Lawsuit Filed to Have Records Released in Global Warming Controversy Involving Previous Administration Scientists

News Staff : Mar 28, 2017
Judicial Watch

Last Sunday, the whistleblower, Dr. John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, showed The Daily Mail irrefutable evidence that the [climate change] paper was based on misleading, 'unverified' data.

(Washington, DC)—[Judicial Watch] Judicial Watch today announced it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to compel the U.S. Department of Commerce to turn over all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration's climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement. (Photo: Dr. John Bates/via The Daily Mail)

The suit was filed after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ("NOAA"), a component of the Department of Commerce, failed to respond to a February 6 FOIA request seeking:

• All records of communications between NOAA scientist Thomas Karl and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren.

• The FOIA request covers the timeframe of January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017.

Karl, who until last year was director of the NOAA section that produces climate data, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), was the lead author of a landmark paper that was reported to have heavily influenced the Paris Agreement.

Holdren, a former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, director of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and long-time proponent of strong measures to curb emissions.

According to The Daily Mail, a whistleblower accused Thomas Karl of bypassing normal procedures to produce a scientific paper promoting climate alarmism:

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the 'pause' or 'slowdown' in global warming in the period since 1998—revealed by UN scientists in 2013—never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected...

But the whistleblower, Dr. John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, 'unverified' data.

It was never subjected to NOAA's rigorous internal evaluation process—which Dr. Bates devised.

His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a 'blatant attempt to intensify the impact' of what became known as the Pausebuster paper...

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