NOAA fudged temps by 2.5 degrees to show 'warming'

The International Space Station seen from NASA space shuttle Endeavour (Photo by NASA)

NOAA has been exaggerating temperature measurements in the United States over the past century by as much as 2.5 degrees to maintain its belief that the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere is causing global warming, contends the publisher of a climate science website.

Average U.S. temperatures have decreased since the 1930s, according to actual measurements. But about half of the 1,218 U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperature stations in the U.S. fail to report their data, allowing NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to "adjust" it, writes Steven Goddard, who publishes with the pseudonym Tony Heller.

Goddard, who has a BS in geology from Arizona State University and a Master's degree in electrical engineering from Rice University, writes that the NOAA "data tampering produces a spectacular hockey stick of scientific fraud, which becomes the basis of vast amounts of downstream junk climate science."

Meanwhile, a whistleblower who retired last year as the principal scientist of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, has accused the author of a NOAA report on ocean temperatures of trying to explain away the "pause" in warming through "flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards," the Washington Times reported.

"Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam" is available at the WND Superstore

Goddard says that to create the "hockey stick" graph showing a spike in warming, NOAA has "progressively cooled" temperatures prior to 2000 and "warmed" temperatures since then.

"This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895," he says.

"Most of these adjustments are due to simply making up data."

He explains that every month, a certain percentage of the temperature stations fail to report their data. Consequently the temperature are estimated by NOAA using a computer model. The missing data is marked in the USHCN database with an "E," meaning "estimated."

In 1970, about 10 percent of the data was missing, but now nearly half of the data is estimated.

Goddard explains that the estimated temperatures have warmed four degrees since 1970, relative to temperatures based on actual station data.

"This shows that the warming trend in the U.S. claimed by NOAA is based on computer models, not actual thermometer data or even adjusted thermometer data," he writes.

The "smoking gun of fraud by NOAA," he says is that the adjustments "being made almost perfectly match atmospheric CO2 levels – showing that the data is being altered precisely to match global warming theory."

"Science doesn't get any worse than how NOAA handles U.S. temperature data."

James Delingpole, who specializes in the climate-science debate for Breitbart News, commented that "one of the great lies told by climate alarmists is that the world's various temperature gatekeepers operate independently of one another – and that the fact they have all reached the same conclusions is confirmation that they must be right."

Goddard told Delingpole that along with turning an 80-year cooling trend into a warming trend, NOAA is releasing graphs with no annotation that the data has been altered.

People assume that the data represent the thermometer record, he said, but they don't.

Goddard said NOAA is "altering the data to match their theory, the exact opposite of how science necessarily must operate."

And the alterations, he noted, "are largely due to modeled data, generated in lieu of missing thermometer data – which they are losing at an alarming rate."

"Almost half of NOAA's monthly U.S. temperature data is now fake," Goddard told Delingpole. "Their handling of data would make even Enron accountants blush."

NOAA whistleblower

The Washington Times reported the NOAA whistleblower, John Bates, wrote Saturday on the Climate Etc. blog that the author of the NOAA "pausebuster" report on ocean warming, Thomas Karl, "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 rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy."

Karl's June 2015 report, "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus," which updated the ocean temperature record, was published six months before the U.N.'s Paris summit, the Times noted.

Bates' accusation sparked debate, including a "fact check" on the CarbonBrief blog by Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.

Hausfather said Sunday that Karl's conclusions "have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and many other independent groups."

Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, who have suspected the Obama administration manipulated climate data to erase the pause in global temperature increases, said Bates has confirmed their suspicions, the Times reported.

"Now that Dr. Bates has confirmed that there were heated disagreements within NOAA about the quality and transparency of the data before publication, we know why NOAA fought transparency and oversight at every turn," said Chairman Lamar Smith in a statement Sunday.

Smith's committee investigated Karl's report after whistleblowers claimed it was "rushed to publication before underlying data issues were resolved to help influence public debate about the so-called Clean Power Plan and upcoming Paris climate conference."

The Daily Mail of London said Karl "admitted the data had not been archived when the paper was published," but he denied trying to influence the climate summit.

Asked why he had not waited, he told the British paper: "John Bates is talking about a formal process that takes a long time."

On Twitter, Penn State climatologist Michael E. Mann, known as the "hockey stick" theory founder, dismissed Bates' charges as the "latest denialist smear against #NOAA scientists."

Mann's famous graph, however, has been discredited by statisticians for distorting climate history by minimizing or removing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the record.

The Times reported a prominent climate scientist, the University of Colorado's Roger A. Pielke Sr., backed up Bates' claims, writing in a comment on Climate Etc. that Bates' experience was "consistent with my experiences" with Karl on the Climate Change Science Program in 2005.

"What John Bates has done is to expose this culture based not on robust science, but on promoting an agenda," Pielke wrote. "Regardless of one's views on policies, the scientific method should not be hijacked as they have done."