Squabble over supposed global-warming pause illuminates new political challenges
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8205
Two years ago in a Washington Post op-ed , Reagan-era secretary of state George P. Shultz asserted that whatever was to be said about “a global ‘stall’ in temperature increase,” the “globe is warming,” carbon dioxide “has something to do with it,” and people saying otherwise “will wind up being mugged by reality.”
That’s why the 2017 eruption of a 2015 global-warming-pause controversy, sparked by a 4 February article in the UK’s Daily Mail, shouldn’t matter. Even if attacks on the research of Thomas R. Karl and his colleagues were somehow validated, the globe would still warm relentlessly.
But the reinvigorated controversy does matter. It reveals that the climate-science enterprise itself could wind up being mugged by new political reality.
The pause that wasn’t
Karl represents the National Centers for Environmental Information at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In a 4 June 2015 paper in Science, he and eight coauthors presented “an updated global surface temperature analysis” bearing on the much-debated global-warming pause.
These satellite images, taken a year apart, show a growing crack in the Larsen-C ice shelf, which is located on the Antarctic Peninsula. The crack now extends about 175 km.
Copernicus Sentinel data, processed by ESA
The researchers found that an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement of two years before—"that the global surface temperature ‘has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years'—is no longer valid.” They found “no discernable (statistical or otherwise) decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century.” The results, they concluded, “do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”
Climate-consensus scoffers across the media erupted derisively , sometimes with outright vituperation, and regularly with accusations of out-and-out scientific dishonesty. James Delingpole at Breitbart News posted “‘Hide the hiatus!’ How the climate alarmists eliminated the inconvenient ‘pause’ in global warming.”
By autumn 2015, conflict had arisen between NOAA and the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Lamar Smith of Texas. Beyond seeking supplemental scientific information about the findings, he demanded, and subpoenaed, access to researchers’ emails. Smith issued this statement:
It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda. The agency has yet to identify any legal basis for withholding these documents. The Committee intends to use all tools at its disposal to undertake its Constitutionally-mandated oversight responsibilities.
Ars Technica observed , “Even though his office has been provided with the raw and corrected data, as well as the details of the methods and a personal accounting of the rationale behind them, [Smith] is still accusing the scientists … of fudging their results. The evidence seems to consist of the fact that he did not like those results.”
In January 2017, citing a study by Zeke Hausfather and his colleagues in Science Advances, an Ars Technica headline reported “New analysis shows Lamar Smith’s accusations on climate data are wrong: It wasn’t a political plot—temperatures really did get warmer.” The Pulitzer-holding Inside Climate News explained : “Using a global network of buoys, robotic floats and satellites to trace the rise of sea surface temperatures,” Hausfather and company show that “there was no slowdown.”
The Washington Post‘s Chris Mooney reported that Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that a hiatus of a sort did take place in the 2000s and that it needs to be understood, but that it’s not an either-or. Mooney quoted Meehl: “To say the slowdown never occurred is to ignore the important aspects of internal variability, and to say that global warming stopped in the early 2000s ignores the important long-term warming trend due to increasing” greenhouse gases.
In other words, stalwart Republican Shultz was right: humans cause warming. Nevertheless Mooney, aware of political reality, predicted that controversy would be “stirred anew” in the wake of Hausfather and company.
He was right. Early February saw the arrival of statements from retired NOAA scientist John Bates amplified in a sensationalized tabloid news story, all promoted by the House Science Committee and, among others, by Breitbart’s Delingpole.
Assessing a so-called scandal
Bates had spent the second half of his three-decade NOAA career at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). In a blog posting on Saturday, 4 February, he condemned the Karl paper as the “most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset.” He cited “flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards.” He called for deeper attention to science ethics. In de facto support of Science Committee chairman Smith, he wrote:
A NOAA NCEI supervisor remarked how it was eye-opening to watch Karl work the co-authors, mostly subtly but sometimes not, pushing choices to emphasize warming. Gradually, in the months after [the Karl et al. paper] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom 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 rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.
Also on Saturday, an energized headline and collection of subheads appeared online from David Rose of the Daily Mail:
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
- The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
- It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
- America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
- The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
Rose saw in the incident “disturbing echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair” of 2009, calling it “the biggest scientific scandal” since then. “Like Climategate,” he exclaimed, “this scandal is likely to reverberate around the world, and reignite some of science’s most hotly contested debates.” He linked Karl to former President Obama by way of former presidential science adviser John Holdren. He boasted, “Thanks to today’s … story, NOAA is set to face an inquiry by the Republican-led House science committee.”
On Sunday, the House Science Committee promoted Rose’s work. It advertised the article in a tweet that charged, “NOAA obstructed the committee’s oversight at every turn. Now we know what they were hiding.” It issued a press release headlined “Former NOAA scientist confirms colleagues manipulated climate records.”
Confirms the alleged manipulation? On Monday, Bates retreated from Rose’s sensationalizing and contradicted the press release. E&E News reported that in an interview, he “specified that he did not believe that [his NOAA colleagues] manipulated the data upon which the research relied in any way.” The article quoted him: “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.”
No such contradiction got reflected that day by Breitbart’s Delingpole. With his article “NOAA scandal gives Trump the perfect excuse to drain the climate swamp,” he shed light on an increasingly obvious political surmise: What’s going on actually has to do with altering the course and conduct of federally funded climate science in the Trump era.
“Lying scientists” are thwarting the president, Delingpole charged, but “fake experts at NASA and NOAA will be out of a job, replaced by honest scientists.” The Trump era, he concluded, constitutes a “disaster for the global warming industry.”
In the media it’s easy to find cheering for the Rose attack. A Mail on Sunday editorial enthused that following the Rose piece, President Trump “will find it easier than before to dismiss the climate change agenda completely.” National Review predicted that Bates’s actions will “encourage others to speak out about what’s been going on at federal scientific agencies"—and added, “It’s long overdue.” A Fox News report ended by wondering which side the president “will take his cue” from. A brief Wall Street Journal online news video , framing the controversy as “Climategate 2.0,” presented the views of the Cato Institute’s Pat Michaels concerning the alleged data manipulation. The video ends with this take-away: “It sounds like it’s time for the new administration to do a cleanout of NOAA and NASA and all these other agencies.”
Other news organizations took a strong stand against Rose and Bates. A Guardian subhead sniffed at “an attack described by expert as ‘so wrong it’s hard to know where to start.’” Ars Technica called the charges “more office politics than science.” Popular Science proclaimed in all-caps that “no credible evidence” supports the allegations. The Huffington Post headlined “Fake climate scandal.”
Three experts’ detailed online rebuttals to Rose and Bates have been quoted widely. Zeke Hausfather, lead author of the Science Advances paper cited earlier, declared that Rose’s so-called “astonishing evidence … in no way changes our understanding of modern warming or our best estimates of recent rates of warming.” Victor Venema of the University of Bonn’s Meteorological Institute observed , “Knowing that data is never perfect is why scientists do their best to assess the quality of the data, remove problems and make sure that the quality is good enough to make a certain statement.” Peter Thorne, identified by Venema as a “climatology professor in Ireland, former NOAA employee and leader of the International Surface Temperature Initiative,” stated that the accusations “do not square one iota with the robust integrity I see in the work and discussions that I have been involved in with [NOAA colleagues] for over a decade.”
For all three, the sorting-and-explaining task calls to mind a pithy summary from the Snopes.com debunking : “A tabloid used testimony from a single scientist to paint an excruciatingly technical matter as a worldwide conspiracy.” Thorne engaged that excruciation by itemizing only a “small selection"—seven—of “misrepresentations.” No, there weren’t “devastating bugs” in software. No, buoy-originated temperature data weren’t wasted. And Thorne affirmed the rigor of various review processes, a topic related to the charge that the Karl et al. paper itself was rushed through peer review at Science for political reasons. Science editor Jeremy Berg’s resounding debunking of that accusation has been widely reported.
David Titley is a retired US Navy rear admiral who became a NOAA leader and now directs Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. He says the controversy amounts merely to the Mail on Sunday using a “disgruntled” former NOAA employee “to construct alternative facts about the climate.” But that’s only if you focus merely on the squabble over something that, even if the scientists involved are somehow wrong, doesn’t change what Republican Shultz emphasized: humans cause warming.
Science clouded by politics
Titley, who once led the navy’s Task Force on Climate Change, understands climate science as an enterprise in the Trump era. With physicist Lawrence Krauss he coauthored the 26 January New York Times op-ed “Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock advances toward midnight.” The authors lamented that the new president “has expressed disbelief in the scientific consensus on global warming.” So Titley would also understand why Inside Climate News calls the warming-pause squabble “just one front in a war … to reshape the conduct of science by the federal government.”
That new political reality got dramatized 7 February in a brief exchange at the House Science Committee involving Rush Holt, the former physicist and congressman who now heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The subject was the Rose–Bates controversy. Here’s how Inside Climate News reported the exchange:
“This is not the making of a big scandal,” said Holt, who is in effect the publisher of Science. “This is an internal dispute between two factions in an agency. There is nothing in the Karl paper that, in our current analysis, suggests retraction.”
Smith shot back, “I encourage you to talk to Dr. Bates, because what he’s said to me is that they falsified data. It may be more serious than you think.”
More serious indeed. It’s not really about the perceived warming pause. It’s about the future of climate science and climate awareness. That’s why some climate-science stakeholders might decide to take heart at a Washington Post news report placed online late on 7 February. It began: “A coalition of veteran GOP officials—including five who have either served as treasury secretary or as chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers—will meet Wednesday with top White House officials to discuss the prospect of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change.”
Three of the five had an op-ed to that effect in the 8 February New York Times. It began, “Crazy as it may sound, this is the perfect time to enact a sensible policy to address the dangerous threat of climate change. Before you call us nuts, hear us out.”
Two of them—Shultz and fellow Reagan cabinet member James A. Baker III—had such an op-ed in the 8 February Wall Street Journal as well.
For Shultz, the carbon tax is an old campaign. That was his subject in the 2014 Washington Post op-ed that provided quotable wisdom about the relative unimportance of warming pauses compared to warming relentlessness. Maybe he symbolizes, and justifies expectations of, climate-science statecraft.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.