Revelations by the Mail on
Sunday about how world leaders were misled over global warming by the
main source of climate data have triggered a probe by the US Congress.
Republican
Lamar Smith, who chairs the influential House of Representatives
Committee on Science, Space and Technology, announced the inquiry last
week in a letter to Benjamin Friedman, acting chief of the organisation
at the heart of the MoS disclosures, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
He
renewed demands, first made in 2015, for all internal NOAA documents and
communications between staff behind a controversial scientific paper,
which made a huge impact on the Paris Agreement on climate change of
that year, signed by figures including David Cameron and Barack Obama.
The
paper – dubbed the ‘Pausebuster’ – claimed that contrary to what
scientists had been saying for several years, there was no ‘pause’ or
‘slowdown’ in the rate of global warming in the early 21st Century, and
that in fact it had been taking place even faster than before.
The ‘pause’ had been seized on by climate sceptics, because throughout the period, carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise.
This
month, this newspaper revealed evidence from a whistleblower, Dr John
Bates, who until the end of 2016 was one of two NOAA ‘principal
scientists’ working on climate change, showing that the paper based its
claims on an ‘unverified’ and experimental dataset measuring land
temperatures, and on a then newly issued sea-temperature dataset that is
now to be withdrawn and replaced because it exaggerates both the scale
and speed of warming.
source:source:http://www.dailymail.co.uk
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