Paris Climate Pact is based on junk science and should be junked

CHICAGO — Shortly before the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015, a leading federal scientist published a paper purporting to show that the Earth had not experienced an 18-year pause in rising temperatures. That was contrary to every temperature dataset in existence at the time, but Tom Karl, the director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Center for Environmental Information Services, argued that previous findings were wrong and temperatures actually were rising at an alarming rate.

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof. But world leaders, including President Barack Obama, ignored the overwhelming evidence, and chose to rely on Karl’s startling “discovery” as the iron-clad evidence they needed to produce a strong climate agreement requiring sharp reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions. In a February 4th article on the Climate Etc. website, John Bates, an award-winning scientist responsible for establishing and maintaining NOAA’s data-testing and archiving process, disclosed Karl and his team violated NOAA’s rules for ensuring the quality of their research. Prior to the publication of Karl’s paper, NOAA had adopted a process for reviewing climate datasets to ensure they are archived for sharing, replication and testing — key components of the scientific process. Defying agency rules, Karl did not run his team’s dataset through the agency’s software and did not archive key datasets. Because he failed to archive and store his datasets properly, some of the original datasets were lost when the computer used to process the data failed. How convenient for climate alarmists! The data purportedly showing an alarming and continuous global temperature rise gets lost, but Karl and his team say, in effect, “the computer ate our homework, but trust us anyway. We’re right and everyone else is wrong.”

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Bates castigated Karl’s research for consistently exaggerating measured warming to produce the results they wanted. “So in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets leading into Karl’s paper, we find Tom Karl … pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation,” wrote Bates in the Climate, Etc. article. “Gradually, in the months after Karl’s paper came out, 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.” Much of the climate-science community had already become suspicious of Karl’s claims when it was discovered, in the words of David Rose writing for the Daily Mail, Karl “took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards — using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations … even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.” As a result, the ocean temperature dataset used by Karl exaggerated the warming.

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Even if the science motivating the Paris climate agreement weren’t suspicious at best and deeply flawed and manipulated for political reasons at worst, the treaty itself is a costly farce. While the United States is expected to restrict its people’s fossil-fuel use, China, India and other major carbon-dioxide emitters get to keep growing their coal, natural gas and oil use. Their economies thrive while ours is expected to stagnate, and all this was done without any hope of a real climate benefit. Even the United Nations admits if all the parties to the agreement were to cut emissions as promised, temperature rise would still exceed the upper limit of 2 degrees C — by a substantial margin — in 2100. If disaster is in the offing, the Paris climate agreement won’t stop it. It’s time to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement! Nothing less should be tolerated or is justifiable.