The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which our government alters existing U.S. and worldwide temperature data in order to enhance an apparent warming trend, and thereby support a narrative of supposedly dangerous global warming. This is Part XXXIII of this series, which goes back to July 2013. A composite link to all 32 prior posts in this series can be found here.

As has been widely reported and discussed, the arrival of the new Trump 2.0 presidency is bringing disruption and change to many areas of a previously complacent federal bureaucracy. One of the areas where disruption appears to be hitting is an agency called NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is a part of the Department of Commerce. NOAA is the place where the world and U.S. temperature data are collected and compiled — and altered.

Will the new disruption shed some light upon the systematic alterations of our temperature data? It’s too early to tell, but there is reason to hope.

First up, CBS News reported just yesterday that massive layoffs have hit NOAA. The headline is “Hundreds of NOAA employees laid off in latest cuts to federal workforce.”

Hundreds of staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, were laid off Thursday. . . . A congressional source told CBS News the layoffs affected 880 NOAA employees. . . . Prior to Thursday's cuts, NOAA had about 12,000 staffers across the world.

880 staffers out of 12,000 would be about a 7+% cut. But then there’s this:

Former NOAA officials told CBS News earlier this month that current employees had been told to expect budget cuts of 30% and a 50% reduction in staff.

The CBS piece does not give any indication of whether the cuts are reaching the people who compile — and alter — the temperature data.

But is there reason to think that there may be some concern that the temperature alterations may come under scrutiny? Well, there is this February 25 piece from ABC News, headline “Yes, NOAA adjusts its historical weather data: Here’s why.” Suddenly, it is time to admit that the alterations are occurring:

When digging into conspiracies claiming that the federal agency “manipulates” its historical weather data, ABC News chief meteorologist and chief climate correspondent Ginger Zee was able to confirm that it was true — but that the routine, public adjustments to records happen for good reason. . . . NCEI [a branch of NOAA] adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published through its federal website.

It’s nice to see ABC News catching up to the Manhattan Contrarian in noticing that these adjustments are occurring. But I’m seriously put off by their calling claims that NOAA has been altering data “conspiracies.” Have they checked to see if the adjustments are quantitatively appropriate versus completely made up? Beyond noting that the changes are “peer reviewed,” the answer is no.

Others have checked to see if the adjustments are quantitatively justified, and the results so far have been damning for NOAA. Back in Part XXIX of this series (February 18, 2022), I noted the fundamental problem of NOAA’s adjustments:

NOAA/NCEI make no secret of the fact that they are altering the raw data, and they give what appear to be legitimate reasons for the adjustments (e.g., a given temperature station may have moved to a warmer location); but at the same time they make the details of the alterations completely opaque such that no outsider can directly assess the appropriateness of each adjustment.

My February 2022 piece reported on an article then just out from a group of 17 authors let by Peter O’Neill, Ronan Connolly, Michael Connolly and Willie Soon, published in the journal Atmosphere. My description of this article:

[The authors attempt] to reverse-engineer the adjustments to figure out what NCEI is doing, and particularly whether NCEI is validly identifying station discontinuities, such as moves or instrumentation changes, that might give rise to valid adjustments. The bottom line is that the adjusters make no attempt to tie adjustments to any specific event that would give rise to legitimate homogenization, and that many of the alterations appear ridiculous and completely beyond justification. . . .

The O’Neill, et al., article looks specifically into numerous individual stations, to see if the NOAA/NCEI adjustments correlate to legitimate things like station move, instrumentation changes, or the like. The result:

The more the authors looked, the less they found any relationship at all between valid station discontinuities and temperature adjustments inserted by NCEI’s computer algorithm.

My February 2022 piece goes specifically into several specific sites, where data exist as to specific station moves, but NOAA adjustments do not correspond to those moves. Here is the conclusions from the O’Neill, et al., paper itself:

[T]he results raise serious concerns over the reliability of the homogenized versions of the GHCN dataset, and more broadly over the PHA techniques, which do not appear to have been appreciated until now. As shown in Table 1, the homogenized GHCN datasets have been widely used by the community for studying global temperature trends.

If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.

I’ll await further revelations as the prior NOAA personnel get thrown out.