The UK Daily Mail is reporting that a scandal that many are already calling climategate 2 is brewing at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. A whistleblower named Dr. John Bates, described at a top NOAA scientists, has revealed evidence that a paper that the agency presented that claimed that the so-called Global Warming Pause that started did not exist was based on faulty data. Indeed, Bates argued that NOAA breached its own data verification protocols to have the maximum effect at the Paris Climate Summit. Bates further claims that the lead author of the paper, head of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) which produced climate data, insisted on, “decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”

If Bates’ claims prove to be true, NOAA is about to be rocked by a scandal that has echoes of the original Climategate which broke in 2009 when leaked emails that suggested that climate scientists who believed in human-caused global warming were manipulating data to high flaws in it and were plotting to discredit climate change skeptics.

A subsequent investigation found no wrongdoing, but it was the equivalent of the Nixon White House concluding that nothing bad happened during Watergate.

The revelation of possible chicanery going on at NOAA is bound to lend impetus to President Donald Trump’s drive to back off on climate change alleviation efforts and encourage more fossil fuel drilling. The bombshell also unmasks, again, that something rotten is going on in the climate science community. Dr. Judith Currey, a renowned climate scientist, was recently forced out of academia for the heresy of being a skeptic of global warming. Other experts have called the computer models that predict global warming to be flawed and based on false and misleading data.

All of this suggests that whomever Trump chooses to be the administrator of NOAA is going to have some housecleaning to do. The climate wars with believers claiming that the “science is settled” and that anyone who believes otherwise is a “denier” will heat up and convulse the scientific community.