The piece, which quotes John Bates—a scientist who NOAA once employed—challenges the data used in the famous 2015 Karl study. The study, named after Thomas R. Karl—the director of the NOAA’s Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the paper's lead author—was published in
Science and debunked the notion of a climate “hiatus” or “cooling.”
The House Science Committee press release, which includes quotes from committee Chairman Lamar Smith as well as Darin Lahood (R-Ill) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz), misrepresents a procedural disagreement as proof that human caused climate change is not occurring. It's akin to pointing to a family argument as proof that they aren't actually related.
"What the House Committee is trying to do, like they did in the past, is debunk the whole issue of global warming,” said Yochanan Kushnir, a Senior Scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.
Do not buy the House Science Committee’s claim that scientists faked data until you read this
At the center of the argument is contention over how NOAA maintains climate data records.
His primary complaint seems to be that when researchers at NOAA published this paper in
Science, while they used a fully developed and vetted ocean temperature product, they used an experimental land temperature product," said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst and environmental economist with Berkeley Earth. Because climate data comes from a number of different sources, methods of handling that data go through a vetting process that ultimately dictates the use of one for the official government temperature product. That can mean controlling for known defects in the devices that gather climate data or figuring out the best way to put them together. The product that Karl used for land temperature data hadn't finished that process.
"That said," said Hausfather, "the land temperature data they used in the paper is certainly up to the standards of an experimental or research product.”
So what does that mean for those of us on the outside?
Not much.
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