The researchers threw out good data on sea temperatures recorded on buoys,
and “corrected” it with what he said was bad data from ships, Dr. Bates said, according to The Mail.
Dr. Bates was demoted from a managerial role in 2012 under Thomas Karl — the lead author of the study Dr. Bates has questioned
— after complaints over Dr. Bates’s professional conduct, according to the former colleagues and supervisors.
“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.
“The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data,” Dr. Bates said.
It’s like grade school,” said Glenn Rutledge, a former physical scientist at NOAA who worked with Dr. Bates.
Former colleagues said that, in aiming at his former boss, Dr. Bates was motivated by more than scientific zeal.
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.
Rather, he said, his issue was that some of the processed data used in the report wasn’t
subsequently archived in accordance with strict protocols that Dr. Bates had developed.
And Dr. Bates himself later stated in an interview with a business news site
that he had not meant to suggest that his former boss had played fast and loose with temperature data.
According to the article in The Mail, Dr. Bates claimed that the study relied on problematic data.