I think, as usual, the media has obscured rather than clarified what is going on here. If you read his own words, you will see John Bates is accusing NOAA (in p

I think, as usual, the media has obscured rather than clarified what is going on here. If you read his own words, you will see John Bates is accusing NOAA (in particular, Tom Karl) of p-hacking. He claims they are changing the significance cutoff, choosing which data/processing to include based on statistical significance of a trend, and that this process is not reproducible. "I questioned another co-author about why they choose to use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95% — he also expressed reluctance and did not defend the decision. [...] Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’—in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets [...] Tom Karl liked the maturity matrix so much, he modified the matrix categories so that he could claim a number of NCEI products were “Examples of “Gold” standard NCEI Products (Data Set Maturity Matrix Model Level 6).” [...] Since the version GHCNM3.X never went through any ORR, the resulting dataset was also never archived, and it is virtually impossible to replicate the result in K15. [...] The withholding of the operational version of this important update came in the middle of a major ENSO event, thereby depriving the public of an important source of updated information, apparently for the sole purpose of Mr. Karl using the data in his paper before making the data available to the public." https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-climate-data/ https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus... So statements like this are rendered meaningless: >"Also, the new global trends are statistically significant and positive at the 0.10 significance level for 1998–2012" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full Personally, I know such statements about statistically significant deviations from a strawman nil-null hypothesis are always meaningless. However, perhaps this will open up a few more people's eyes to the awful state of affairs NHST has brought us.