Der Bates

OK, Eli is getting tired of the lies and distortions coming from John Bates and David Rose.  A bunny could throw Lamar Smith and Judith Curry into that patch, but let us be economical.

The more that one learns about this faux (spelled Fox) controversy the more the flavor of offal sneaks through.  There have been developments to curl one's ears and Eli, of course, has long curlies. Among them are a recent article by Hiroko Tabuchi in the New York Times Business section which gets into the interpersonal more deeply than anybunny who wished to delay bathing after playing in the offal might wish, but the lede is as good as it gets

A few weeks ago, on an obscure climate-change blog, a retired government scientist named John Bates blasted his former boss on an esoteric point having to do with archiving temperature data.  

It was little more than lingering workplace bad blood, said Dr. Bates’s former co-workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Bates had felt he deserved his boss’s job at NOAA, they said, not the demotion he received. 

Tabuchi scored a quote from the data center administrator which confirmed Eli, and pretty much every other readers opinion of John Bates

“He was often heard saying that he, not Karl, should be running the center,” said Marjorie McGuirk, former chief of staff at the data center.

and

Ms. McGuirk said that one of her responsibilities had been to manage what she described as frequent complaints about Dr. Bates’s behavior in the workplace.  

Those complaints led to his demotion in 2012 from his post as head of the data center’s satellite and remote sensing division, where he supervised a dozen or so employees, to a position as principal scientist, which involved no managerial duties, she said. “This episode is consistent with his history of outbursts,” she said.  

Ms. McGuirk said that she herself had filed a complaint against Dr. Bates, based on his conduct at a staff meeting in 2009. At that meeting, Dr. Bates shouted that Ms. McGuirk was not trustworthy and belonged in jail, according to an internal log detailing complaints against the scientist that was viewed by The New York Times.

The first rule of organizations is never anger the staff, send them postcards, share your Halloween candy, and they get first bite at the chocolate rabbet's ears (ouch).  They know which bodies have been buried and where the metadata describing the graveyard are kept.  Tabuchi knows this or somebunny tipped her off on whom to ask.

Also sneaking through the missile shield is a February 8 article in Snopes by Alex Kasprak that adds a couple of bits to the fire.  One particular strange idea has been the claimed computer meltdown which supposedly took out a bunch of data never to be seen again

Bates made the claim that the use of the more experimental dataset by Karl et al contradicted NOAA policy because the new dataset had not undergone an “operational readiness review” (ORR). He also alleged that the use of this data set, and a computer failure, resulted in no record being created of what the paper’s authors did, putting that paper in conflict with both Science’s editorial standards and NOAA’s internal standards — a point Rose brought up multiple times

Zeke Hausfather called that out  (Eli, never one to mince words, is even less inclined after the last month)

In his [Daily Mail] article, David Rose relies on reports from a researcher at NOAA who was unhappy about the data archiving associated with the Karl et al paper. While I cannot speak to how well the authors followed internal protocols, they did release their temperature anomalies, spatially gridded data land and ocean data, and the land station data associated with their analysis. They put all of this up on NOAA’s FTP site in early June 2015, at the time that the Karl et al paper was published.

Science Magazine has said that it's editorial standards were met and, of course, Bates is simply making "standards" up

The Science paper would have been fine had it simply had a disclaimer at the bottom saying that it was citing research, not operational, data for its land-surface temperatures, Bates says.  

 But Mike Tanner, director of NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate at NCEI, says there’s no NOAA policy that requires such a disclosure. “There's nothing. That doesn’t exist,” he says.

Oh yes, Tom Karl disputes that the computer melted

For what it’s worth, Karl told us that he has no knowledge of a computer failure that wiped out critical information, saying that “This allegedly happened after I retired, but I have been informed that is simply not true.”

In this blizzard of nonsense, the only thing that appears to be clear is that John Bates and/or David Rose have taken two semesters of truth embroidery classes and are now doing the lab work.