doubt warmed very slightly the water passing through the engine manifold where temperatures are measured.
Incidentally, I am very familiar with ship log data, having spent about 30 years studying the same, and I consider it probable that the adjustment for engine room heating is in fact the wrong way round since there ahs been a failure to appreciate that the original source of the water is not SST but rather water drawn at considerable depth usually say 7 to 10 metres, and the consequence of that exceeds the adjustment appropriate for the warm engine room environment..
NOAAWhistleblowers finally cannot keep quiet anymore. Criminal fraud and conspiracy to commit the fraud carries stiff penalties. Send the directors to jail and fine them. Civil suits are to follow in amounts of $ TRILLIONS worldwide. Some will come clean and get better treatment. Lawsuits will be the ruin of the unrepentant criminals perpetrating fraud in promoting Global Warming Fraud.
And of course the EPA and CIA stand behind the fine work that John Beale did for them.
In this fight politics matters a great deal. Al Gore among others created the funding monster that ate climate science from his seat in Congress. It’s only right that the fix comes from there as well.
NOAA, like all government agencies, is a criminal conspiracy.
The elephant in the room is that Karl et al proves beyond a shadow of doubt that it is utterly simple beyond reason that the climate record can be manipulated to whatever ends are desired.
This raises the specter that all scientists on the federal “dole” are as suspect as any on a private sector stipend.
Writes Neo:
These plain facts – that the books can be (and have been) “cooked” by the climate catastrophe quacks who have maneuvered themselves into positions in the various bureaucracies entrusted with the maintenance of these records – is something the Social Justice Warriors invested in this civilization-wrecking meme (“man-made climate change”) will not accept in public discourse. It’s a plain fact, backed not only by best appreciations of what “the consensus” have done but by investigation of how and why they’ve done it (as is almost certain to be manifest in the communications they’ve conducted within the cabal).
But when the latter are about to be brought out for public examination, the SJWs “double down” by condemning the search for such evidence of collusion – reasonably to be revealed when the e-mails and other correspondence of Karl et alia on this incompetent dollop of duplicity are disgorged under rule of law – as “conspiracy theory.”
Moronic, ain’t it? If the indicators trend ineluctably to the conduct of conspiracy, you’re not supposed to come to a theoretical (abstract) concept that embraces the idea that the “malevolent jobholders” on the public payroll had to have combined to foist this misrepresentation of factual reality upon the trusting and the gullible for political purposes.
But you’re not supposed to say that – or even approach the issue with that possibility under consideration – because….
Well, it’s a conspiracy theory and that means you’re on the wrong side of history, a bible-and-gun-clutching Neanderthal, a “denier,” a “birther,” and probably a racist in the bargain.
“Embrace the suck,” Neo. This Social Justice Warrior feces-festival shows no sign of getting better before it’s going to get worse.
Any true skeptics among you should read this…
http://democrats.science.house.gov/sites/democrats.science.house.gov/files/Ranking%20Member%20Johnson%20Second%20Letter%20to%20Chairman%20Smith%20on%20NOAA%20Subpoena.pdf
Why ??
With regard to the letter of Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (National Socialist – Bantustan Dallas), it’s to read the following:
To which the proper response of anyone frequenting WUWT is inevitably going to be: “Yeah. So?”
Rep.Johnson (a nurse, not a lawyer, and therefore pardonably ignorant of law) fails to distinguish between suspicion(and investigation) of malfeasance in public office and both accusation and indictment. Presumably she’s got a staff which includes lawyers, and as a U.S. Representative she has access to the legal staff of the House for advice, but either didn’t do so or didn’t elect to take whatever advice she’d gotten. Perhaps she’d succumbed to Gadarene enthusiasm in her letter to Rep. Smith.
Or desperation.
Like most incumbent politicians of the National Socialist Democrat American Party (NSDAP), Rep. Johnson understands that the actions of the NOAA bureaucrats (no matter how sterling their credentials and public reputations might have been before they’d gotten pantsed by exposure of their book-cooking idiocy) are collusive with the policies announced and implemented by our Indonesian-in-Chief, “Barry” Soebarkah (alias “Barack Hussein Obama II” and “Harrison J. Bounel”), and intentionally duplicitous. If she doesn’t know that the editors of Science were accessories after the fact to Karl et al 2015 in the perpetration of pal review (rather than properly blinded peer review), then among the subjects to be discussed is her own incompetence; she admits knowledge about Climategate and the e-mail exchanges therein which document the co-ordination of review subversion among “the consensus.”
For some reason, darklaw seems to think that reading Rep. Johnson’s incompetently composed letter to Rep. Smith will in any way persuade “the true skeptics among [us]“ to receive this dollop of leftard flop-sweat as anything other than convincing evidence of corruption all the way up through the office of Rep. Johnson to the avatar of Shiva, the Destroyer, occupying that big, comfy chair behind the Resolute desk.
We already know they are cheating, as Steve Goddard alone have documented for years, ref.: https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/
KARL2015 is such a complete disaster that even NASA whistleblowers are aghast at this feeble attempt to fabricate a “Pausebuster”…
CAGW alarmists had no choice. This disparity between CAGW hypothetical projections vs. reality have already EXCEEDED the necessary criteria to disconfirm the CAGW hypothesis (2+ standard deviations for 15+ years).
CAGW alarmists will likely get away with KARL2015, and will continue fabricating new paper like MICKEYMOUSE2017, BIGBIRD2019, BERT&EARNIE2020 to keep the projections vs. reality disparities below 2 standard deviations. They have no choice at this stage.
PauseBusters Theme song:
If there’s something strange
and your model ‘s no good
Who ya gonna call?
PauseBusters!
If there’s something weird
and a FOIA appears
Who you gonna call?
Pausebusters!
I ain’t afraid of no pause
I ain’t afraid of no pause
‘cast doubt on the scientific integrity of NOAA’s global temperature reconstructions.’
you cannot lose that which you never had , meanwhile the NOAA , like the EPA, will not change its bad habits until the person in the ‘big chair’ no longer finds these bad habits ‘useful’
No matter how many or how loudly whistles are blown.
what is the big fuss about. the american business world works the exact same way. having worked for a large american multinational until i left to retain my sanity and not end up in jail for the killing the clown running the facility i was employed by i saw this first hand. friends working for other american companies state the exact same thing.
every single layer of management sucks up to the one above, there is never any dissent by a subordinate, they always toe the management line, even when it is driving the profitability of company off a cliff due to some senior executive being sold the latest and greatest management technique (usually developed in a totally different industry and not applicable to others) and the subordinates being too scared to question it for fear of damaging their career. personal integrity is lacking at all levels of many american businesses from what i can see.
management personnel only have one goal, get to executive level where the pay off amounts are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and they will kiss enough ass,and swallow as much pride as need be to get there. just the same as government works.
Big difference — private money is not really my business, public money is.
Some have different views of Lamar Smiths witch hunt:
http://democrats.science.house.gov/sites/democrats.science.house.gov/files/Ranking%20Member%20Johnson%20Second%20Letter%20to%20Chairman%20Smith%20on%20NOAA%20Subpoena.pdf
These might be the most outrageous statements ever made by a Chair of the Committee on Science.
In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing. You have accused NOAA’s top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation’s most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on). If that weren’t enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to Administrator Sullivan herself. And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations – exposing this so-called “investigation” for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain.
Soooo, in other words she said ” Dang, they caught us !! “
what part of this do you have a problem with ?
“These might be the most outrageous statements ever made by a Chair of the Committee on Science.”
I doubt it.
“In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing.”
Yes they have. Yes they have.
“You have accused NOAA’s top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation’s most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on).”
Exactly. Correct. That is exactly what is happening.
“If that weren’t enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to Administrator Sullivan herself.”
Yes. And by extension, those who appointed her. The Whitehouse.
“And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations – exposing this so-called “investigation” for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain.”
Oh there is more than enough factual basis to justify at least opening an investigation. Sometimes you need to investigate to find out if there is a problem or not.
If it was conjured up out of thin air and there was nothing to it all, then NOAA would and should gladly and quickly release all their internal documentation and emails immediately and put out this little wildfire before it can gain any tracking at all. Just shine the light around the room to show there is nothing untoward going on here. How hard is that? Easy peasy.
But…. they are not doing that. They are circling the wagons and battening down the hatches. All personnel to fire stations!
And most importantly they are refusing to obey the law of the land, the FOI legislation, by refusing to release the emails that the Science committee has a legal right to review. Ooooohhhhhh….. that doesn’t bode well at all for NOAA.
A publicly owned organization like NOAA is accountable to the public. The Science committee is the representatives of the public. They oversee NOAA. NOAA must report to them. The emails belong to NOAA which, in turn, belongs to the taxpayers. Do not ever forget that these NOAA personnel are on the public payroll. They are accountable to the taxpayers. They always will be.
Quoting Rep. Johnson (NSDAP – Bantustan Dallas), sergeiMK pastes:
…while ignoring the fact that the statements of Rep. Smith (R – Texas) are entirely in accord with indications of concerted malpractice (dereliction of duty in terms of failure of adherence to scientific integrity) and malfeasance (the knowing utterance of falsehoods under the color of federal government authority) received by Rep. Smith and the rest of the Committee’s members during the course of investigating Karl et al 2015 and its peculiar place in the pantheon of propaganda surrounding the “Clean Power Plan” sabotage campaign being inflicted upon the citizens of these United States by a federal chief executive who is himself arguably not a citizen of our republic, but simply a jihadi alien engaged in taqqiya the better to pursue the destruction of the U.S. economy.
That dollop of dung moved by Rep. Johnson didn’t wash when Nurse Ratched’s letter was read in the PDF, and it reeks no less in sergeiMK‘s excerpt.
As I’ve said elsewhere on this Web site, I have no brief for Rep. Smith (or his political faction), but I extol his value as an attack dog pursuing this particular batch of vermin infesting the federal bureaucracy under our Rat King substitute for a legitimate president of these United States.
Sic ’em, Rep. Smith.
I just watched the five part series on Science channel “When We Left the Earth NASA Missions” I strongly recommend that all watch it. After working at TVA for about a year as a contractor on the startup of one of their Nuclear Power Plants, I have an excellent idea as to why NASA had problems – Large government bureaucracies are prone to breeding, propagating and promoting, ignoring complacency and even shooting the messenger when it is pointed out. The root problem of the space program failures can all be attributed to this inbreed complacency, NOAA, IRS, VA, the Secret Service, whatever government Agency you can name has the same problem. And worse yet, literally all of the early, useful, informative texts, manuals, guides on Risk Analysis, MORT – Management Oversight Root Tree, Incident Analysis, etc. were developed by the government or contractors for the government. – Yet it seems the government only uses them half heartedly or, as in this article like the peer review, bypasses them or rushes through them.
Complacency is not the appropriate word choice for management issues in the agency cases you cite. That word implies there was only a problem of attention, not intentional mission divergence. Look again.
The largest government bureaucracy is the Defense Department. It has more than half the federal budget.
Yes, Military spending is the largest part of Discretionary spending, and is more than 50% of Discretionary spending. It has been less than 25% of the TOTAL budget since Clinton.
It hasn’t been above 50% of the federal budget since JFK was in office. And has been exceeded by either SS or Medicare since Clinton.
Even now, about 10 percent of the “military” spending (the DOD budget) is spent on “Greening” the military due to Obama mandates to achieve 20% of their power from “renewables” and a 20% reduction in energy usage. Thus they have had to spend large sums on weatherization, insulation and purchasing/constructing Wind farms and solar farms. These same “Sustainability” mandates have been invoked upon ALL government agencies, making their budgets larger and increasing the flow of “Green” cash to the “renewable” energy scammers. The Utility I retired from has a $0.03 /kWh contract with the local AFB, however, they are forced to buy electricity from a wind farm nearby at $0.25 / kWh whenever available. And YOU (and me) get to help pay the wind farm owners to get rich. Obama’s “Green Jobs.”
The ‘Big 3’ in surface temperature products are; NOAA, UEA’s CRU & NASA’s GISS.
Given there was an internal or external ‘whistleblower(s)’ releasing the UEA/CRU emails which became known as Climategate
Given that there are internal NOAA whistleblowers providing Congress info about the NOAA processes leading to the integrityless Karl et al 2015 research by NOAA.
Given two of the ‘Big 3’ in surface temperature products have had whistleblowers, then shouldn’t it be considered good logical form to think that there is a GISS ‘whistleblower-in-waiting’ ?
I am eternally curious about things that look like patterns.
John
The tone of the WaPo article is very different from the tone of this article…big surprise. To read the article, many of the accusations being leveled at NOAA are unfounded.
Personally, I never liked the whole “massage the data to get the desired results” thing. Stinks.
The probability of this NOAA fraud being ignored and/or excused by authorities is close to 99.99999999999999999999%. You all know why that is!!!!
A scientist being a whistleblower? Give me a break. I will believe it when I see it. To call these people whistleblowers is a joke. Whistleblowers identify themselves. Whistleblowers who don’t come out of the closet can’t have their “facts” scrutinized.
My problem with the whole climate issue is that scientists never stand up for anything anymore, if they ever did. Had scientists taken on pier review and this system years ago, then we wouldn’t be where we are now.
Frankly, if 90% of the scientists say that government needs to do something, I support the government doing something. I think that is generally good policy.
The problem is that scientists have allowed a few scientists in powerful positions to hijack the scientific method and then these scientists manufacture the consent of the vast majority of the scientific community.
It may not always have been the case, but the idea of there being integrity, scientific or otherwise, at NOAA nowadays is a laughable non sequitur.
Scientists couldn’t care less about waterway docking structures (“piers”). Quality control of publications by their peers is of vital interest, however.
Lest we forget, these emails are probably copied by the dozen.
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