right wing MSM propagates lie about NOAA falsifying data

>The paper concluded that there was no evidence of a slowdown in global warming over the last decade or so, an idea that had been a focus of people who reject the seriousness of human-caused climate change.

>Rather than engage with the science behind this paper, Rep. Lamar Smith has, without any evidence, accused the NOAA scientists of doctoring their results to exaggerate recent warming. Although NOAA provided Smith with the (publicly available) data and methods behind the paper and provided a personal explanation of the research, Smith subpoenaed the e-mails of the scientists and other NOAA staff. NOAA handed over staff e-mails but refused to make the researchers’ e-mails available for a fishing expedition, citing the importance of protecting scientists’ ability to communicate freely while trying to understand their data.

>Rep. Smith claimed that a whistleblower at NOAA had provided his office with information proving that the study had been inappropriately rushed for political reasons. The Mail on Sunday claims the same thing and presents NOAA scientist John Bates as a whistleblower.

The whistleblower

>Bates recently retired from NOAA after a career working primarily on satellite measurements used for weather forecasting. Recently, he was also in charge of data-archiving efforts for satellite and surface temperature records. Bates alleges that NOAA's Tom Karl and the rest of the team behind the paper failed to adequately follow NOAA’s internal processes for archiving their data and stress-testing the updated databases they used.

>Bates also questions the way in which some sea surface temperature measurements were adjusted to sync them up with the rest of the measurements, falsely claiming that the technique alters the warming trend.

asdasdasdasd

>In a blog post, Maynooth University research Peter Thorne—who worked on both the land and sea databases underlying the Karl paper but not the Karl paper itself—disputed many of Bates’ claims. First off, Thorne notes that Bates was not personally involved in the research at any stage. And while Bates claims that Karl made a series of choices to exaggerate the apparent warming trend, Thorne points out that this would be difficult for Karl to do since he didn’t contribute to the underlying databases. Karl’s paper simply ran those updated databases through the same algorithm NOAA was already using.

>Ars talked with Thomas Peterson, a co-author on the Karl paper who has since retired. Peterson provided some useful context for understanding Bates’ allegations. The satellites that Bates worked with were expensive hardware that couldn't be fixed if anything went wrong after they were launched. The engineering of the software running those satellites sensibly involved testing and re-testing and re-testing again to ensure no surprises would pop up once it was too late.

>Bates expected the same approach from his surface temperature counterparts, but Peterson explained that their work with weather station data was not nearly so high-stakes—problems could easily be fixed on the fly. The engineering-style process NOAA was using for endlessly double-checking the software for all dataset updates could drag on for quite a long time—years, in fact—and Bates opposed any attempt to speed this up. Peterson and other scientists were naturally anxious to incorporate changes they knew were scientifically important.

>Bates alleges that the Karl paper was “rushed” for political reasons, but Peterson said the reality was that NOAA was well behind the times, waiting to include known improvements like additional recording stations in the rapidly warming Arctic. “I had been arguing for years that we were putting out data that did not reflect our understanding of how the temperature was actually warming—[for] literally years we slowed down to try to account for some of these processing things that we had to do,” Peterson said. (At the time of the Karl paper, NOAA’s dataset showed less warming in recent years than other datasets, like NASA’s.)

>Bates also claims that there were bugs in the land station database software that were ignored in the Karl paper. But according to Peterson, the slight day-to-day variability seen in the software’s output was simply the result of the fact that new data was added every day. Stations that straddled statistical cut-offs might fall on one side of the dividing line today, and on the other side tomorrow. There was nothing wrong with the software, they realized. It was just silly to re-run it every single day.

>There may also be something beyond simple “engineers vs. scientists” tension behind Bates’ decision to go public with his allegations. Two former NOAA staffers confirmed to Ars that Tom Karl essentially demoted John Bates in 2012, when Karl was Director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Bates had held the title of Supervisory Meteorologist and Chief of the Remote Sensing Applications Division, but Karl removed him from that position partly due to a failure to maintain professionalism with colleagues, assigning him to a position in which he would no longer supervise other staff. It was apparently no secret that the demotion did not sit well with Bates.

Let’s ask the data

>Office politics aside, the claims in the Mail on Sunday article that the Karl paper exaggerated the warming trend fall down when you examine any of the other surface temperature datasets. In a paper we recently covered, a team led by Berkeley researcher Zeke Hausfather compared the updated sea surface temperature dataset to shorter but simpler and independent sets of measurements made by satellites and automated floats. That analysis confirmed that the updated dataset is more accurate than its predecessor.

>In a post for Carbon Brief, Hausfather noted that NOAA’s updated dataset doesn't cause it to show more warming than the datasets run by NASA, the Berkeley team, and the UK Met Office. Instead, the update caused NOAA to stop showing less warming than everyone else.

>The House Science Committee’s Twitter account has yet to tweet a link to Hausfather's story.

>Hausfather also points out a glaring error in the Mail on Sunday article that illustrates its author’s lack of knowledge. The article includes a graph of both the NOAA and UK Met Office records. The NOAA data appears to be roughly 0.1°C warmer than the UK Met Office data across the entire time span—supposedly evidence of “flawed NOAA data showing higher temperatures.” Apart from the fact that a constant offset would have no impact on temperature trends, the offset is simply a mistake. The numbers in the two datasets are calculated relative to different baselines—the 1901-2000 average for NOAA, and the 1961-1990 average for the Met Office. Once you put them on a common baseline, the differences largely disappear.

>The Mail on Sunday updated the caption to note that the datasets “are offset in temperature by 0.12°C due to different analysis techniques,” but the graph remains unchanged. And it's not clear how many Mail readers will understand the importance of this offset.

>For a final example of its author's incompetence, the Mail on Sunday article claims that NOAA has seen the error of its ways and that it's suddenly working on a new version (version 5) of the sea surface temperature database that reverts the previous changes and reduces the cooling trend again. In reality, the new version is just the normal process beginning the next update, which will incorporate data from the growing fleet of autonomous floats, among other things. It's happening because version 4 is now over three years old. Hausfather notes that while the preliminary version 5 does indeed reduce the recent warming trend by about 10 percent, it still shows 50 percent more warming than the version Bates and Lamar Smith seem to like.

>The article on the Daily Mail website is headlined “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data," but the list of those “duped” seems to be limited to the author of the story and any readers who make the mistake of trusting it. Sadly, those believers include the head of the House Science Committee.

Original study:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/updated-noaa-temperature-record-shows-little-global-warming-slowdown/

Daily Mail article:
>Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html

The lie was propagated by major conservative news outlets from its original source in the Daily Mail article:

Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/02/07/federal-scientist-cooked-climate-change-books-ahead-obama-presentation-whistle-blower-charges.html

Breitbart: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/21/h-sterling-burnett-climategate-redux-noaa-scientists-fudge-lose-data/

Washington Times: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/climate-change-whistleblower-alleges-noaa-manipula/

The Federalist: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/10/congress-investigates-federal-climate-change-study-after-whistleblower-exposes-fake-science/

Newsmax: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/noaa-scientist-influential-climate-change/2017/02/06/id/772259/

National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444668/whistle-blower-scientist-exposes-shoddy-climate-science-noaa

The New American: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/25324-retired-noaa-scientist-disputes-agency-s-study-denying-global-warming-hiatus

The Blaze: http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/02/07/former-noaa-scientist-colleagues-manipulated-climate-change-data-for-political-reasons/

None of them have added any disclaimer or posted a redaction of their articles.

The existence of this or any other article explaining why the accusations were bullshit won't stop the deniers. They're a cult, all they need is a name telling them the bullshit they want to hear.

>>134584
Because it's by a communist.

>>134592
Used to be damn Muslims, now it's the sneaky commies trying to poison my children and kill my people... I think it's really the crooked Jews that are behind it all though.

>>134603
Rules for Radicals: never leave a crisis untapped.

Global Warming scares provide a great tool for globalists to assert emergency powers and enforce / overregulate beyond their established powers.

If you don't think this is happening, wether climate change is real (man made or not) then youre basically retarded.

>>134629
Prove literally anything you just said or go eat shit. Fucking useful idiot.

>>134629

So why is globalism inherently bad and nationalism inherently good?

It seems reasonable that the best approach to some problems is cooperation between countries.I don't understand how we are going to effectively address anthropogenic climate change if we can't be globalist in making transnational agreements in which we ensure everyone pays their dues with respect to a collective problem.

If I were to dump toxic sludge into my portion of the river, upstream from your property, you would want me held culpable for that, even if you're not the one causing the sludge to drift onto my property. Doesn't the same apply to neighborhoods, districts, cities, states, countries, &c.? Isn't the global interest of cooperating on EPA also the national interest?

>>134632
Globalism is wrong for everyone in multiple ways. Understand how complex human societies are and try to gather insight though my simplification of these issues:

1) Nations represent a collective system of cultures, races, traditions, and leaned values among other things. They are incredibly important in that they are effectivley an experiment of "how to live best" in a specific area with a specific group of people. All nations have their own ways and people should be free to move to other nations if they dislike their own - it allows people at least in part to live the way they would like in theory. It also produces variety, in thought and in ideas.

2) Modern globalism is an attempt to centralize power, which is incredibly dangerous. You don't believe me, look at history.

3) globalism is basically affirmative action / welfare for the world on the back of wealthier nations. This means reduced effectivness of the 1st world, invasions of the rights and values of the 1st world, and an unnatural / inorganic societal shift that will create tensions, economic strife, and eventually war.

>>134635
>Nations represent a collective system of cultures, races, traditions, and leaned values among other things. They are incredibly important in that they are effectivley an experiment of "how to live best" in a specific area with a specific group of people. All nations have their own ways and people should be free to move to other nations if they dislike their own - it allows people at least in part to live the way they would like in theory. It also produces variety, in thought and in ideas.

I'm not arguing against the continued existence of nations as an essential construct in human civilization and I agree with you with respect to the benefits of maintaining competition and a diversity of approaches to organizing society.

I don't think we should give all power to a single world government any more than we should abolish all government altogether.

But I see distinction between national and global levels of governance to be analogous to power shared between state and national levels of government. It's not a binary choice; there's a continuum of positions along the spectrum between all power to states and all power to federal government, but both serve important purposes and the optimal solution is going to be somewhere in between the extremes, along that continuum.

>2) Modern globalism is an attempt to centralize power, which is incredibly dangerous. You don't believe me, look at history.

There is a risk of over-centralization of power but that has to be managed. When it comes to serious and pressing problems, it makes sense to mitigate collective risk by means of a collective response.

>3) globalism is basically affirmative action / welfare for the world on the back of wealthier nations.

I'm not going to debate the merits of welfare and affirmative action in any particular instance here, I'll just address the benefits of global cooperation for modernized economies.

Globalism is not inherently good or bad for any person or population, developed or undeveloped, just like nationalism isn't; it's all in the particular implementation.

In the case of tackling climate change, it's true that equatorial regions of the world will probably experience disproportionately adverse effects of climate change, and I don't know about you, but it doesn't seem right for one continue polluting because other people are going to pay a disproportionate price for one's actions. If I live upstream from you and dump my sewage into the river so that it washes up onto your property, would you expect some culpability from me, even if I'm dumping the sewage from my property?

That's not to say we won't suffer up north as well; our world will loose irreplaceable ecological complexity and we will suffer economically as well at least due to rising waters from thermal expansion flooding coastal regions.

The right thing to do would be for more developed countries to assist less developed countries in transitioning to greener and more efficient energy use and production. But failing that, we should at least make hard and comprehensive commitments on transitioning ourselves.

Unfortunately, Arse-technica have become rapid shills for climate alarmism, even worse than the Democrat Party's own Vox.

They've got caught up in their own sanctimony to the point where what might be true is now longer of interest. It's personal.

Gave up on AT years ago. Recommend you do the same.

An effective global response to a global threat doesn't necessitate global government per se.

A relatively flexible treaty like the Paris agreement, but with hard commitments, and significant incentives / penalties built in by which all signatories collectively enforce cooperation and discourage failure to meet commitments, is sufficient. There doesn't have to be any people appointed to power over any given country. Maybe an independent watchdog committee. Nobody is asking for a governor or president or king or anyone with any power to govern or legislate on behalf of other countries to tackle the issue.

>>134641
You gave up on liberal media and anything that promotes Climate Action; all of which advocate Welfare and Regulations.

>>134631
to r/politics with you

>>134642
It depends on whoever believes in Anthropogenic Climate Change or not; and weither or not they have any bearing on the economic policies of our nations.

>>134629
maybe you nationalists should come up with a solution to global warming then

>>134643
>all of which advocate Welfare and Regulations.
Oh no the twin bogeymen of rules and incentives how ever society progress if we a shackled by such things.

>>134713
1) International competition to meet specific criteria of effeciency for electric engines, winner gets grant and but patent for tech is distributed to all competition attendees.

2) Green tech conference based on startups, like a world fair, to be held every three years

3) Litterally get out of the way for industry to evolve to green tech, deregulate for green tech and industry

>>134759
You'll like this gal, I think.
Although that first suggestion sounds a bit like communism.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4482946/dooley-tea-party

She gives out snowflake medals to liberals on twitter while fighting to end the stranglehold of vested interests on the energy market.

>>134641
Hannibal's articles were the only reason to go there. It hasn't been a tech site for more than half a decade.