The Mail on Sunday today reveals
astonishing evidence that the organization that is the world’s leading source
of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global
warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate
change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this
newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the
sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on
world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate
conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or
‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN
scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising
faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations
fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media and cited repeatedly by politicians
and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr. John Bates, a
top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday
irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous
internal evaluation process – which Dr. Bates devised.
His vehement objections to the publication
of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes
as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the
Pausebuster paper.
His disclosures are likely to stiffen
President Trump’s determination to enact his pledges to reverse his
predecessor’s ‘green’ policies and to withdraw from the Paris deal – so
triggering an intense political row.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Bates
accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year
director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers
for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific
choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation… in an effort to
discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time
publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate
policy’.
Dr. Bates was one of two Principal
Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.
Official delegations from America, Britain
and the EU were strongly influenced by the flawed NOAA study as they hammered
out the Paris Agreement – and committed advanced nations to sweeping reductions
in their use of fossil fuel and to spending £80 billion every year on new,
climate-related aid projects.
The scandal has disturbing echoes of the
‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009,
when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they
had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential
Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
