Regular readers will be aware that the alleged “Global Warming Policy Forum” recently published what they describe with tongue in cheek as a “correction” to one of the many egregious inaccuracies published on their web site recently.
Last night the Mail Online web site followed suit by publishing an excuse for a “correction” to the self same egregious inaccuracy published on February 19th 2017 as part of David Rose’s self christened “Climategate 2” campaign in the Mail on Sunday. Here’s how I announced that momentous event to the waiting World:
and here’s how that version looked in virtual print last night:
Now in actual fact I reported this particular inaccuracy to David Rose’s managing editor at the Mail on Sunday weeks ago. This morning I rushed down to the local paper shop to discover how the Mail’s apology for a “correction” looked in actual print. I searched in vain for a “climate change” story or even a “science” story with which it might have been associated, but I failed miserably.
They are an elite fighting force with proud history and a fearsome reputation for being among the toughest soldiers in the British Army.
But now, in an extraordinary military first, a battalion of the crack Parachute Regiment are to receive key aspects of their training from Barclays Bank.
The astonishing scheme has echoes of the classic sitcom Dad’s Army, in which hapless bank manager Captain Mainwaring attempted to whip his platoon into shape.
What a picture of Arthur Lowe has to do with that story, or “Climategate 2” for that matter, escapes me but nonetheless beneath that load of “investigative” churnalism the printed version of the Mail’s alleged “correction” looks like this:
One of the numerous problems with the Mail and the GWPF’s version of these recent events is that none of the UK Met Office insiders I have contacted have any idea what the Mail might be blathering on about:
David is a bit slow on the uptake, since we reported on the “US Congress probe” several days ago. He also seems not to have taken on board any of the copious quantities of evidence that his “climate data that duped world leaders over global warming” allegations are the purest fantasy. This time around Mr. Rose claims, amongst other things:
Last week Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, admitted that notwithstanding the Pausebuster, it was clear ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away’.
The ‘pause’ is clearly visible in the Met Office’s ‘HadCRUT 4’ climate dataset, calculated independently of NOAA.
Let’s see if we can discover if Peter Stott has any recollection of being interviewed last week by the Mail on Sunday and/or The Mail’s leading fantasy fiction writer shall we?
The online version of the Mail on Sunday have just published a “correction” to the most egregious of their long list of recent errors and inaccuracies. It reads as follows:
On February 19 we reported a Met Office official’s announcement that the average global temperature in January 2017 was about the same as in January 1998. In fact, this was incorrect, and the temperature was 0.25C higher.
So there you have it. This buck doesn’t stop on David Rose’s desk, or Benny Peiser’s desk, or John Wellington’s desk, or Geordie Greig’s desk. We’re expected to believe it stops on an unidentified desk of an unknown official somewhere inside the UK Met Office.
For some relevant background to this weekend’s dose of “Alternative Facts” from David Rose in the Mail on Sunday you may wish to peruse this article in our sister journal “Alternative Facts Wetware™“:
From the conclusions to that article on Donald Trump’s rise to power:
Reflecting on the implications of this analysis for the specifics of this election, we can see that many Trump voters knew full well that their man was a reprobate, that they deplored his crudities and that they saw him as a risky choice. And yet in a world where the system is seen to be against “us” and where things appear to be driven in the wrong direction by “them,” the really irrational thing to do is to vote for the conventional candidate who represents sticking with that system.
Getting back to this morning’s batch of post truth alternative facts from the poison pen of David Rose, the latest porky pie fresh off the Mail’s production line is entitled:
It is of course Mr. Rose who is “twisting the truth” yet again. His opening salvo:
They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.
A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.
Mr. Rose wouldn’t recognise “a fact” if it hit him in the back of the head at a million miles an hour. The “landmark scientific paper” in question isn’t “critically flawed” anywhere but in the fertile imagination of David Rose and the other “Merchants of Doubt”. Take a look at the facts:
As predicted yesterday, I’m off down to the local paper shop. I wonder if there’s an associated editorial this week too? I’ll be back in a bit with more. As David Rose so eloquently put it this morning:
We cannot allow such a vital issue for our future to be mired in half truths and deceptions.
[Edit – February 12th PM]
My pocket is now £1.70 lighter in exchange for the following information:
It seems that is what passes for “due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology” in MailSpeak? Here’s the actual facts once again:
I don’t see an accurate graph in Mr. Rose’s profuse apology. I see no mention of “World leaders not duped, Mail readers conned again”. Do you?
[Edit – February 15th]
This will come as no shock to seasoned Lamar Smith watchers. The U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee have issued another news release:
Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today sent a letter to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Acting Administrator Benjamin Friedman requesting information on the Karl study following reports the study ignored NOAA standards, was rushed to publication, and was not free from political bias.
“Allegations of politicization of government funded scientific research cannot be ignored. The Committee has a constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight in instances of alleged fraud, abuse, and misconduct especially where the government’s scientific integrity is called into question. Dr. Bates’ revelations raise additional questions as to whether the science at NOAA is objective and free from political interference. In light of this new information, the Committee requests the below information to better understand the depth and scope of internal debate at NOAA related to the Karl study,” the letter states.
Today’s letter requests documents and communications related to the release of the Karl study, the datasets used in the Karl study, concerns raised about datasets used in the Karl study, and the scientific integrity of the study. The committee also requested a briefing on the independent experts NOAA is engaging with to review this matter.
The news release continues to describe the alleged “background”, but I think we’re all pretty familiar with that by now? The letter itself is addressed to Benjamin Friedman, NOAA’s acting administrator. It demands to see a big pile of documents “related to the Karl study”. It will come a no surprise whatsoever to our regular readers that it references the leading actors in the David & Judy show!
If that’s the case then it doesn’t actually answer my repeated question, which included the word “amicably”. See below.
I’d be most grateful if you could confirm that my interpretation of your email is correct. In any event I shall give IPSO a call on Monday to see what they suggest.
I think I’ll head to the newsagents first thing tomorrow morning, to make sure I grab a copy of the MoS before it sells out. What “Shock News” might be next I wonder?
“New NOAA Whistleblower says Ice Age Imminent!”
Please feel free to plagiarise that one if you so desire.
Shock News! The David and Judy Show took to the road once again last night, aided and abetted by all the usual suspects. We’ll skip the Breitbarts, Hellers and Watts of this world and head straight for the now ex Prof. Judith Curry‘s “Climate Etc.” blog. There we will discover “Climate scientists versus climate data“, a guest post by ex NOAA scientist John Bates. According to John:
The most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no ‘hiatus’ in global warming in the 2000s (Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause”). The study drew criticism from other climate scientists, who disagreed with K15’s conclusion about the ‘hiatus.’ (Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown). The paper also drew the attention of the Chairman of the House Science Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, who questioned the timing of the report, which was issued just prior to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan submission to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.
Regular readers of our humble scribblings will be well aware that here in Great White Con Ivory Towers we are firmly of the opinion that there never was a ‘hiatus’. Exhibit 1:
Animation by izen
What’s all the fuss about then? Perhaps our old friend David Rose can explain in layperson’s terms? In his latest article for the Mail on Sunday, catchily entitled “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data”, he assures us that amongst many other things:
The [K15] 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.
Now “never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process” isn’t quite the same thing as “manipulated global warming data”, but Mr. Rose has more!
The misleading ‘pausebuster chart’: The red line shows the current NOAA world temperature graph – which relies on the ‘adjusted’ and unreliable sea data cited in the flawed ‘Pausebuster’ paper. The blue line is the UK Met Office’s independently tested and verified ‘HadCRUT4’ record – showing lower monthly readings and a shallower recent warming trend
That graph looks convincing enough, doesn’t it? However there is a teensy weensy little upward adjustment in there that Mr. Rose is apparently unaware of, as NASA’s Gavin Schmidt pointed out late last night:
This morning Carbon Brief has published a much longer takedown of the aforementioned purple prose by Zeke Hausfather, who points out amongst other things that:
What [David Rose] fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and that many other independent groups, including Berkeley Earth and the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, get effectively the same results.
As per usual Mr. Rose doesn’t stick to science, however dubious. He also dabbles in politics. On that front we are assured:
Karl’s ‘Pausebuster’ paper was hugely influential in dictating the world agreement in Paris and sweeping US emissions cuts. President Trump, above right, has pledged to scrap both policies – triggering furious claims by Democrats he is a climate ‘denier’ and ‘anti-science’.
Thanks to today’s MoS story, NOAA is set to face an inquiry by the Republican-led House science committee.
We’ll have much more to say on this controversy in the context of our “Alternative Facts” investigation in due course, but for the moment at least it looks to us as though the nth iteration of “Climategate 2” barely made it out of the starting gate. However Mr. Rose’s loyal army of “rebloggers, retweeters, plagiarisers and other assorted acolytes” and that “Republican-led House science committee” may of course have other ideas?
[Edit – February 5th PM]
Commentary on Judith Curry’s blog brought to light an article by Peter Thorne. He says, amongst many other things:
I worked for three and a bit years in the NOAA group responsible in the build-up to the Karl et al. paper (although I had left prior to that paper’s preparation and publication). I have been involved in and am a co-author upon all relevant underlying papers to Karl et al., 2015.
The ‘whistle blower’ is John Bates who was not involved in any aspect of the work. NOAA’s process is very stove-piped such that beyond seminars there is little dissemination of information across groups. John Bates never participated in any of the numerous technical meetings on the land or marine data I have participated in at NOAA NCEI either in person or remotely. This shows in his reputed (I am taking the journalist at their word that these are directly attributable quotes) mis-representation of the processes that actually occured. In some cases these mis-representations are publically verifiable.
See if you can spot where Dan & Dan mention the term #Climategate.
[Edit – February 6th]
It’s been a busy day! Several of my carefully crafted comments have ended up on Judy’s cutting room floor, but this one has eluded the red pencil thus far. I bring you this warming and educational nightcap created by an ad hoc team of celebrity international chefs for “warmists” around the planet:
You have to keep clicking through to the very bottom of the virtual mug in order to experience the full benefit of the beverage.
Thank you and good night from May or May Not Land. I’ll see you all in the morning (UTC).
[Edit – February 7th]
Lot’s of pertinent papers just in from Great White Con guest author Kevin Cowtan of York University. Kevin is part of the by now world famous team of Cowtan & Way, who have long championed the cause of accurate Arctic temperature measurements. Kevin tells us:
The paper by Karl and colleagues corrected two known problems with the temperature observations: poor coverage of the Arctic, and a change from ships to buoys. Both had been known about since 2008:
It took NOAA seven years to produce a paper correcting their temperature data, and even now their monthly updates still omit much of the Arctic. The UKMO temperature record is also missing much of the Arctic and only partially corrects the ship problem. Both lead to an underestimation of recent warming.
The agencies face an impossible dilemma – on one hand they have to slowly and carefully evaluate new results, and on the other they have to provide an up-to-date temperature record. Rather than rushing out corrections, they appear to have been extremely conservative.
So there you have it. For more accurate Arctic temperature metrics turn to Cowtan & Way and/or the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study! The long delay in improving the quality of the data published by NOAA and the UK Met Office has led to confusion amongst the public, politicans, and even other scientists. All three groups have been trying to understand a supposed “pause” in warming, which in our (humble?) opinion never actually happened. If you disagree with that assessment please feel free to take a good long look at izen’s animation at the top and then explain to us very slowly where you see a “hiatus”.
You may also wish to take a good long look at another guest post on the topic of “the pause”, this time authored by our very good friend Bill the Frog.
[Edit – February 8th]
Watch this video to discover how “The Land of the Free” has morphed into “TrumpLand” in a matter of weeks. The “interrogation” of Rush Holt of the AAAS:
A show trial of the American Association for the Advancement of Science? Congressman Lamar Smith presiding!
[Edit – February 9th]
We like the UK Met Office’s new style. They have taken off the kid gloves, rolled up their sleeves, and they’re extracting the Michael from David Rose on Twitter with great glee:
It looks like we’ve now got a serious contender for our surrealist crown. We’ll have to try and up our game!
[Edit – February 10th]
I was beginning to think he’d retired, but no such luck for David Rose! Peter Hadfield (AKA Potholer54) is back with avengeance. Essential viewing:
If you have the time take a good long look at Peter’s takedowns of the Good “Lord” Christopher Monckton.
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