Climate Change Hoax? NOAA Data Exaggerated Global Warming, Alleged Whistleblower Claims

A Daily Mail investigation gained significant traction Saturday, asserting that a United States agency falsified evidence about climate change in order to get politicians to sign an agreement lowering carbon emissions last year. It quotes a whistleblower who states that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broke its own rules and submitted “misleading, unverified” data that was cited in the Paris Agreement.

The article was written by David Rose, a British reporter who has frequently been criticized by environmentalists, and received a sharp rebuke from Dr. John Abraham in the Guardian Sunday. Abraham stated that Rose "has a history of denying the well-established science of climate change" and also has "a long history of making incorrect climate change statements."

Rose claimed that a high-level whistleblower told the Daily Mail that the 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 U.N. climate conference in Paris in 2015.”

Multiple scientists came forward to denounce and correct the story, though it’s likely to become fodder for climate change skeptics.

While on the campaign trail in 2016, President Donald Trump decried global warming as a hoax perpetrated by China in an attempt to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. A poll by the University of New Hampshire showed that only 25 percent of people who voted for Trump believe there is climate change and that it is caused by humans. In contrast, 90 percent of Democratic nominee's Hillary Clinton voters indicated they believe in human-induced climate change.

The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, pledged to limit the rise in global temperatures by reducing carbon emissions in developed nations and setting deadlines for peak carbon emissions in developing nations. The U.S. vowed to cut its emissions by 28 percent of its 2005 levels by 2025 while China promised to peak carbon emissions by 2030.

The Daily Mail article pinpointed NOAA scientist Dr. John Bates as its “high-level whistleblower” and said the scientific study in question was never subject to an internal evaluation process and thereby “exaggerated global warming.” The study was published in the journal Science and found that a slowdown in global warming never occurred and that the climate was warming faster than previously thought.