What needs to happen next to clarify the issues raised by John Bates?

We can look forward to more revelations from John Bates, including documentation, plus more detailed responses to some of the issues raised above.

An evaluation of these claims needs to be made by the NOAA Inspector General. I’m not sure what the line of reporting is for the NOAA IG, and whether the new Undersecretary for NOAA will appoint a new IG.

Other independent organizations will also want to evaluate these claims, and NOAA should facilitate this by responding to FOIA requests.

The House Science Committee has an enduring interest in this topic and oversight responsibility. NOAA should respond to the Committee’s request for documentation including emails. AGU and other organizations don’t like the idea of scientist emails being open to public scrutiny. Well, these are government employees and we are not talking about curiosity driven research here – at issue here is a dataset with major policy implications.

In other words, with the surface temperature data set we are in the realm of regulatory science, which has a very different playbook from academic, ‘normal’ science. While regulatory science is most often referred to in context of food and pharmaceutical sciences, it is also relevant to environmental regulations as well. The procedures developed by John Bates are absolutely essential for certifying these datasets, as well as their uncertainties, for a regulatory environment.