New Climate Agency Head tried to Suppress Data, Critics Charge

[calfoxwc]

<H1 id=story-title>New Climate Agency Head Tried to Suppress Data, Critics Charge</H1>By Ed Barnes

 

- FOXNews.com

 

 

 

Thomas Karl, the head of Obama's new Climate Change office has been criticized for trying to suppress contradictory scientific data on climate change.

 

The scientist who has been put in charge of the Commerce Department's new climate change office is coming under attack from both sides of the global warming debate over his handling of what they say is contradictory scientific data related to the subject.

 

Thomas Karl, 58, was appointed to oversee the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, an ambitious new office that will collect climate change data and disseminate it to businesses and communities.

 

According to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the office will "help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change. In the process, we'll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs."

 

Karl, who has played a pivotal role in key climate decisions over the past decade, has kept a low profile as director of National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) since 1998, and he has led all of the NOAA climate services since 2009. His name surfaced numerous times in leaked "climate-gate" e-mails from the University of East Anglia, but there was little in the e-mails that tied him to playing politics with climate data. Mostly, the e-mails show he was in the center of the politics of climate change decisions

 

According to a school biography published by Northern Illinois University, Karl shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and other leading scientists based on his work at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he was "one of the 10 most influential researchers of the 1990s who have formed or changed the course of research in a given area."

 

His appointment was hailed by both the Sierra Club and Duke Energy Company of North Carolina. Sierra Club President Carl Pope said, "As polluters and their allies continue to try to muddy the waters around climate science, the Climate Service will provide easy, direct access to the valuable scientific research undertaken by government scientists and others." And Duke Energy CEO Jin Rogers said the new office, under Karl, will "spark the consensus we need to move forward."

 

But Roger Pielke Sr., a climatologist affiliated with the University of Colorado who has crossed horns with Karl in the past, says his appointment was a mistake. He accused Karl of suppressing data he submitted for the IPCC's most recent report on climate change and having a very narrow view of its causes.

 

The IPCC is charged with reviewing scientific data on climate change and providing policy makers and others with an assessment of current knowledge.

 

Pielke said he agrees that global warming is happening and that man plays a significant role in it, but he said there are many factors in addition to the release of carbon into the atmosphere that need to be studied to fully understand the phenomenon. He said he resigned from the IPCC in August 2005 because his data, and the work of numerous other scientists, were not included in its most recent report.

 

In his resignation letter, Pielke wrote that he had completed the assessment of current knowledge for his chapter of the report, when Karl abruptly took control of the final draft. He said the chapter he had nearly completed was then rewritten with a too-narrow focus.

 

One of the key areas of dispute, he said, was in describing "recent regional trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures," and the impact of land use on temperatures. It is the interpretation of this data on which the intellectual basis of the idea of global warming hangs.

 

In an interview, Pielke reiterated that Karl "has actively opposed views different from his own." And on his Web site last week, he said Karl's appointment "assures that policy makers will continue to receive an inappropriately narrow view of our actual knowledge with respect to climate science."

 

He said the people who run the agencies in charge of climate monitoring are too narrowly focused, and he worries that the creation of the new office "would give the same small group of people the chance to speak on the issue and exclude others" whose views might diverge from theirs.

 

Responding to the criticism, Karl told the Washington Post, "the literature doesn't show [Pielke's] ideas about the importance of land use are correct."

 

Calls to The Commerce Department and to Karl's office went unanswered.

 

The IPCC in recent weeks has come under severe criticism after e-mails, hacked from a prestigious climate center, revealed some of the political infighting that occurred as its assessments were being put together and called into question its impartiality.

 

Climate change skeptics, meanwhile, say Karl's appointment was unnecessary and pulls scarce resources from more pressing needs.

 

"The unconstitutional global warming office and its new Web site climate.gov would be charged with propagandizing Americans with eco-alarmism," wrote Alex Newman of the Liberty Sentinel of Gainesville, Fla.

 

On the popular skeptic site "Watts Up With That," Anthony Watts called the climate.gov site a "waste of more taxpayer money" and charged that it is nothing more than a "fast track press release service." He wrote that putting Karl in charge was an issue, because he had fabricated photos of "floods that didn't happen" in an earlier NOAA report.

 

 

[calfoxwc]

Global Warming in Last 15 Years Insignificant, U.K.'s Top Climate Scientist Admits

 

Oh, where, oh where, did CO2 higher levels causing global warming go...

 

Oh where, oh where did it goooooooooo ? @@

[Pumpkin Eater]

back into the junk science bin it came out of.

[heckofajobbrownie]

Cal, I'll let this guy explain to you why everyone is laughing at the folks sending around that Phil Jones interview you found on Drudge. I guess you only understand cut and pastes, but guess what - your wrong again. You're getting bad information, you just don't know it and don't care that it's bad, no matter how many times people point it out to you. You'll just paste some new stuff that you're told to believe tomorrow.

 

So try this paste and see what does for you.

 

"...a week ago Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, gave an interview to the BBC that was widely described as a debacle. The main reason was that the BBC reporter asked Mr Jones whether he would concede that global warming since 1995 has not been statistically significant. Mr Jones replied: "Yes, but only just," and went on to note that there was a measured global warming of 0.12°C per decade since then, and that it tends to be harder to get statistical significance out of shorter time samples.

 

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."

 

Since I've advocated a more explicit use of the word "lie", I'll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

 

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you'll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

 

What's truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right."

 

 

[calfoxwc]

It's just one guy, Heck. You don't like cut and pastes, but you ridicule any attempt to disagree without substantive

 

background support of said disagreement. Then you complain about the site it came from, or you attack one individual

 

who you can discredit, you guys even insisted on links to go back and read the actual articles, except you just dissed the source, whatever it is.

 

trouble is , you just never listen, Heck. It isn't just one guy. Think about all the information to the contrary

 

of mmgw comprehensively. It all sends a message. Unless you can discredit over 700 climate scientists, that's only

 

at last count a few weeks ago, it's over. Demanding that others get on the political man made global warming train

 

is SO over.

 

Get over it. It's fraululently supported in several major studies, it's been found to be manipulated,

 

and $$$$$ and politically motivated.

 

All gone. Just a theory about icebergs going to cause the whole earth to flood if we don't vote for liberals,

 

a theory that doesn't hold water any more, pun intended.