Following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking “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.”
The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.
Holdren’s buddy, Tom Karl, authored a report in 2015 attempting to disprove the hiatus in global warming that had been widely acknowledged by many scientific groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The warming pause threatened to undermine the justification for a costly climate-change pact that was being negotiated at the time: How could world leaders commit trillions in tax dollars to stop global warming if it wasn’t actually happening?
Karl’s report came to the rescue just months before the Paris Climate Conference. In announcing his findings, Karl said the “new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.” How convenient. His analysis was eagerly accepted by the international science community, but others were leery about its timing; the House Science Committee has been leading an inquiry into the report for nearly two years.
But a retired top official at NOAA has now confirmed suspicions about the veracity of Karl’s research and about whether politics — not science — were at play. In February, John Bates, the former head of NOAA’s climate-data archive, wrote a lengthy exposé detailing misconduct at NOAA related to the report. The allegations included using inappropriately “corrected” datasets, violating agency protocol on data review, and failing to archive the data. In the most damning allegation, Bates said: “In every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation.” (You can read more about Bates’s allegations here and a subsequent smear campaign by the scientific establishment here.)
“It was more of a political document than a scientific document,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told me. “People need to know how the [climate] alarmists have taken over agencies like NOAA and NASA. This is about trying to get the truth out.” Judicial Watch also filed a separate lawsuit against NOAA in 2015 attempting to get the datasets used in Karl’s paper.
