Memo to deniers: Stop trying to make Climategate 2 happen. It’s not going to happen.
With Trump in power, we’ve been waiting with bated breath for a full-scale assault on climate and the environment. This weekend, it looks like that assault has begun. With a video and column, the WSJ’s Holman Jenkins Jr. repeats the tired attacks on NASA’s hottest year claim. And that was just the appetizer.
The main course comes thanks to fake news favorite David Rose. On Saturday, a feature in the UK’s Mail on Sunday by Rose made outrageous claims about the now-infamous Tom Karl Pause-buster paper published in Science.
But despite the allegations being easily debunked, we should take notice. All at once we see the WSJ attacking NASA, Rose attacking NOAA and Smith attacking the EPA. With ExxonMobil’s CEO running the Department of State, fossil fuel lackey Pruitt likely to run the EPA and god knows who to run NASA and NOAA, the political world is sure to use these attacks as justification to fulfill the fossil fuel industry’s dreams of gutting federal climate science.
So let’s take a look here. Rose spins a scandal he tries to dub Climategate 2 out of a letter published on Judith Curry’s blog by John Bates, formerly of NOAA and now starting a consultancy.The piece levels charges that Karl manipulated data to influence the Paris Agreement. This was already disproven as the paper version hit newsstands, and Rose quickly had to correct a questionable graph.
The letter makes accusations of wrongdoing in the methodology and data archiving procedures used in the study. These accusations have already been shown as faulty. Even if they were true, the implications have been blown out of proportion by Rose.
Rose’s story and Bates’s letter were so full of holes that both were rebutted multiple times in mere hours. John Abraham provides context in the Guardian, pointing out the many factors Rose fails to address. Zeke Hausfather, in a fact check, discusses the various lines of evidence that support Karl’s findings. He’s an expert on this, given he published a study in 2016 that confirmed Karl’s findings.
To address the complaints by Bates, Peter Thorne at the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units identifies several key aspects of the allegations that are a “misrepresentation of the processes that actually occurred. In some cases these misrepresentations are publically verifiable.” Thorne, having worked on early stages of the study, knows a bit more about how they handled the data than Bates, who was not involved.
Finally, Victor Venema of the WMO discusses both the specifics of the data sets as well as some lighthearted context to help understand Rose’s “reporting” on this supposed Climategate 2.
These false allegations were quickly echoed in various blogs and conservative media outlets, including Breitbart. It was also quickly praised in a Saturday press release by Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican whose career has been funded by fossil fuels and whose chairmanship of the House Science, Space and Technology committee has become what a colleague described as an “ideological crusade” and “witch hunt” against Karl.
Just like Climategate was a manufactured scandal that was debunked by eight multiple independent agencies, this attempt at Climategate 2 is FAKE NEWS which will serve as cover for attacking the multiple lines of evidence and overwhelming consensus of the reality of human-caused climate change. The original Climategate story broke over the Thanksgiving holiday and just ahead of the Copenhagen COP. This time, they dropped it on Superbowl weekend, just ahead of Lamar Smith’s hearing on “Making EPA Great Again” this week.
If there were substance to the claims, they would have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. The original study, which was published in Science, perhaps the most highly regarded academic journal in the world. That these claims are found in the WSJ,a blog and a tabloid should be an indication of their veracity.
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