what choice is there at this point? there is no focus on damage mitigation right now, only preventing co2 emissions.
Stop. Making. It. Worse. There are ways these things can get worse, and people like Annoying Orange are putting us on that path. Mitigation technologies will show up just about as soon as the inevitable damage we've caused, but there is absolutely room to stop/slow the tide by continuing to work towards renewable energy.
Daily Mail so take with grain of salt but the man's verified at least.
Notes from the article:
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised 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’.
- Again, no evidence that any of this is true.
- If he wasn't going for publicity here, he would have reported this to the journal it was published in. That is expected procedure, not going to the media and accusing colleagues of fraud.
But most importantly:
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
- Climate research is published on a near-constant basis. You could make an equal case against any paper on climate change published before the Paris Agreement
- Being published at a politically-relevant time does not mean your findings are false.
So in summary, no, the data wasn't falsified. The 'whistleblower' here isn't even accusing them of falsifying data. There's no evidence that the Paris Agreement was affected by this paper, and it looks more like this guy is a retired scientist who wanted his fifteen minutes of fame.
What the Paris Agreement /was/ based on, were the literally tens of thousands of papers, all peer-reviewed, published that show concordance among all lines of evidence pointing towards one thing: humans are causing climate change.