Major global warming study again questioned, again defended

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Another round of bickering is boiling over about temperature readings used in a 2015 study to show how the planet is warming.

The issue is about how readings gathered decades ago were adjusted to try to get a clearer picture of how the Earth’s temperature is changing now. Those adjustments have been questioned by some who reject mainstream climate science and have tried to claim there has been a pause in global warming.

A congressional committee Tuesday seized on complaints from a retired scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about how the original data were handled to claim the data were falsified – even though the retired NOAA scientist they cite does not argue that it was.

What is being touted as a scientific scandal is more about data handling than what rising temperatures show, according to phone and email interviews with more than two dozen experts on the issue.

The hubbub was sparked when retired NOAA data scientist John Bates claimed in a blog post that his boss, then-director of the National Centers for Environmental Information Thomas Karl, “constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ – in the documentation, scientific choices and release of datasets – in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus” and rushed a study published in the journal Science before international climate negotiations.

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, speaking at a hearing Tuesday, called on Science to retract the 2015 study and blasted NOAA for not being cooperative with his subpoenas.

When the journal’s publisher Rush Holt, a physicist and former Democratic congressman, said the charges don’t support a retraction because the issue is more about data procedures than science, Smith, an attorney, interrupted him and insisted: “They falsified global warming data.”